Only takes one observation to establish an alibi, 100% surveillance isn't always needed.
Posts by Paul Shirley
2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
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7,800 people's biometric data held on police anti-terrorism database
Mozilla burns Firefox on old Androids
Google-backed British startup ‘stole our code’, says US marketing firm
Microsoft joins Eclipse Foundation. Odd thing for a competitor to do

Re: Oh. Woo. Yay.
Diversifying into new niches, nothing new there. Being successful at it, very rare for Microsoft. With new management they're going to do it more and in surprising areas but I have trouble believing they'll have a higher success rate.
Monkey wrenching Eclipse... I doubt there's any damage they could do anyone would notice in the rest of the Eclipse car wreck and zero chance of any takeover succeeding.
Yelp-for-people app Peeple is back – so we rated Julia, its cofounder
even linkedin rejected them
Yes, the home of panhandlers, opportunists, cruising sharks and the implausibly (and unbelievably) "positive" rejected these slandermongers decisively when they tried to defend the stupidity last year.
There's no plausible deniability about how this will work left, they couldn't convince one of the most business & business scam friendly places on the net. They know it's wrong and knowingly carry on. So wrong it's likely they'll never get sued because no one will use it to enable a suit.
AMD to fix slippery hypervisor-busting bug in its CPU microcode
Microsoft wants to lock everyone into its store via universal Windows apps, says game kingpin
Re: Hang on...
One goal of UWP is to run the same apps everywhere. Run them at all. It's not to run them equally well everywhere and it can't do the impossible. Well it could slow down every platform to match the least capable one - that's the Metro solution BTW.
Unfortunately Microsofts real goal is maintaining and increasing Windows lock in, they'll grab as much control as we let them. It's not a time to be quiet while it happens.
Re: Hang on...
No. And it doesn't make the system software "look the same" on any device any more than Win32/64 does either.
No. Because every pc out there has different hardware, no software can disguise that CPUs have different core counts or performance varying by 1000%. GPUs support different feature levels or with vastly different performance profiles.
Games devs like consoles because the hardware is constant. The OS is frequently a moving target.
BBC telly tax drops onto telly-free households. Cough up, iPlayer fans
Re: "Ad blockers are as much a "protection racket" as "cops" are."
Advertisers are paying for the service provider to vouch for the 'acceptability' of their adverts, buying use of the adblockers good reputation. They are perfectly free to rely on their own reputation and appeal directly to the users. After a few decades good behaviour they might earn enough trust for that to work (so really it's never going to happen).
That's not blackmail, it's a reputation repair service that costs money to deliver and no one else would ever pay for the work involved. If there's blackmail, it's entirely self inflicted.
Ofcom should be the BBC's ultimate overlord, UK.gov told
half the job
The BBC don't need a regulator just to protect themselves from themselves, they need one to protect them from unfair external interference as well. Particularly unwarranted political pressure and the nonstop lies spouted by some media rivals. OFCOM in that role makes no sense at all unless the aim is destroying any independence the BBC still has.
Enough people hate them for usually purely selfish reasons, OFCOM aren't the solution to ensuring honest and strong but fair and balanced independence in the face of so many wanting to cripple and control the BBC.
More and more Brits are using ad-blockers, says survey
Re: Very different from magazines
I'm pretty sure it could take 30sec finding the 1st real page in some of those 1000page monster magazines. I think it was Watford that had the genius idea of booking the pages before the real content AND having a smaller page size for their catalog and a natural bookmark, helping skip past the ads while still showing you theirs!
Windows 10 claimed another point of desktop share in February
SCO vs. IBM looks like it's over for good
Re: I'll believe it when ...
That's a lesser error than the initial deal, where they intended to take part payment in SCO shares. The fixed fee arrangement was what it took to cancel that and SCO were the winner despite contingency fee clauses on winnings and sale of SCO.
It was an incredibly stupid arrangement to make that makes it clear the lawyers believed SCO have a good case at the start. Problem was, SCO lied to everyone including their lawyers. It also became obvious the whole suit was as much a stock scam as about the IP.
Taking a shareholding in such an obvious scam would have exposed them to serious legal risk. Just losing vast amounts of money is the lesser evil.
Re: unless .....
Unfortunately they 'bought' their way out of owning any part of the winnings early in the case, leaving no cause to go after them directly. That deal committed the lawyers to continue till the case was won or lost, even after the money ran out. BS&F got up to a lot of abusive and harassing behaviour but it's probably too late to deal with that and the courts allowed it to happen without acting, though it must have badly influenced both the judges and juries.
The good news is BS&F almost certainly lost a lot of money even though the individual lawyers got paid, burnt badly and it damaged the companies reputation. Darl's brother made money but arguably might as well have been working for IBM!
I would have liked to see harassment and libel/slander charges but pj isn't likely to bother and time has probably run out anyway. Maybe now the case is ending someone will leak what they found about funding and Microsoft involvement...
Building a fanless PC is now realistic. But it still ain't cheap
JavaScript daddy's Brave ad-blocker hits Android, Apple stores
Re: Good luck with Bitcoin stuff
Serving adds on the content site would arguably be better in the long term, it ties legal liability directly to the site serving it. Won't take many lawsuits for them to magically do what's been impossible so far and sanitise the shit.
Only then can we have a debate with the shit slingers about what's acceptable and fair. Perhaps remind them workable add filters existed before ads were farmed out to external sites.
Meet Barra's baby: Xiaomi arrives with a splash
Re: Smooth
The bit I hate is when they slide off your hand unless grabbed by the edges, making shiny back large screen devices firmly 2 handed use only. Putting a grippy case or back cover on usually bloats them too much as well, with the notable exception of my G4's leather back (which isn't really gripping enough).
Why this obsession with shininess over ergonomics in phones?
NASA boffin wants FRIKKIN LASERS to propel lightsails
'Leave' or 'Stay' in the referendum? UK has to implement GDPR either way
Strangely the Tories seen happy to ignore eu rules when it concerns the rights of their uk serfs, all the while whining about other eu countries ignoring other less important rules, especially the idiotic ones originating in the uk!
Europe: the last non violent line of defence against our own state. Courts they cant easily override and ignore at great risk.
LG’s modular G5 stunner shuns the Lego aesthetic
Re: Standard, standard, standard
I would guess the physical design here rules out a useful open standard simply because it would require every compatible phone to have the same dimensions and remove a major differentiator between brands and individual phones in their ranges. The grip looks ugly enough on a phone it's designed to fit, imagine one it doesn't physical match.
Sir Clive Sinclair in tech tin-rattle triumph
Re: Hard to take seriously
MyffyW :"C5 has since been eclipsed by a plethora of electrically-powered scooters taking the elderly and infirm to and from the shops"
And they drive on pavements. The C5 was a road vehicle Well, supposed to be, only the suicidal would actual take one on the road and few of them did it twice. Most of us checked the flimsy plastic construction, noticed your head is below window level in surrounding cars and refused.
An absolutely idiotic, dangerous product.
Streetmap's lawyer: Google High Court win will have 'chilling effect’ on UK digital biz
Re: Best of Breed
I think Streetmap brought the wrong case in the wrong courts. Instead of seeking some sort of protection or equal treatment, they asked for damages. Damages for an inferior product, that wouldn't generate significant income from the purportedly lost views anyway.
As a niche player in a global market, where the internet age expects global availability they weren't even offering a similar product. We protect competition, we don't stop innovation because one side can't or won't compete.
Re: Best of Breed
The API side is what really killed Streetmap as a viable monetisation strategy. Their big problem was a poor quality service for end users BUT end users were primarily exposed to their product on 3rd party commercial sites. Sites that cant have been pleased to pay more for something that made their sites look worse than Google maps.
Streetmaps planned income didnt depend on incidental search portal visibility and its hard to believe that would have driven business to them given the limited consumer appeal of their product. Any business searching for a mapping service to embed would have seen them, along with their competition. Very hard to claim damage and be taken seriously if you aren't actually competing for the same thing.
Backdoors are bad, Euro security wonks ENISA tell governments
escrow taints all evidence
Availability of keys to investigators taints and devalues all evidence, even if no tampering or forgery happens. A horrible choice between courts having to trust law enforcement too much or let criminals escape by raising doubt over the evidence.
If escrow ever happens it could easily hamper investigations more than it helps by creating a need for strong safeguards to prevent and detect abuse. Let's just not go there.
Review sites commit to address UK regulator's concerns
new internet skill
Sad that an essential internet skill is knowing how to recognise paid ads everywhere an opinion is given.
Had yet another offer to supply as many fake reviews as I wanted to pay for just yesterday. Don't see how those services will be affected by disclosure requirements they'll simply ignore. At least in the old days you had to actually go to a pub in person with a journalist to buy a good review ;)
Google wins High Court fight with StreetMap over search results self-pluggery
Re: Since 2007?
As far as I remember Google captured maps before it started showing up in search results and you had to go to their maps site explicitly. The competitors had a couple of years to improve their products, don't remember any of them doing anything at all, while increasing numbers of us sought out Googles primitive but silky smooth version.
Sick and tired of modern Windows? Upgrade to Windows 3.1 today – in your web browser
Andreessen stokes the Facebook Free Basics ‘colonialism’ row
Re: perhaps
Andrew is right about one thing, large chunks of the Indian state aren't working for the ordinary and poor people. They aren't necessarily a better gatekeeper than Facebook. That doesn't make Facebook any less creepy or untrustworthy.
Pure (ish) net neutrality potentially offers a way around that lack of trust, creating a much reduced attack surface to abuse. That's why Facebook's scheme has to die in its current form.
Can we assume Andrew now thinks Google giving away search, email, storage, Android and so many other freebies was a good thing? That he was wrong to complain about market distortion, people as the product and so much else? Or maybe agree the benefits outweigh the problems for many, many people?
Or does he just believe Facebook are nice guys with nothing but good intentions we can trust as unregulated gatekeepers to the worlds poor?
When choosing between shades of gray, FbGray is rarely the correct one.
Microsoft quits giving us the silent treatment on Windows 10 updates
SCO's last arguments in 'Who owns Linux?' case vs. IBM knocked out
Re: Tortious interference claims ..
It's quite amazing how often SCO lied during the case, how inconsistent the lies were and how no court did anything about it. In fairness most of the case was fought with PR lies outside the courts but at heart the entire affair was high level blackmail and the legal system failed everyone but the blackmailers.
Don't touch that PDF or webpage until your Windows PC is patched
STOP STEALING MY SETTINGS!
Yet again the cnuts at ms took the opportunity to hijack my file associations and punt them back at Microsoft's own useless apps. Even more annoying this time after finally getting sound to work 99% correctly with my ancient AV system over optical. STOP STEALING MY SETTINGS!
Why does the VR industry think 2016 is its year? It's the hardware, stupid
Canonical reckons Android phone-makers will switch to Ubuntu
Amazon UK boss is 'most powerful' man in food and drink
Re: If their US Pantry
I stick to bulk ordering long life stuff through Amazon, sacks of flour, pulses, rice etc. That's almost everything we used to need supermarkets for and massively cheaper. Almost everything else is cheaper at our local farm shop or the market and ready to eat today, not in a couple of weeks or likely to rot before ever ripening supermarket style.
The surprisingly large proportion of people that think the big supermarkets are actually cheap are a tempting target for Amazon because loss leaders aside, it will be trivially easy to crush them on both pricing and choice. For the few of us that live happily with minimal exposure to anything beyond Aldi, don't see any change coming we didn't already buy into, we're reverting to buying from the best supplier for each product, not the hell of the supermarket shopping expedition.
Are Indians too stupid to be trusted with free Internet?
SCO slapped in latest round of eternal 'Who owns UNIX?' lawsuit
Re: Wasted talent
They bought into a bigger cut of the bazillions in a sure fire case, can't remember how they were paying for it. About 6 months later they noticed the impropriety of being parties to the case was being discussed too much in public and bought their way out of the deal with a fixed fee cap - $30mil+external costs to finish the case. I doubt BS&F were aware how dodgy the case was till they were firmly stuck with it.
The case isn't finished, the money's long gone and they're still compelled to follow SCO's bidding, regardless of it's sanity. BS&F are believed to have burnt through the fixed fee before the case even went to trial.
That's cute, Germany – China shows the world how fusion is done
NOTHING trumps extra pizza on IT projects. Not even more people
Windows 10 will now automatically download and install on PCs
According to the MS shilling scripts there are too few Linux users to notice if they complain!
When MS screw over their 'lots of users' they can't complain about the scale of the response... yet the weasels do, while ignoring the content of the complaints. When Canonical screw over that negligible (it's in the MS shilling pack so it must be true) Ubuntu user base, they get lots of complaints and eventually back down.
Re: Is the End Nigh?
2:1 odds they'll "accidentaly" forget to turn off the forced upgrades but remember to demand a credit card payment to get past the boot menu.
Then they'll do what we all expect and extend the free upgrade offer before the law catches up with them bricking machines with win10 ransomware ;)
The Windows update servers are riddled with bad drivers, it's no surprise so many upgrades fail. They don't seem to even test 64bit support on systems with 4Gb or more ram. Only 1 driver they installed caused instant kernel panics but that hardware is still unusable in win10. Just got lucky it doesn't crash till you try using it or I'd have had an unbootable pc to diagnose.
And they've been auto selecting the win10 upgrade for months...
UK concerned over EU law plans on trade of data for digital content
off topic: straight fruit&veg
The fun thing about straight <insert fruit or veg here> standards is most originated in the UK, the home of unnatural and stupid restrictions and were imposed on the rest of Europe as 'class A' when food classes were harmonised. The rest of Europe promptly ignored them unless they were sending defective crops (AKA straight ones) to the UK!
As usual the UK is wrong on this one.
Rooting your Android phone? Google’s rumbled you again
Re: No problem here
Yes, there's less ongoing need to have root BUT you still need to yank out all the crapware shipped with devices. Luckily unrooting is easy, so root, do the 1 off fixes, unroot, carry on as normal.
Personally I value having regular scheduled backups more than payment apps I never intend to use, too many app updates break them and reverting isn't an unrooted option.