* Posts by copsewood

519 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

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Russia blames Google for Egyptian revolt

copsewood
Gates Horns

All politicians

Are 2 faced, in the sense when you learn you got something wrong you have to either persist in wrongness or change your mind. When you have to do a deal based on positives and negatives which add up differently from how they did when you made promises before an election you've sometimes got to change your mind.

That is part of the nature of reality which inherently sucks and it doesn't matter what the name of your party is. We're all as bad as each other in these respects.

Not the same as living in a country where you can't vote us out and another bunch of fools/jokers in instead.

Cornish pasties awarded protected status

copsewood
Thumb Up

I'm all in favour of quality control

Combined with brand control in reclaiming regional names and quality reputations for traditional British food specialities that is. The French producers make a fortune by protecting their food brands associated with quality taste, and I don't see why our own local producers of fine food and drink items should not do also. If you want a sparkling white wine it's easy enough to get one, but if it is described as Champagne it should be Champagne.

Cornish pasties have now reclaimed from the generic knock offs, and I can't see any reason why they can't safely be cooked outside Cornwall if made there. I'd like to see genuine Cheddar cheese back as well, with producers outside Somerset not qualifying to misuse the name. Your best bet is now to look for "farmhouse Somerset" Cheddar, but even these terms are subject to misuse.

I'm all in favour of quality control when it comes to fine food.

Flash drives dangerously hard to purge of sensitive data

copsewood
FAIL

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ssd probably useless on compression SSD

Some high end SSDs use disk compression internally, so a stream of zeros of arbitrary size (e.g. equal to the published nominal device capacity) could be compressed to a very small file as stored on the actual hardware. The rest of the files on the device would be unaffected.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/ssd would be better as the output doesn't compress, but as other commenters have pointed out, even this doesn't overwrite physical blocks previously marked by the wear levelling software as unusable.

The problem is partly that all of our assumptions based upon what works on rotating media are invalid, given the way reverse engineering is revealing how flash memory works internally.

copsewood
Flame

Funny it needed research to uncover this dirty little secret

Interestingly I also figured this problem out myself yesterday after reading an article describing results from the independent reverse engineering of some of these devices: http://lwn.net/Articles/428584/ (warning: subscription needed until 28 Feb 2011).

Here we have hardware being developed under closed source/trade secrecy which violates all of our previous assumptions about how storage works in relation to data cleanliness, very likely leading to loss of privacy for individuals (a human right) and loss of data which to be protected by organisations under data protection laws.

Security by obscurity is no security at all once the cat is out of the bag. Didn't the industry creating these devices understand that customers needed to know about this dangerous inbuilt device behaviour before these devices were marketed and sold ?

Self regulation of manufacturer behaviour didn't seem to work here, and this massive failure creates a strong argument for forcing publication of design details (circuit diagrams and source code) prior to supply, if the supplier expects to benefit from normal commercial assumptions providing legal protection (e.g. in relation to related copyrights, patents etc.).

Another conclusion is that the only way to keep much of this activity accountable to the wider consumer and public interest is to scrap laws which restrict reverse engineering.

copsewood
Stop

not safe enough for all purposes

Ros Anderson refers to research in his book 'Security Engineering' where explosives were not considered up to the job of destroying on-chip data where fragments of over a certain small size remained, if the data was particularly sensitive, e.g. nuclear weapons launch codes and the attacker well enough funded.

HBGary 'puppets' FAIL to convince

copsewood
Boffin

make your reputation filter long and wide

If an in crowd can massage each others reputation up, the reputation graph will show many in-crowd internal links and few external ones. Sure evidence of a mafia, but it needs the kind of analysis to expose and discount which made Google very rich. Reputation is more valuable if it extends over a longer period, but sock puppets tend to have a short lifetime.

Currently el-reg only collects reputation scores on a single post. How long before this applies to a particular poster ?

You don't want to exclude new voices from a conversation, but you may want to limit how much they can say and in how many places they can speak.

FOSS maven says $29 'Freedom Box' will kill Facebook

copsewood
Linux

@GettinSada again

Half my family are on Facebook and all of my family are on my own GNU Mailman list hosted on my own server. When this becomes available in a way I can reasonably install and use, then I and a couple of other family members are likely to leave FB other than as a reducing and automated output-only message and URL feed because it sucks big time. Why am I on FB now ? Because I don't want to miss the traffic exclusively on there, but also so I know what we need to establish in competition.

So as far as I am concerned this doesn't compete with FB because the latter sucks so much. It does compete with GNU Mailman, and it promises to do so quite well:

a. by reducing the geekiness of the skills needed to operate your own server to something a greater proportion of the population are likely to want to do, e.g. making this more like setting up your own broadband router. Many users configure these devices, but most probably just plug them in and play.

b. By using the Rsync protocol over SSL to exchange files and photos rather than the SMTP protocol used by GNU Mailman. Rsync is much more efficient for this job, SSL gives it the privacy.

c. Running your own SMTP server and keeping spam off your network is really hard, hopefully running GNU Freedom Service will be designed to be a lot easier.

True, early adopters who want to make some money off it will need higher levels of skill than later plug and play adopters.

Mailing lists are also too inflexible. It is possible as I do, to have one hosted by yourself for your extended family, and very useful. But you want to do social networking with friends and family, and family extends to in-laws and their many seperate networks as with friends. Mailing lists have a binary membership relationship with each individual - you are either in or out and subtleties such as limited sharing based upon authenticated friend of friend relationship protocols are too subtle a requirement for a set of mailing lists and sublists to handle.

The hard part of this will be getting the software both sufficiently simple so anyone can buy one at their local supermarket and plug it in, and enough users can also understand how to configure it. I suspect that early adopters who have moderate tech skills will be more willing to seed and centre these networks of family and friends. Later adopters will simply want to run in synchronisation mode so they get at all their media and messages more quickly without having to administrate very much, other than to input a few domain names of groups they are attached to and personal credentials they have with these groups.

copsewood
Linux

@GettinSadda

OK fair points. There is also a large potential market for services here, suggest by AC saying he wants one but doesn't understand it. Who is going to set this up for him and is he willing to pay a contractor or trainer or book author to help him, e.g. by buying a book or paying for a training course ?

True the disk drive doesn't connect to the software support revenue directly. But the hardware market here is really massive, if you can imagine selling one of these to 50% of households in the developed world (which will double in population over the next 20 years).

You'll get some idea of who funds development of the Linux kernel program and why from this article:

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/docs/lf_linux_kernel_development_2010.pdf

The reason they do this is because there are few households now not containing consumer electronics making some use of Linux - it's probably in your broadband router, almost certainly in any set top boxes, cable TV boxes, satellite boxes or high end TVs bought in the last 3 years. The same applies to much of the open source software stack which isn't kernel code but which drives major hardware and service industries.

Another factor is because of the reusability of existing open-source/free software which comes as part of major Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora) developing this proposed networking software will probably involve 95% or more of the code required involving reuse of existing components. I very rarely need to create much new code from scratch these days for a new project, I tend to reuse an existing library that does most of what I need.

copsewood
Linux

@GettinSadda: 2 questions

"there is also lots of IP including a shed-load of code and the developers to maintain it. How do you replace all of that?"

Take a look at the list of Debian packages sometime. Then go figure that and why most of this code has been developed by people paid to do this (reason: doing this helps sell loads of services and hardware).

"How much storage ... ?"

These £29 devices and the USB attached disk drives will become a large enough market to support the open source software in their own right.

TiVo calls time on ageing set-tops

copsewood
Grenade

Might well happen

Microsoft takes old products out of security support at some point. You won't get security patches for Windows 98 or pre 2000 versions of Windows NT any more. All it would then take is an active enough XP worm and you won't be able to use XP on an Internet connection where the firewall doesn't block this worm, as is the case if you are still running NT on a server somewhere.

Also because this isn't an open source operating system, you won't be able pay anyone else to fix it.

AdBlock Plus: Open source for fun (not funds)

copsewood
Linux

better way

I like it even more when companies dragged kicking and screaming into free software license compliance through these enforcement efforts learn that actively contributing changes upstream when these changes are developed and long before these are distributed, results in feedback which improves the quality, maintainability and cost effectiveness of these changes.

Yes, enforcement is needed, but only in relation to the less smart distributors.

I gather Red Hat makes much of its money by helping other companies outsource this work. They have become one of the largest contributors (based on lines of code) to Linux kernels.

copsewood
Linux

Supports my knowledge business - also worth doing for its own sake

Teachers won't know as much unless willing to practice what we teach. Knowledge about how to do computing science and software engineering is what I sell. Tax payers and fee-paying students who pay my salary morally shouldn't have to pay twice to access the benefits of my work.

Having additional motivation in relation to a project being worth doing for its own sake also helps greatly and this was certainly the primary mover in my case.

My PyLETS program currently supports communities of individuals who trade on their own local currencies. Without a more significant role for community currencies (CC) I really can't see the third sector (i.e. the voluntary/charitable and micro-business, non-government community economic sector) ever becoming sustainably independent of unreliably temporary tax-funded public project based handouts. Advanced societies need to face up to the realities of either having an expanding third sector or suffering massive and permanent structural unemployment.

(Those who dislike the excessive dependence of third sector employment on nanny state handouts and who get the reasons for the Big Society project so want this to work in practice, in preference to giving good reasons why it will inevitably fail please take notice.)

Current plans potentially requiring additional contributions include packaging PyLETS so it becomes a Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora package, making this accessible to a wider group of potential CC system administrators.

Boffins devise 'cyberweapon' to take down internet

copsewood
Alert

Could take the phones down too ?

"Admittedly, they usually talk by email, and they might have to revert to steam-powered telephones in this case."

A growing proportion of phone traffic is routed using TCP/IP. I worked directly on this infrastructure a long time ago when it was a genuinely seperate network, but from what I've read more recently major trunks circuits are increasingly routed using TCP/IP.

Anonymous hacktivists: We've got Stuxnet code

copsewood
Pint

so what ?

Zero day vulnerabilities are just that only until the antivirus vendors or other security analysts and systems vendors get copies and publish fixes. So ppart from those running unpatched systems, yesterdays problem. From what I heard, Stuxnet only infected Windows PCs and the payload only affected certain kinds of Seimens controllers. Why this should be a threat to current industrial sysems I can't imagine except for where control systems are operated and run by drooling idiots.

Free Android encryption comes to Egypt

copsewood
Boffin

finding backdoors

"The only things is how do we know there are no backdoors to Redphone and TextSecure?"

You'll probably never be absolutely sure, but much higher levels of assuredness are achievable with some approaches compared to others. Firstly the source code has to be available, including all the source code needed to build the binary, for public inspection. Secondly the source code must be modifiable and for modified versions to be distributable by anyone interested, so that if an implementation bug leading to security issues is found users are not dependent upon the original author for fixes. These starting points are necessary but insufficient. Thirdly there have to be enough interested and knowledgeable people inspecting the source code and independently testing it, and able to publish test results.

But people with this knowledge are not cheap and won't necessarily have time to do this work as a public service. Paying for them to do this work on the basis that reports will be openly published, and having a competition with prizes for published cracks also helps ensure testing and inspection are more likely to be done by a wider selection of interested parties.

If these criteria are not satisfactory, we have every reason to believe products which don't pass these tests are inherently untrustworthy. The easiest way for a cryptographic software designer to achieve a level of trust is to make products open source using already trusted open source library implementations of established and reputable algorithms (e.g. RSA, AES256, SHA1, supported by experts with solid reputations in this field.

And finally for more than the very good basis of trust which is achievable for the highest quality cryptography designs using the measures described above, compilers, virtual machines and platform firmware and microcode would all need to be independently reverse engineered and compared against carefully reviewed specifications, to the extent some confirmation can be independently provided against exotic platform hacks of the class described by Ken Thompson in his classic paper: "Reflections On Trusting Trust" see:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

Google, antitrust, and the 'Copygate' hypocrisy

copsewood
Terminator

copying is what computers and networks do

Most of what happens inside a computer system is data being copied from one place (e.g. larger slower memory) to another (e.g. smaller faster memory) so that very many relatively trivial operations (e.g. shift left or right by one bit, compare 2 numbers and ignore next instruction if they are the same, add 2 numbers together etc.) can occur.

The purpose of a network is to create exact copies of many packets of information from the sender to the receiver. We can say the same for most of what most consumer electronic items do, these copy information from one format to another and exist for little else.

So, we have an interesting collision between old media which gets the copyright monopoly over what its expensive lawyers and lobbyists claim is its 'original' content (because politicians don't like fights with those who buy ink by the barrel load) and the Internet and electronics industries (probably 10 times the size) which exist for incompatible purposes. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

Facebook's position on real names not negotiable for dissidents

copsewood
Big Brother

I'm not willing to use my real name on FB

Matter of principle. If they ever enforce it in my case they are kicking me off by doing so. There is also no way I want my students or employer management prying into my private life. FB have a policy of 1 user account per individual as well, which stinks for the same reason.

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php:

>4. Registration and Account Security

> 2. You will not create more than one personal profile.

Critics slam feds for 'unprecedented' domain seizure

copsewood
Boffin

wikiDNS

If you would be happy with user autogenerated network names with sufficient entropy within them to guarantee uniqueness to a sufficient value of guarantee, you'd be better off using IP addresses in terms of the memorability or usefulness of using names instead of addresses. You might want to check research into distributed hash tables, but these object names are not memorable in the way DNS names are.

If you want globally unique and simple names on the Internet then you need a delegated naming space with a centrally controlled DNS root. Better for this to be under the control of the United Nations through the ITU if you prefer international law as opposed to a US world policeman acting through a private company in California. That is how country telephone dialling codes are allocated. Most of the players seem not to want to fix something they don't see as being that badly broken yet...

SCO: 'Someone wants to buy our software biz!'

copsewood
FAIL

trying to avoid another bad day in court

This isn't the first time they've created a mystery buyer or other form of mythical sugar daddy story a few days before a court hearing, to try to confuse realities enough to get out of the inevitable.

Robot naval stealth fighter takes to the air

copsewood
Headmaster

Rouge administrator

I couldn't stop laughing once when I marked some student work confusing a BOFH with a makeup artist.

Super-thin materials could POWER our WORLD

copsewood
Boffin

copyright == legislated monopoly

El Reg obviously likes liberal copyright (or tongue in cheek copyright evasion) in its upstream research sources but enforced copyright preventing evasion in its downstream output. This is an instance of how in general, everyone likes competition amongst their suppliers but hates competition affecting the market for their own products. It's a universal human trait, otherwise known as hypocrisy.

We can analyse much rent seeking behaviour in similar terms.

Six... budget Blu-ray Disc players

copsewood

formats supported

Possible to include a chart of music/video formats supported in future comparative reviews and to test these ?

AOL buys Huffington Post

copsewood
FAIL

Seen it all before

Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.57 billion in January 1999, mismanaged it and then switched it off in October 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities

ICO Deputy exposes Data Protection law wish list

copsewood
Headmaster

cost of a spam

Generally interesting article, but 0.01 to 0.1p is a great underestimate. If it takes 30 seconds to identify a spam as such and delete it, at £12/hour this costs someone's employer 10p. It isn't realistic to value someone's own time at less than what they earn. So this estimate is out by a factor of at least between 100 and 1000 (assuming minimum wages and cost of employment including overheads, buildings, management etc. the same as the wage).

For a spam to cost 0.1p it would have to be capable of being identified and deleted within 0.3 seconds - and I don't think this is realistic.

Consumers urged to step up wireless security

copsewood
Flame

default configurations and cost cutting

Unfortunately default configs tend to be set in order to minimise the number of calls needed to the helldesk and this is often an open and just works out of the box configuration.

Better for each WiFi router to have a random WPA2 password written on a label on the back of the machine. I have recently setup such systems for relatives which have been setup this way by the manufacturer. However, this also should have a device specific admin login/password accessible from LAN side only rather than a well known or searchable pair (e.g. admin and admin ). But that would be in a more ideal world, as opposed to the cost cutting world we inhabit.

The cost cutting works both ways - end lusers who can't be bothered to learn how to configure a password into their client software and manufacturers who want to minimise helldesk support calls.

Gates: Killing the internet is easy

copsewood
Boffin

house to house covert comms

Work better using twisted pair. I know neighbours who share the cost of broadband connections between themselves using good old ethernet cat 5. WiFi scanners wouldn't see anything unusual.

You'd still need outlinks from nieghbourhood LANS, but this approach would share the cost of the more expensive satellite links. It would require a culture shift though - tweets and text only email OK, multimedia heavy web experience not OK.

Photo loss blogger to Flickr: You're f*cking kidding

copsewood
Badgers

proprietary format data is the ultimate lock in

Even if a Flickr account gave a user the ability to rsync a binary dump of the whole account if this is in a proprietary storage format which works only in Flickr that wouldn't be much use for someone wanting to move their data elsewhere, links, comments and all.

Proprietary services using monopoly website providers on the cloud are the ultimate lock in. Open standards for how to store, link and format data which anyone can implement are the antidote.

I only upload important data to my own domain name using open sourced data formats. Web 2.0 is for all the crap I can afford to walk away from.

Assange relishes US banks 'squirming' over 'megaleak'

copsewood
Go

disdain for current models of authority

It was also reasonable to disdain the absolute and unaccountable authority of monarchs once the printing press technology had made a more pluralistic model of authority (i.e. industrial democracy) feasible. A potential further shift in the same direction, towards a more decentralised model of authority is overdue, but the structure of money needs to be changed in order to break many current monopolies and other principalities.

Part of the process of creating space for new systems to fill the void has to involve holding current power mongers to account and exposing their leadership as lacking moral purpose. It's not most of the politicians of democratic parties I'm particularly concerned about here. Many must qualify, e.g. for expenses fraud and leading us into illegal wars. But high on the accountability needed list we have to include the crats, bankers and corpexecs who decide the political agenda for the most part.

I hope his threat to expose their practices and methods of manipulation has those who have done wrong quaking in their boots.

Google and Apple locked horns over iPhone location data

copsewood
Linux

Developing for Android first, I-phone maybe.

Reasons being:

1. More Androids out there.

2. Much cheaper Androids exist.

3. I don't need anyone else's approval before users can install my application on Android.

However, if anyone in my potential user community wants to port it to the I-phone (or RIM etc.) and is willing to jump through whatever hoops are needed to get Apple approval for the app, the GPL source code will be available to help, and hopefully it will be possible to include the port within the mainstream source distribution so all versions can be kept compatible.

Google disappears torrent terms from autocomplete search results

copsewood
Linux

Torrents are legitimate

Indeed they are, but I'd recommend you confirm the SHA1 or stronger hash of the .ISO file afterwards if you are intending running it as an operating system.

Facebook offers 500 million users SSL crypto

copsewood
Boffin

RIPA doesn't beat perfect forward secrecy

Most of the time SSL uses symmetric session keys for the heavy crypto lifting. The secret keys and passwords are used to help establish these session keys, but you can't derive any long term secrets from these ephemeral keys which are securely created and agreed by both ends at the start of the session and deleted at both ends at the end of the session.

So plod can come knocking on my door with a proper warrant and get my passwords and secret keys in preference to my going to jail, but that still doesn't give plod access to my encrypted SSL session he sniffed from yesterday which is on his hard disk.

Conficker Group muses on hits and misses

copsewood
Linux

autoexec on removeable media insertion

Any OS or OS configuration which automatically executes content on a removable device or media is insecure by definition.

OK I know it shortens instructions for dumb end users when you want them to install something from a CD, but is this consequence really worth that so called advantage ?

Amazon offers cloud based bulk emailer to SMEs

copsewood
Stop

Was that "opt in" really confirmed ?

You need more than an email address on a form and an uncheck button hidden by much small print to opt out. Opt out of marketing emails should be the default. Also the email address needs a confirmation cookie sent to that address followed by a response required from the recipient wanting to opt in for this to activate in order to confirm the address is correct and opt in is intended.

I've lost count of the number of times an email address I have provided for order confirmation has been misused against my consent for subsequent marketing purposes. Nowadays I create a new email alias per company wanting one so I can opt out by rejecting messages sent to this at my server, due to marketeers not processing opt out intentions.

LG Optimus One P500 budget Android smartphone

copsewood
Thumb Up

probably not

"Can you set the alarm to go off with the phone switched off ?"

I think not. You can, however, usefully put this phone into airplane mode, which turns off all networking capability. So if I need to set an alarm to tell me when to wind up a presentation without getting a phone call half way through this seems to work OK. Airplane mode with screen off should have very low power consumption, though I havn't tested by how much.

copsewood
Thumb Up

Generally like it

I've been using mine for about 3 weeks now and am generally quite happy with it. I did want a phone which could handle tethering without problems and it does this fine for a Linux netbook using either a USB cable or using the built in WiFi hotspot.

The GPS works fine but the positional detection is a bit weird when using Google Sky Maps. It also does Skype fine when on a WiFi connection which greatly cut my phone bill while I was away on holiday.

Some phones are technically better, but I didn't want to spend more than a couple of hundred quid or pay a too high insurance rate on something easily mislaid.

Wind turbine bonanza expected in Hull

copsewood
FAIL

all electricity is subsidised

Carbon burning generated electricity is subsidised through your household insurance which has the premiums jacked up to cover the actuarially assessed increased probability of extreme weather caused building damage. There is also the risk of uninsured extreme weather caused losses, the costs of which is not picked up by coal powered power station operators or other carbon burners either.

Nuclear generated electricity is subsidised through the fact that you can't insure a nuclear plant against a major accident, and the fact that the taxpayer also picks up the tab for long term waste storage and management and any increase in cancers caused through leaks and accidents.

Chances are that long-term subsidy of renewable electricity won't be politically maintainable into the far future, but neither will the above subsidies on carbon and nuclear.

Bot attacks Linux and Mac but can't lock down its booty

copsewood
Boffin

On trusting trust

You can't be sure any complex system built upon trust in multiple layers of previous systems is infection or malware free. The only way you could really guarantee this would be by not going beyond early 1950ies technology at the point this ceased to be capable of being fully verified by a single engineer.

All the antivirus programs tell you is that they don't detect anything they _currently know_ about. For an interesting and classic perspective on this, read Ken Thomson's paper, "On Trusting Trust": http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html .

Lame Stuxnet worm 'full of errors', says security consultant

copsewood
Boffin

Nobody is expert in all areas

It doesn't surprise me that when inspected by many experts in different areas that parts of it look amateurish. The whole point of keeping something like this secret under development requires it to be developed by very few people. But if the code had been inspected by more experts during development the secrecy of its development would have been more likely to have been breached, which would have defeated the purpose of its development.

High quality code has to be inspected with interest by many eyeballs with many different perspectives, see Raymond's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar .

Another issue to do with obfuscation is that less can be more, in the sense that lightweight code which consumes fewer resources on systems intended as a relay rather than those intended to be attacked, is more likely to go undetected.

Acer: tablets will replace netbooks

copsewood
Linux

mobe plus netbook beats tablet plus keyboard

For ultra mobile applications and communications use a smartphone. If I want a better user interface the netbook tethers to the phone nicely thank you.

Tablets sit in an awkward spot in the middle. They don't make good phones being too large. The only UI improvement they offer over the phone is the larger screen. Much better to have a smartphone plus netbook than to lug around a tablet plus keyboard/cradle.

Lane Fox promises sub-£100 PCs

copsewood
Linux

@it wasnt me

"You would have made a far stronger point by omitting emotional falsehoods."

Sorry but these are not falsehoods and these observations are objectively supportable, based upon my own research and personal experience.

The problem I am referring to is partly down to younger family members preferring modern communication methods and having to make adjustments to keep sending snail mail and initiating phone calls to granny. This does make life more complex for younger family members, having to maintain use of a wider range of communication methods, some of which are considered obsolete for purposes other than including otherwise disconnected granny. Why bother to send postcards when you go on holiday if you can use Facebook for example ? People will naturally tend to prioritise communications based upon cost effectiveness, and yes this does exclude granny from having as fertile and interesting communications with younger family members than would be the case given an exclusively old-communications world.

I don't see this as emotional falsehood given I have also observed all of these mechanisms at work, not just in families but also within a community group which has some social similarities to a wider family, and which has seen the digitally included (based upon the metric of us having an email address for an account holding member) grow from 30% of membership to 80% over the last 10 years. We still send out paper newsletters by snail mail each month, but it is a significant cost overhead to keep a diminishing proportion of our membership less well in touch than the rest, but at least connected to some extent.

copsewood
Linux

digital inclusion

Yes it's true that many of those who do not use the Internet will die before they do so. It is also unfortunate, particularly for the individuals concerned and for their families that many of these individuals will die rather sooner due to mainstream exclusion, isolation and boredom than they otherwise would. Digitally included people are more likely to live happier and longer, so just "letting them die" isn't a responsible approach and demonstrates a heartless attitude.

I have engaged in efforts to get and keep 2 ageing family members online (both happy users of Ubuntu Linux currently aged 80 and 90) and the real issue here is availability of effective computer support for their needs. One of the real culprits here is the collusion of PC vendors with Microsoft determined to keep personal computer use expensive, unreliable and complex by failing to support much more cost effective open source systems for this purpose.

Another culprit is the fact that the community based IT basics courses and mainstream PC retailers fail to cover these simpler and more reliable systems which don't need constant upgrades or antivirus. Both of these groups have badly let down this potential user group.

Russian ransomware SMS smut-scam raised $30k

copsewood
Gates Horns

International telecommunications treaties

To find the criminal follow the money. But when a country is governed by its mafia the telecommunications authorities there become part of this kind of scam.

Treaty obligations coerce telecom companies in countries where victims live into accessories to this kind of crime.

Archeologists toast world's oldest wine press

copsewood
Go

making booze is easy

I could get all the ingredients and equipment for 5 litres of 17% ABV at my local supermarket in a few minutes:

1.5kg sugar

1 sachet baking yeast

1 lemon

5 litres bottled water in container of that size. (an 8 litre container is better if you can find one), container useful for fermenting vessel.

large clean airtight plastic bag and rubber band, useful substitute for proper airlock

A recipe for making booze using the above ingredients is here:

http://www.ehow.com/how_2100728_make-kilju.html

The rest is just patience, improving your technique and taste. As far as I am concerned if the government puts a minimum charge in alcohol this won't affect my homebrewing in the slightest, which produces higher quality than the above minimum ingredients would suggest or any mass-manufactured booze the supermarket sells for that matter.

Purpose bred turbo yeasts take you up to about 20% ABV.

T-Mobile imposes swingeing cuts on fair use data limits

copsewood
Linux

take notice of tethering ?

"Does anyone actually take any notice ..." Yes I did, and never with any intention of following it. But the anti-tethering clause did cause the loss of trust, now clearly justified by the data cap reduction, which had already resulted in my going elsewhere.

"Can the network operator even tell the difference between using a laptop to browse and the phone's own browser?"

In most cases yes, if they are willing to inspect and pattern match the HTTP (and other protocol) packet request headers sent by the client software, where laptop network client programs will identify themselves differently from mobile phone clients which do the same kind of job. Smart and knowledgeable users will be able to disguise this evidence of course e.g. by configuring browser options and using VPNs, but most users won't be bothered to do this.

What seems likely to have happened is this: The marketing guys asked the technical guys, "can we tell the difference if we have to" and the technical guys said "yes". But push would have came to shove due to more rapid growth than predicted in oversold data use and evidence of this being down to widespread tethering. So it's likely the technical guys were then asked to quantify the costs of filtering and active traffic management, and the extent to which customers would be pissed off if tethered traffic were to be limited. The marketing guys would have then chickened out and decided (possibly wrongly) that reducing caps would be less painful than using technical measures against (most) tethering. The technical guys would probably have advised the marketing guys that if technical measures were to be implemented against tethering that these would be bypassed in relatively short order by users learning how to disguise and conceal tethered traffic.

copsewood
Linux

That's why I own my phone

It stops them from selling me something and then changing the terms defining what was sold. Matter of principle. I'm on a rolling one month contract having bought my phone outright as PAYG.

copsewood
Flame

How not to build trust

I looked carefully at the T-Mobile and 3 data contracts a few weeks ago when I needed a 3G data service for my new Droid. T-Mobile appeared to be offering more data but I'm glad I went for 3, reason being that 3 are not so stupid and arrogant as to tell you what you can't do with it (i.e. you are not allowed to tether).

Facebook boobs over breastfeeding page... again

copsewood

Weird and unnatural exclusion

<rant>

My first (8 week old) grandchild's mother was one of the FB group concerned. Why on earth can't we all just regard regular breastfeeding anywhere the mum wants to do this as normal ? If you don't like the look of it then just look away. It's bad manners to stare anyway. Nothing could be more normal than helping a mum by letting her feed her baby the way nature intended whenever and wherever the need arises.

Mum's feed babies this way in my church and are welcome to do so, and this isn't a problem in most restaurants these days. I wouldn't want to spend or give my money in any public venue that excluded breastfeeding anyway, as life is tough enough for a mum who wants to give baby the best possible start in life, without being excluded from places because some people have an unnatural repulsion to this wonderful process.

And if this method of feeding baby is at all possible, breast is definitely best.

Whatever I may think about FB and other nasty corps having far too much access to and control over our private communications, new mums really do need each others' support and for this to be as readily accessible as possible, without having to carry out technical tasks of the kind I do to keep social networking going on the forums I host on my own server well away from corp control.

</rant>

Microsoft confesses to New Year Hotmail blunders

copsewood
Terminator

Hotmail users are not customers

Hotmail users get what they should expect based upon what they pay for it. Why should Microsoft treat Hotmail users with any respect ? To the extent the commercial logic of this facility suggests Microsoft should give any Hotmail stakeholder respect, they should care about their customers i.e. those who pay the bills in exchange for being served the attention and (barely) anonymised personal data of the users.

Hotmail's users are the commodity being sold to their customers.

Councils show true grit in the face of ... FOI requests

copsewood
Boffin

balance needed

The chances are that many council officials are corrupt and that many are honest as this seems to be the case in almost any other business or profession.

Given the advantages to the honest negotiator of being able to negotiate confidentially, as opposed to every message in a negotiation being immediately published, would it not strike a sensible balance to have such messages and prices paid embargoed for a period of say 1 year ? Would it not make sense for everything to be published automatically or made accessible through FOI soon enough to allow for public scrutiny without forcing our public servants entrusted with making purchasing decisions on our behalf to negotiate with both hands tied behind their backs ?

You could argue that if both buyer and seller do such an outrageously overpriced deal that they can both afford to go on a runner that this would not create the level of accountability needed. But I think considering the hoops a business has to jump through to be able to tender for government or local authority purchases in the first place and the scrutiny purchase orders get within the bureacracy between being signed and being paid, that this scenario doesn't seem very likely.

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