* Posts by copsewood

519 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

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Men at Work swiped Down Under riff

copsewood
Pirate

The law is an ass

Especially so called "intellectual property" law. The more stupid the IP law decision, the more the whole idea of IP law is dragged into the kind of public disrepute that enables the wide ranging legal reforms needed to gain political momentum.

When there is no longer any rational basis to consider IP to represent moral rights, the more these claimed rights are ignored in practice the better.

iPhone vulnerable to remote attack on SSL

copsewood
Go

expensive ones and zeros

What the CAs are charging you for are the most expensive ones and zeros in the world. Thankfully some of the money derived from their sale is funding the Ubuntu improvements being made to Linux.

Tories moot breaking up BT Openreach monopoly

copsewood

upspeed still too slow

Don't really see much point of increasing the downspeed to over 10mbit/s if the upspeed is going to stay at 128Kbit/s taking forever to upload a couple of dozen Mbytes to the website I have to host remotely just so my family can all see my photos without waiting all day. And no, I don't like my family photos being used to sell someone else's advertising to nearest and dearest - that's why I host these myself. OK I admit, I have a large family.

Home Office spawns new unit to expand internet surveillance

copsewood
Stop

Tor is slow and lacks critical mass

Tor could only work like this if it reorganised networking based on enough people having a well connected Tor router and all Tor routing being done based on trusted relationships, as opposed to based on network geography. Realistically this isn't going to happen, as it would slow everything by factors of 10 or 100 even if you could persuade more than half the population to operate in this manner. Those getting into Tor now have to connect to other Tor partners based on limited availability and not trust, so this early prototype network is insecure.

Better for those who care about the issue enough to invest in virtual servers in countries whose laws they trust and to use VPNs to secure their own internet traffic, using offshore virtual servers as apparant traffic origins in respect of all their Net use with everything else tunnelled over the VPN. Then your trust is in the virtual server provider and the integrity of the VPN you select.

Amateur CCTV sleuth site probed by privacy watchdog

copsewood
Big Brother

improbable

If this is illegal then this would make every webcam installed in the UK illegal if it transmits images to the web. I'd have thought if that were the case someone would have complained about it long ago on the same grounds. These things have been around in great numbers going back 15 years. I havn't read anything in the DPA which suggests this to be a problem, so long as personal data collected for one purpose isn't used for another.

SourceForge bars 5 nations from open source downloads

copsewood
Linux

OS licenses don't oblige distribution

Accepting an OS license doesn't oblige someone to distribute software. The only obligation an OS license of the copyleft kind creates is to ensure a distributor who makes binaries available also makes source available to those to whom binaries are distributed.

The fact that US law prevents distribution of some or all software to a list of countries doesn't prevent anyone outside the reach of US law from doing so.

Linux coders do it for money

copsewood
Linux

losing out

I thought Mac OSX was BSD based. Google is thought to be contributing open source code to the community in many other ways. However, both Apple and Google are probably losing out if they are using any significant Linux modifications internally which they are not contributing upstream. This is because they would be forgoing the benefit of community peer review of code and help with testing, and they are also having repeatedly to patch in their own changes whenever they no longer want to maintain an increasingly divergent base kernel target for their own development, in order to benefit from changes elsewhere appearing in mainstream kernel versions.

Jonathan Corbet has written about this in detail on lwn.net. This is a significant motivation for why the contributor companies described in the article are contributing upstream. It has very little to do with altruism, and has much more to do with the technical and commercial benefits being greater than the costs.

Lloyds, RBS ditching more tech workers

copsewood
Grenade

leaving the sinking ship

I've just moved my current account from a big bad corporate cannibal bank that eats its own kind to one of the few friendly local and mutual building societies left. I'm fed up of being taxed in order to pay bonuses to these bastards.

Rattled Red Hat battles support impostors

copsewood
Linux

good for customers

The fact that open competition is good for customers is the reason Red Hat is growing. Microsoft shares are down on their value a few years ago because imprisoned customers tend to become resentful and avoid the nasty supplier whenever and wherever they can, so the nasty supplier will have to rely on a reducing value core market and will lose out on new opportunity areas. But Red Hat will never achieve the dominance over a market area in the same sense previous monopolies could, simply because with open source there is no lock in.

FBI nicks 22 in classic bribery sting

copsewood
Grenade

Bribery is illegal everywhere

But it often suits the rich and powerful not to enforce such laws and to behave in a manner that makes such laws unenforceable in practice. Unless it affects someone else. Very often the people at the top are there because they have managed to avoid getting caught. It also suits the large arms manufacturers to have minor independent arms dealers locked up to reduce competition in the bribery market. The fact that you won't find executives of major US or UK arms corporations caught up in this kind of sting doesn't mean bribery isn't used or doesn't operate at a higher level, but major arms corporations have more political clout than the smaller dealerships.

copsewood
Headmaster

Sure, but legal defence needed

Once the police charge someone it is in their interest to have this fact published. Otherwise there would be little to prevent the police ensuring that someone accused of a serious offence languishes in jail with those they know thinking they have dissappeared, and all sorts of bureacratic reasons being used to block their communications with the outside world. This is all part of a legal process to ensure people can't be held too long without charge and that those charged have their rights protected by the courts. Personally I can't see the rights of those accused being protectable otherwise.

Judge blames RealNetworks for DVD-ripping ban

copsewood
Grenade

DVDs have to be ripped to be usable

Otherwise the content on them isn't of merchantable quality as far as highly portable personal media players are concerned. DVD-CSS is not designed to prevent a DVD from being ripped anyway, it is designed to prevent a DVD from being played on a mono-region DVD player which requires a different region encoding.The judge concerned seems to be living in the stone age.

New mega offshore windfarms could supply 2% of UK energy

copsewood

No need

You don't need energy storage for single day a year requirements. Just have a wind holiday, planned a couple of days in advance based on the weather forecast. Cheaper and more fun.

copsewood
Flame

so coal leccy is cheaper ?

Without all this wind power I could be having cheaper coal generated electricity yet not be able to afford to insure my home against flooding or hurricanes. Lewis Page tells us to think of wind leccy as expensive so coal leccy must be cheaper ?

Why Nominet disconnected 1,000 sites with no court oversight

copsewood

Easy enough to use an agent's business address

If you don't want your personal address published on whois then you can use the address of an agent easily enough, e.g. a small ISP acting on your behalf. Good idea to register yourself as the owner of the domain. As far as I'm aware this meets Nominet's contractual requirements. I remember being contacted by Nominet to confirm contact details a couple of years ago of a .uk domain, though the fact they didn't have these wan't my oversight, and I think they have tightened up since.

BT names 63 more exchanges for fibre upgrades

copsewood
Unhappy

toffs first

All the exchanges listed in the West Midlands are for effluent areas too.

U2 frontman bitchslapped by TalkTalk

copsewood
Linux

Different business model needed

If the content carried by the network sells the network, morally the providers of the content should reasonably get a commission, but when they do, the commission has to be conditional upon legitimising use of content for which sales commission is due. The idea that content providers can police use of the network is incompatible with human rights concerned with privacy and expression.

Bono accuses ISPs of 'reverse Robin Hooding' over piracy

copsewood
Pirate

right to a cut != right to police net

Without the art carried by it, people wouldn't be paying as much for as much bandwidth. So I personally don't have a problem with the artists getting a cut, similar to a sales commission. But I do have a problem with artists imagining they can police everyone's online behaviour. It's the same idea as when you go into a clothes shop or restaurant where music is played. The customer doesn't pay for the music, the business that gets value added from the music does.

So I'd be very happy for artists to get a 2-3 percent cut of ISP sales and from supermarket sales of blank media - on condition they legitimise non commercial use of this bandwidth in order to be able to benefit from commercial use. The problem is that artists are not represented well by the collection societies and distribution managements who have persistently defrauded them, and still imagine they can somehow persuade the public they have a right to police what the entire Internet and electronics industries products are used for. That is pretty stupid; a bit like them suing someone who eats a meal in a restaurant for unlicensed music played to them instead of charging the business owner for a license.

If they can get a cut from radio stations and shops etc, the only thing stopping them getting a cut from ISPs and blank media sales is the delusion that they can control non-commercial and private use of such.

Today is not New Year's Eve - or the end of the decade

copsewood
Headmaster

conspiracy theories

"we don't even know for a fact if Jesus even truly existed"

Was that a tin foil hat you were wearing to shield the mind control rays ? I haven't been to America, but I tend to believe that the existence of America isn't a conspiracy because I have reasons to trust those who have been there and who claim to live there. The fact that scientific proof applies to nothing recorded by history doesn't mean the very many who recorded and preserved it are all conspiring against the facts.

Some history within the Bible also ties in extensively with non-Biblical history of the same period, including the Gospels with what Roman historians of the period wrote as well as with current archaelogy, while some Biblical accounts including the Parables and the Book of Job don't tie in with other history - for the somewhat obvious reason that these are presented within the Bible as works of fiction.

So before making sweeping statements like the one above which puts you firmly into the flat earthers and moon landing deniers camp, if you don't want others reasonably to consider you to be either nuts or thick, then you might want to do yourself the favour of studying and thinking a bit more carefully about the subject.

Tobacco biofuel to solve energy/ environment crisis?

copsewood
Boffin

air transport

Solar voltaic panels generate electricity directly. Concentrated Solar Thermal panels generate electricity via heat concentration. Solar heating panels substitute for heating fuel or electricity use by providing hot water. None of these applications are useful for generating fuel for very light and mobile applications, i.e. aircraft. Surface transport may become convertible to sustainably generated electrical use, e.g. through trams and railway electrification and vehicle battery technology. But air transport can't accept the low power to weight ratio of batteries, so to avoid net CO2 release, some kind of biofuel production is needed for sustainable air transport.

Hackintosher's new line: Linux and T-shirts

copsewood
Linux

OS X isn't Linux

It uses another Unix derived kernel - not the Linux kernel. It is true that most Unix derivatives can run the same Posix standardised applications, particularly if available for compilation as source code, but technically Linux is the kernel, not the particular set of applications (i.e. the distribution) which tends to be installed along with the kernel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X#History

Ten years of .NET - Did Microsoft deliver?

copsewood
Linux

different language optimisations

"The reason is simple: Garbage Collected Languages are simply not up to the task when it comes to high-performance, high-throughput and low-latency applications."

True these languages will probably always be slower than applications written close to the metal in C or C++. But there exist a wide range of values of performance cost for different GC languages. GC languages also have different improvement factors in relation to programmer productivity from each other. Programmer productivity is the critical constraint to be optimised far more frequently than not, unless you are a live action roleplay games developer or working on system software or realtime control systems.

Perl and Python are GC languages. These both provide much higher programmer productivity than even Java and C#. Python is unlike Perl in the sense that Python source code is usually much more readable. I was changing a Python application I wrote myself 3 years ago earlier today, with a hard deadline to meet and it worked perfectly and on time in a small virtual machine server memory footprint for dozens of concurrent web application users, with no apparent latency evident.

Honeynet research lifts the lid on spam trends

copsewood
Boffin

partial solutions

I use the spamhaus DNSBL on my server. This rejects typically 3000 spams a week according to my weekly automated reports. Spamassassin in reject mode (scores > 10) gets rid of a further 200.

In filter mode, I use more agressive DNSBLs (including one I compile myself) and a lower Spamassassin threshhold score ( > 7.0). I get about 300 spams per week in my spam folder, where I check one line per email (sender and subject) twice a week for false positives, and I get about 1 FP per month there.

About 20 spam emails a week make it through to my inbox.

Many commercial email rejection/filtering services provide their customers with similar or slightly better performance here than I achieve myself.

To be able to improve upon this various incremental improvements in existing standards and software based approaches are possible including:

a. ISPs to implement standards such as automated activation of RFC2369 headers when someone clicks a "this is spam" button (based on subscriber regret). This would be better than AOL making these headers invisible and bouncing an anonymised and untraceable complaint to an abuse handler unable to remove the confirmed opt in with subscriber regret.

b. Better means of identifying IP addresses which should not be sending email directly across administrative or contractual boundaries in the first place, such that an ISP can mark all addresses other than their own mailservers unsuited by default with domain owners publishing CSV records ( http://www.bbiw.net/CSV/draft-ietf-marid-csv-dna-01.txt ).

c. DNS and email server software and services making implementation of standards such as those above and DomainKeys a lot easier.

copsewood
Boffin

You might be an anti spam kook if ...

http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html#e-postage

"The FUSSP assumes that your attention is so important that strangers will pay money to send you mail."

FUSSP: Final and Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem

Google demos image rec 'quantum computer'

copsewood
Boffin

Very likely indeed

Though how far they have got in connection with the use of Shor's algorithm in cracking the RSA problem is an interesting and open question. I'm not a mathematician, but my quick scan of the following article suggests a 2048 Qbit computer is needed to crack a 1024 bit RSA key:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm

Free software lawyers hit Best Buy et al with GPL 'violation' claim

copsewood
Linux

I want my TV's source code

You are very likely to find the TV firmware as a whole is a derived work, considering it was distributed together on the same chip, and compiled together into the same single program. So the demand is going to be for the source code capable of being used to create the firmware image as a whole.

The reason I want my TV's source code is because I want full control over what my own TV can do once I have purchased it. The software developer issued Busybox under the GPL partly so I could contribute any improvements I might be able to make towards Busybox, and if I don't get my TV's source code then I can't make any improvements to it.

copsewood
Linux

The retailer distributes the software

As a distributor of material coming under a copyright license you either comply with the copyright license or you have no right to distribute. This is how copyright law works. The copyright owner or assignee has the right to go after the unlicensed distributor. What happens quite often is that the manufacturer is located in a country where enforcement is difficult. Then the easiest way to get the manufacturer to comply with the license is by putting the retailer in the situation where if the manufacturer does not comply they would either get countersued by the retailer, or the retailer would be forced to discontinue sale of the products.

If the retailer sees costs in compliance they will be more careful about products they buy wholesale from manufacturers in future.

All these cases I'm aware of to date have been settled out of court by the manufacturer being forced into license compliance, i.e. by releasing the source code as required by the license.

copsewood
Welcome

free as in freedom not as in price

You won't have too much trouble getting this kind of legal work done pro bono given that developers using these licenses want consumers to have access to source code to avoid freedom being compromised and the pool of talent which could contribute being depleted. Legal firms exist which have annual budgets concerning the amount of pro bono work they do, and this kind of case will come high up their criteria for support. I very much doubt Richard Stallman has ever had to find money to pay legal bills - he is setting an agenda very many people are keen to contribute substantially towards.

When, as a programmer, you are able to assign copyright to a suitably well funded software freedom organisation which pursues your agenda, then you obtain a strong ally in ensuring your objectives concerning distributee access to source code will be achievable.

'We must all stop washing to save the planet'

copsewood
Thumb Down

Nuclear lobbyist misrepresenting solar capacity

Concentrated solar thermal (CSP) is likely to be developed much more rapidly than solar voltaic. The link posted isn't the world's biggest solar plant, it may be the biggest photovoltaic one. The entire world's electricity supply could theoretically be generated by CSP occupying a 432km square of hot sunny desert covered in CSP plant, see

http://www.desertec-australia.org/content/concentratingsolarpower.html

Generating electricity around the clock is easier for CSP than for photovoltaic, as liquids or steam superheated using CSP can be stored efficiently and used to generate electricity when needed. This approach is more suited to the tropics and subtropics. But it works more generally when part of continental high voltage DC supergrids also fed by wind electricity balanced using hydro from colder and windier regions.

Google expands plan to run own internet

copsewood
Boffin

DDOS firewall

Google already have much more traffic and routing capacity than any likely DDOSer can throw at them. True, they might not want the largest likely DDOS to be thrown at the pair of resolver IP addresses directly. But this wouldn't happen. All Google would have to do would be to identify originating abusive addresses and address blocks dynamically and block these from coming into the Google network at their border routers. This would be more generally disruptive for customers of ISPs not implementing RFC2827, but having customer pressure forcing their own ISPs to implement RFC2827 would be a positive outcome.

copsewood
Linux

You don't have to config DNS through your router

Easiest bypass is to configure all your internal machines to use static IPs in the range supported by the router typically 192.168.1/24 so they don't get DNS addresses through DHCP. Then get them to point to your chosen DNS resolver directly. Even better find an open source firmware compatible with the Murdoch owned router (if there is one) which doesn't brick or disconnect you.

copsewood
Boffin

Many DNSs

All the alternative generic DNS offerings so far do is provide an alternative _resolver_ service to the alternatives provided by multiple ISPs. Many small to large organisations and some researchers run their own resolvers too, though having a reliable always on server helps. What none of these alternatives have attempted so far is any redefinition of who runs all the much greater number of DNS _content_ servers or to change top level domains. The root domain (i.e. list of top level domains including .uk and .com and the addresses of authoritative content servers for TLDs) could also have multiple copies - it's a small file and easily obtained, and it changes infrequently. However, with a few exceptions anyone offering an alternative generic DNS resolving to different TLD or other content from everyone else would be abandoned soon by their users.

Having choice between many DNS resolving services is a good thing, because this competition will prevent legitimate offerings from going bad.

A scenario where a complete alternative DNS infrastructure might work would be in respect of a narrow class of security application - e.g. for a grassroots financial network comprising Building Societies, Credit Unions and community currencies. This could use DNSEC from the start, with those wanting their own domains resolved having to provide better credentials in order to get zone signing keys signed than your average blackmailer, 419er, phisher or identity theft artist could arrange. All your non financial applications would continue to use the public DNS through whichever resolver service you prefer and the finance applications you use that don't expose you to private banks or other assorted crooks could be preconfigured to use the non-profit financial community DNS.

Gov confirms plans for Sky box in charge of your house

copsewood
Welcome

Client side choice perhaps ?

If the smart meter delivers information about spot electricity prices to the smart meter, it will be the equipment programmed by the consumer that decides when to switch on and off based on electricity spot price changes.

Very happy to program my dishwasher, heatpump and washing machine to buy wind leccy when the price falls below points I set in advance. This isn't remote control, it's how an efficient market operates.

Nissan super-battery to 'double' e-car range

copsewood
Grenade

stability ?

Having seen some of the nastier laptop fires when much smaller high energy density batteries go wrong, I hate to think what one of these babies blowing will look like or do. Just hope they find a way of containing the resulting fire or explosion.

Climate change hackers leave breadcrumb trail

copsewood

who do you trust more ?

Various comments on this thread tend to assume that the individual or group which hacked into the CRU system and leaked data didn't insert anything of their own or carry out any modifications of this data. If asked whether to trust a group of climate scientists operating in a typically shambolic research environment (I've provided IT support in a few) or those who illegally hack their systems (based on undisclosed funding and agenda) it's fairly obvious which group I'd trust first and which second.

Dell sows 'experimental' Chrome OS for Mini netbooks

copsewood

Bleeding edge

This seems like a very early technology preview for those who really need to know, are not worried that most things are broken and positively want to help debug it.

LHC smashes Tevatron record: Humanity enters the unknown

copsewood
Joke

Particle experiment and the Big Bang

It's an amusing idea that the Big Bang from whence we all came was a particle accellerator experiment that went wrong.

McKinnon family 'devastated' by Home Sec's latest knock-back

copsewood
Stop

@AC 12:38 GMT - justice delayed is justice denied

I agree that you don't "understand this thing at all really".

"So it's okay if I break into your house and have a look around, as long as I don't damage anything?"

I agree that this isn't OK, and this would be a worse kind of offence than poking around in an unsecured PC with nothing of importance on it. That said, even the more serious offence you suggest in comparison probably would not justify extradition, especially if appropriate justice could be done more quickly without extradition being required.

"I don't understand this whole thing at all, really. He broke into Pentagon computers - what does he expect?"

A Pentagon or NASA computer used for highly sensitive purposes, or one used to play games in the visitor canteen ? The evidence available from both sides strongly implies something closer to the latter than the former, which makes the location of the computer irrelevant.

The point is that extradition should only ever be used for serious crimes. It should never be used for minor offences. This is because the process of taking someone away from their home and trying them in a foreign land by people with a different culture thousands of miles away from friends and family, disproportionately harms the suspect processed in this heavy handed manner.

What Gary did was wrong. But it justifies at best a non custodial sentence. Without the mitigating factors clearly evident, it would justify at worst a very short period inside in order to teach him a lesson. Dragging on extradition proceedings for a substantial fraction of Gary's life prevents him from learning from his wrongdoing and getting on with a life in which he can carry out a responsible job and pay taxes.

This is a clear case of justice delayed being justice denied.

iPhone upgrades - a one-way control-freak street

copsewood
Boffin

GPL3 would make it your phone

Eventually, if enough developers use GPL3 to the point that Apple and others can't afford to maintain their own GPL2 or non copyleft software forks for ever, Apple will have to supply you with the keys to what you imagined was your own little virtual kingdom, because you paid for it and the device that hosts it is physically in your possession. On something that can still be rendered useless by its remote controllers because it is locked into a single network (e.g. as with the XBox gamers) that doesn't help you very much, but OFCOM and other communications regulators are quite interested in opening up competition at the network level.

Chances are the parts of it that control radio frequency use and interference will be kept in a separate and closed module, so phone hackers can't break the communications used by emergency services etc.

'World's largest' BitTorrent tracker Mininova kneecapped

copsewood
Big Brother

legalising it or making file sharing uncrackable ?

This has to be inefficient, because the most efficient way to share files is to make the files globally searchable and for receivers to obtain the packets comprising the file either directly from senders in parallel, e.g as with Bittorrent, or better, using mirrored content servers located within users ISP networks close to the users.

Both efficiencies (global search and short network distances) give those attempting to attack P2P distributors and users the information they need to identify network endpoints. To defeat such attacks, Tor onion routing makes the packets engage in many hops, supposedly along trust paths, though in practice there are too few Tor routers for most people to be able to find a genuinely trustworthy one to connect to in the early stages of Tor implementation, let alone the several trusted nodes needed for a user to become an effective part of a Tor network. Similar problems exist with a distributed search index - operating a distributed hash table over Tor is also going to provide a slow way of finding multiple distributed components of a wanted file. There is another counter incentive greatly reducing likely Tor participation in the sense that someone who would be willing to operate an onion router carrying one kind of technically illegal content e.g. 50 year old music legal in some places but not in others, might reasonably be unwilling unknowingly to carry another kind, e.g. parts of a kiddie porn file.

Hacking Copyright law potentially offers a much better fix and avoids wasting most of the available network bandwidth through multi hop routing which doesn't follow network efficiency but which does follow personal relationship trust regardless of geography. The Swedish Pirate Party seem to be taking the first steps in hacking this law, so that unlimited Copyright doesn't trample over human rights to personal privacy and freedom of communications.

It is ultimately in the interests of content owners not to oppress their users and to obtain a reward based on a fair share of the value of the extra network traffic generated, taken from those charging consumers for this traffic. This value will be partly based upon the convenience of end users not to have to maintain their own media collections, because the media they want is downloadable on demand in exchange for a few percent on the cost of the Internet connection.

Facebook swipes user's vanity URL

copsewood
Badgers

Path of least resistance

Facebook are obliged by their shareholders to minimise costs and maximise revenue. That means they will almost never have time to act fairly - all they will do in this kind of situation is take the path that seems likely to be least expensive at the time, in other words take action in favour of the side to any dispute that seems most likely to threaten a more costly (to Facebook) lawsuit.

What those who don't like this fact need isn't yet another web 2.0 single monopoly site whose users attention or content is sold to advertisers. Much better will be a social networking protocol for which anyone can implement and operate a client or server with some means selectively and optionally to share content between users and servers where prior knowledge and trust relationships exist. That is why so called web 2.0 is a regression - it's really web 0.5.

UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files

copsewood
Big Brother

@AC13:52 GMT

"I'm asking how YOU propose to deal with the very real problem of people encrypting child porn / terrorist plans in the modern world. What's the solution? Ask them nicely, then give up if they say no?"

Is the reason you use envelopes on snail mail because you have something to hide or is this because privacy is the normal default ? Police work takes effort and time and costs something, and isn't successful in every case. The fact that this could make some police work cheaper doesn't justify compulsory use of postcards instead of envelopes. The same applies to cryptography and compulsory key disclosure. What price innocent people being locked up as with the Birmingham 6 and the Guildford 4 ? Did these innocent people being locked up result in IRA terrorism being reduced or did these miscarriages instead result, as many including myself believed, in IRA terrorism being increased ?

Locking a genuine peado or terrorist up over a refusal to disclose a key when there is no other evidence will make them appear to be taking the principled stand of a privacy martyr, which also won't help the cause of justice against peadophilia or terrorism. If there is other evidence it should be up to the prosecuting authorities to investigate it properly in order to be able to convince a judge and jury, rather than having to rely on a travesty of a law which presumes guilt by requiring an individual to self incriminate. If we need this aspect of the RIPA in order to defeat terrorism then this cause is lost, because the terrorists have decided what kind of police state we are going to become.

copsewood
Big Brother

thoughtcrime and evidence obtained through torture

I wrote to my MP (Bob Ainsworth) while the RIPA was being debated, protesting that this kind of injustice would inevitably result from it: i.e. otherwise innocent people being jailed because they refuse to disclose cryptography keys. I can't imagine anything more closely resembling the idea of thoughtcrime as described in George Orwell's '1984', in which any resistance to the total ownership and control by the state over the state of an individual's mind and thoughts was considered criminal.

The reason the US constitution's 5th ammendement prevents the US authorities from demanding an individual's self incrimination:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Self-incrimination

Is because self-incriminatory evidence was invariably obtained through the use of torture. The threat of imprisonment against an otherwise innocent person is a form of mental torture, and the loss of mental health by JLC as a consequence of his wrongful imprisonment is further evidence that this aspect of the RIPA is a form of torture, referred to by cryptographers as "rubber hose cryptanalysis":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis

IE bug leaks private details from 50m PDF files

copsewood
Alert

Metadata is a significant security issue

As suggested in another comment, a pathname including directory structure might expose some of the thinking behind the creation of a file. But I think the potential issue of metadata leaking unintended information is much wider than this narrow example.

Consider how the origins of the claimed "weapons of mass destruction" dossier were exposed. This was through old edit data in a plagiarised Word document which hadn't been cleaned prior to publication. This exposed the claimed legal justification for going to war against Iraq as shoddy research. We once gained a negotiating advantage against a PC supplier when purchasing, when they sent us a quote document which showed the same makes and models having been quoted to another purchaser at a lower price in a previous version of the Word document, also exposed using the strings program on Linux. We got the price down by asking if they were willing to give us the same price as they offered this other customer - though we never told them how we found out.

People are now getting cameras with GPS included, which is exposing not just the date, time and make and model of camera used when a photo is taken, but also the geographical coordinates where the photo was taken. In most cases publishing metadata unwittingly is equivalent to "exposing a bit more than intended on a saturday night". But in a few cases this will lead to significant and adverse consequences.

Crypto pioneer and security chief exits Sun

copsewood

Diffie Hellman protocol

I've been teaching this protocol to students for a few years without knowing who he is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie-Hellman_key_exchange

Facebook revises privacy policy

copsewood
Badgers

Web 0.5

Web 0.5 because Web 2.0, however much it "enriches" the user interface, is a regression in other respects. Web 1.0 didn't have so much monopoly or central control over how data painstakingly provided or presented by millions of users is sold on to advertisers or represented in future.

Intel offers non-Jewish Saturday workforce in Israel plant row

copsewood
Jobs Halo

A heretic who doesn't worship Mammon ?

What on earth would the world come to if the market god didn't enjoy our absolute faith and respect to the point where all other values have to give way before it ? Horror of horrors, people would be able to spend the occasional day chilling out with family or friends and honoring what they really care about, rather than buying and selling 7 days a week in slavery to Mammon, who is clearly the god of the modern age. How disgustingly unprofitable ! Imagine how much this takes away from shareholder profits !

In practice you can't close a modern chip factory down completely one day a week and you do need emergency services and a few shops open, so some compromises are needed. But it's still not a bad idea if people can chill out together on a day and respect in community what they really care about (e.g. through Church, Synagogue, Mosque or Secular Hall) on the day most people don't have to work. In different places with different traditions this will be Friday, Saturday or Sunday respectively, depending upon what most people there want.

Massive net surveillance programme on schedule

copsewood
Big Brother

Easy enough to opt out

Just learn use of VPNs and how to administrate a hosted virtual machine server in a jurisdiction whose privacy laws you agree with, so that all your net traffic appears to originate and terminate there. They'll still be able to do some traffic analysis on the encrypted VPN tunnel, but sending some chaff using it should negate most of the information obtainable, at greater expense from that source. The justification for doing all this is similar to using letters instead of postcards for ordinary mail, or having ordinary mail sent or received remotely, and repackaged into larger and more secure parcels for secure local delivery using a trusted courier. That is how Bletchley Park handled snail mail during WW2. This doesn't defeat expensive attacks, e.g. steaming open your letters at the distant post office or monitoring electromagnetic emissions outside your premises using a radio car, but it does make it less likely your government will spy upon you unless they have somewhat better reason to. Nowadays we can all use the same techniques the spooks developed to make it a bit more expensive for the spooks to spy on us, to encourage them to concentrate on organised crime and genuine terrorists, rather than on ordinary law abiding citizens.

High-tech 'blade runner' legs better than real ones - profs

copsewood
Welcome

Bicycles are faster than prosthetic legs

In a sense a bicycle is just another kind of prothetic pair of legs. But cycling is a different, albeit faster athletic sport. The fact I could still fairly easily beat a world leading runner over 1500 metres using my own muscles applied more efficiently through the use of bicycle does not make me into an olympic athlete alas. So I think that blade running, cycling and conventional running on your own 2 feet will have to be classified as entirely different events.

Wikipedia sued for publishing convicted murderer's name

copsewood
Welcome

Wikipedia, organisation and offices

An organisation that doesn't want to abide by the laws of a country shouldn't locate offices and provide employment there. Then someone living in Germany would have to sue Wikipedia based on law where Wikipedia is based; if Wikipedia have no Germany office there is nowhere to serve the papers within the jurisdiction of German law. Perhaps if Wikipedia wants a German language edition they can license the rights to the name to a local organisation which would set site policy based on law within the German speaking country where they operate,e.g. Austria or Switzerland. If the German language edition organisation isn't responsible for the English language Wikipedia they can't be sued over the publication policies of another organisation which grants them a trademark license.

This all suggests to me that Wikipedia shouldn't be a single organisation.

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