Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

A Google monopoly today means packet snooping tomorrow

Worst. Article. Ever. (almost)

Way to take a real problem (privacy on the web) and twist it to complete irrelevance and counter-productive advice...

"Other than the subscription fees that carriers collect for access to the Internet itself, the only reliable revenue stream the ’Net has ever generated is ad sales" WTF? When are you living, in 1998?

"Google's targeted advertising program AdSense is even more intrusive than the controversial Phorm and NebuAd systems." WTF? The first is trivial to dodge and concerns a tiny part of the web, the others are almost impossible to avoid and scan your whole internet traffic.

"there is no opt-out, and using a secure tunnel is no protection." Oh I get it. Also, a flea is more deadly than a charging elephant because you can't stop it with a .375 H&H Magnum round.

"as web spiders can extract more personal information from the Internet than DPI can." WTF? Do you really believe that? I thought you knew a few things about networking, I was apparently misled.

"Utopian notions of net neutrality that simply protect the search monopoly’s position, my sense is that they’re outnumbered by pragmatists who would be pleased to allow a lightly-regulated market and the public relations machinery of the public interest organizations"

Oh, here is the hidden agenda... explains all. So because google is a cold money-making machine, we need to deploy DPI everywhere -only way to "deneutralize" the net based on the content- and/or prioritize traffic based on the "content providers" bribes to the ISPs? What's the link again? And the privacy angle you choosed is the most clumsy foot-meet-bullet moment I've seen in the last couple years: because Google uses cookies to indulge in some light snooping when you visit sites that use websense (annoying, yes, but limited to the web -actually a small part of the web- and utterly trivial to thwart), we need to have some "public interest organization" (IWF anyone?) analyzing all the traffic that goes up or down our pipes? In the bloody name of bloody privacy? You' 'avin' a laff, right? Either that or I misunderstood your statement and by your "lightly-regulated" (opposed to "neutral") you actually mean privacy laws, data retentin laws and the like. But then, why the opposition with "neutrality"? Why the mention of "public interest organization"? Nah, doesn't make any sense, you definitely means traffic analysis "a la " DPI by the IWF.

The only almost sensible part is the "the only way to ensure personal privacy in the long term is for users to pay for content and services". *Almost* sensible because of course it won't work. Whether the users pay for the services or not makes little difference. Advertising outfits do not aim for the user's money, but for the sellers' (or content providers') money. And these will try to make as much money as they can, regardless of what the user pays. The real cut-off here is the user's tolerance to ads, not the amounts he pays. That's a result of the web's (not Internet as you wrongly say) business model, which is "let's make as much money as we can". So the real way to change things is of course *not* to make the user pay much beforehand, but to raise the user's awareness. If ads stop to produce enough money to overcome the user-deterrent effect, they will disappear. And content or service providers will charge more, which will result in the user paying a bit more (as a *consequence*, not a *cause* for the change). And also the content providers will pay a bit more, or get around to using non-google traffic analysis tools, a lot of which are free software or available freely. Let's not forget that the google tech you are so critical about mostly provides services to the *website owners*, not users.

Google mocks Bing and the stuff behind it

Google AND MS are evil

But Google makes stuff that works.

The key here is not whether Ning is good (it's not) or if Google Search is good (not that bad, imho), but that the MS guy was all like "it's completely impossible to get people to work together on a coherent platform, that's why we spend millions in tweaking every app separately", to which the Google man answered "the coherent platform approach works very well for us, ta very much".

Actually it's much more than the cloud thing. It's obviously a culture problem at MS. Even their bloody office applications don't communicate well with each other and have different ways of representing the same things, and different ways of performing the same actions. That's the most basic level of integration, and MS fails even that test, so what coherence would you expect when it comes to apps that perform different kinds of tasks from different kinds of data?

The secret is, there appears to be no IT management at MS. It's a huge boat with a lot of momentum, full of individual rowers (more like teams of rowers actually) who push in random directions at random times hoping for the best.

Ecopocalypse causes giant fish ears

Science is not a religion. Kick the dogma-based approach out.

"The authors grew seperate populations of sebass, one in water with a high carbon dioxide concentration, which is certainly how I'd go about it."

Yes, but the man-caused global warming is supposed to originate from elevated CO2 in the atmosphere, causing a warming and a liberation of CO2 from the heated oceans (CO2 is much much less soluble in warm than in cold water). So the "man-made CO2-caused global warming" dogma (I'm not conviced but let's admit it) infers that an elevated CO2 concentration in the air causes, and is fuelled by, a decreased concentration of CO2 in the oceans. So man-made CO2-induced global warming should lead to decreased bone size... waidaminit, it doesn't fit so well now... Where does this study stand is not clear to me... Or rather, it's very clear: it's the "we have an interesting observation that can be published in a small paper. Let's crowbar a bullshit reference to "global warming" in, and make it a /Science/ instead!" syndrome. Good old sheeple-driven American science...

It stinks like self-fuelled opportunistic frenzy. Let's jump on the trend! The non-proven dogma must be true, don't you dare to publish contradictory evidence!

You know what, the more I know of the American reasearch system, the more I think Al Quaeda, Fred W. Phelps and friends are actually quite open-minded, comparatively.

If someone's looking for me, I'll be busy committing suicide in the basement. Poor science.

Oh, and a@ Palladium specifically

"Interestingly, the authors note that this finding was contrary to their expectations."

Yep. Thats the scientists's way of saying "I'm not biased, honest". You can find the same (or equivalent) in every other scientific paper. Though it's a good thing when it's true, it has been faked so much that it doesn't mean anything anymore.

Me too, me too!

Ah, the joy of correlating correlations of correlated guesswork...

I guess you could publish a paper on the colour of your turd in Nature or Science these days, provided you shoehorned a link to climate change.

Come to think of it, me an the vast majority of my mates were considerably slimmer in the eighties. We tended to eat less, too. So the evil "global warming" made us fat, which made us eat more, which pushed towards a more destructive food industry, back-fueling the "global warming" and thus making us even fatter, etc. Not to mention the increased production of methane-rich human wastes. May I have my Nature paper now?

Microsoft's Bing in travel trouble

Almost identical but...

Kayak works, whereas Bing doesn't. (more specifically, it uses some kind of dodgy redirection hack and is -rightfully- blocked by my firewall.)

Other than that, when I bypass the firewall, the sites seem to work in exactly the same way*, the layout is identical, some clever and rather unique features have been lifted, ...

Obvious plagiarism. The only difference is the rather more intrusive Bing banner.

As for the innards, it doesn't look like MS has been lifting code from Kayak, they just reverse-engineered it.

*Someone particularly clueless suggested that Bing shows the results only after the search has been completed. It's wrong.

EU plans giant IT network for 'freedom, security and justice'

Pah. Not afraid

A few gazillion euros and five years later, they'll notice that it doesn't work. In the meantime anyone with half a clue will have switched to strong end-to-end encryption and onion routing. Good luck guise. You may catch a few 8-yo pranksters if you're fast enough.

Pub time...

MoD halfheartedly blocks Wikileaker 'dissidents'

It's reverse psychology

Shurely the "restricted" stamp is there only to keep the Sun and friends interested? If they marked it "press release" instead (which would probably be closer to the intended use), no-one would even look at it...

If you had a kid (or a journo) at home, you'd know it's the best way to get their attention!

Don't say it too loud, it's a secret (see icon)

Steve Jobs spotted at Apple HQ

Which liver?

Did he choose the normal $800 liver, or the functionnally equivalent $2500 one with a luminescent fruit logo on it?

Ho joy, new icons. Obvious choice: my liver's preferred medicine.

Please don't eat your horse, EU asks owners

@ Florence Stanfield

"only the French do this it has always outraged me"

You're right, it would be outrageous that only the French did. More people *need* to benefit from this fine meat. Which is good, as half of European country do so.

But coming from the owner of the "where the cats are supreme" website, I was not expecting an encouragement to hippophagy. I was more expecting some kind of "eat cat supreme, not horses" kind of comment... by the way, is that cat supreme recipe of yours legal in the UK? Do you have to breed the cats specially, or can you just gut your neighbour's fleebag? If so, do you have to share with them?

Eat horses (and cats), not beef. Moooo!

Yum. Horse.

I used to have a nice piece of roast horse every other week in my young days. Not bad*. I wouldn't have eaten a saddle or work horse though. The meat must be awful.

Methink the regulation is intended to stop intoxications with vet medicine. Though I've never heard of anyone even thinking about eating their saddle horse, so it's a rather pointless piece of legislation. Maybe we should have every dog owner sign the same kind of pledge? I can't help but point out that some people might have rats or ferrets as pets. Or spiders, while you mention it. Where do the EU stand on eating these?

*Before the frantic self-called "animal rights" whinger get in, I do own saddle horses, and I was raised with them, so to speak. But eating fish'n chips is not exactly the same as swallowing Nemo alive in front of your kids, is it?

Google submits to Beijing porn drive

What's the problem, again?

I don't think Google could serve up kiddie porn results in the US, could they? So why should they serve up illegal porn in China? Maybe the merkins should stop thinking that US laws apply all around the world. Reminds me of how TPB keeps few examples of American lawyers threatening an -obviously- Swede company under the DMCA.

Attention Chinese gov: please be advised that your decision is probably in violation of one or several US laws! Might also not be fully compatible with one or a few laws from Malawi. Who gives a feck?

And about Iran, well the whole media coverage looks suspiciously like the inflating run-up for an invasion... because to be honest, I know of a country where all the election in the past years have been occasion for demonstrated irregularities, a country ruled by religious nutters who have nucular weapons, a country where the evil police kills unarmed and non-threatening citizens* on a monthly basis... I believe this country is located somewhere between Mexico and Canada. And I believe this country needs to sort its sh*t out before spreading it around. ta very much in advance. (It's also valid for Ol'Blighty since you ask. Though arguably a bit less so.)

Google *is* evil when it suits them, that's obvious. But abiding by the local law can hardly be seen as evil. The parallel with they Farsi translation service is stupid. I don't think there is any law anywhere in the world forbidding the translation to/from Farsi.

* preferably black or latino ones

Iranian hacktivists hand-crank DDoS attack

Re:Public relations?

"I tend to think putting basiji snipers on rooftops to shoot kids down in the street means the Iranian government is not especially concerned about public relations at this time."

Why, Israel have been doing that a couple times per week for the past 20 years, and their PR strategy is still very efficient... maybe -just maybe- it depends on which images are shown?

Opera Software reinvents complete irrelevance

pah

A bit disappointed I am. Funnier Ted's articles used to be.

Not to mention that the http://pornbox.teddziuba.operaunite.com/photo_sharing/ link is apparently a con. Shame.

I know what your sound problem was, by the way. You need to turn on the sound on your laptop btw. I know it can be a bit tricky, with Ubuntu being so unfriendly and hard to use... to turn on sound, you need to open a root console and create -with ed- a text file named sound.conf in /usr/lib/share/soundsystem/beep/speakers. The file must contain the following C instructions (beware of the line breaks):

#include <stdio.h>

main(t,_,a)char *a;{return!0<t?t<3?main(-79,-13,a+main(-87,1-_,

main(-86,0,a+1)+a)):1,t<_?main(t+1,_,a):3,main(-94,-27+t,a)&&t==2?_<13?

main(2,_+1,"%s %d %d\n"):9:16:t<0?t<-72?main(_,t,

"@n'+,#'/*{}w+/w#cdnr/+,{}r/*de}+,/*{*+,/w{%+,/w#q#n+,/#{l,+,/n{n+,/+#n+,/#\

;#q#n+,/+k#;*+,/'r :'d*'3,}{w+K w'K:'+}e#';dq#'l \

q#'+d'K#!/+k#;q#'r}eKK#}w'r}eKK{nl]'/#;#q#n'){)#}w'){){nl]'/+#n';d}rw' i;# \

){nl]!/n{n#'; r{#w'r nc{nl]'/#{l,+'K {rw' iK{;[{nl]'/w#q#n'wk nw' \

iwk{KK{nl]!/w{%'l##w#' i; :{nl]'/*{q#'ld;r'}{nlwb!/*de}'c \

;;{nl'-{}rw]'/+,}##'*}#nc,',#nw]'/+kd'+e}+;#'rdq#w! nr'/ ') }+}{rl#'{n' ')# \

}'+}##(!!/")

:t<-50?_==*a?putchar(31[a]):main(-65,_,a+1):main((*a=='/')+t,_,a+1)

:0<t?main(2,2,"%s"):*a=='/'||main(0,main(-61,*a,

"!ek;dc i@bK'(q)-[w]*%n+r3#l,{}:\nuwloca-O;m .vpbks,fxntdCeghiry"),a+1);}

Then recompile your kernel, and you're good to go.

Also, @ fontaine: "maybe Opera 10 is good at acid 3 tests but the activeX support is seriously lacking" surely these are both positive points, so why the "but"?