Posts by James 100

PM demands media clean-up, not keen on doing much himself

Missing the point

Leveson seems to have missed the main point: this was not a failing of the law, but a failing of law *enforcement*. Some reporters broke the law; the police knew about it, but did nothing. Some police broke the law, too, selling information to reporters - of course, they got away with that completely.

Forget 'judicial inquiry': we should have had a criminal investigation of the journalists *and police* involved, leading to prosecutions and sackings of everyone caught - press or not.

One proposal I do like, though, is the introduction of whistleblower/ethical protection, that journalists should be free to refuse an assignment or instruction on ethical grounds. Why limit that to journalists, though? A few professions already have it to some extent, but it should be much more widespread: system administrators instructed to violate a user's privacy, for example. (Yes, there are some laws which *forbid* sysadmins from doing some things, but is there enough protection in place for us to refuse to do things we believe to be illegal and/or morally wrong?)

Microsoft halves Surface RT production orders - report

The RT mistake

Making the ARM version crippled (no actual Windows applications - except Microsoft's own, of course) seemed a dumb move. With a proper Windows port, an ARM-powered lightweight Windows machine might have some appeal for me; with just "RT", forget it.

As for 'Surface Pro' ... an expensive thin laptop with a touchscreen and removable/optional keyboard? Strip the "expensive" from that, it might fly, but when I can get an i5 laptop with 4 Gb for half the price (£400), the Surface would have to bring something *major* to the table. OK, higher screen resolution ... I'd pay extra for that ... thinner/lighter, too ... but not for that kind of price.

Prisoner found with phone + charger in anal cavity

Re: Call Prices

"Execution never stopped killers"

It's actually very effective at that: very few killers commit further murders after being executed... I take it you mean the threat of execution doesn't prevent killers from committing the crime in the first place? Statistical studies of the last decade tend to conclude exactly the opposite, that there is indeed a noticeable deterrent effect. It fits with common sense as well - surely the more severe the punishment, the more likely people are to balk at risking it?

(In fact, a distant relative of mine, John 'Babbacombe' Lee, was hanged - unsuccessfully, of course - no less than three times, back in the 19th century; after the third attempt failed, it was commuted to life imprisonment, so he eventually he emigrated to the US and died there in 1945 - without being convicted of any further murders, either, so executing him clearly taught him a lesson too!)

Scientists build largest ever computerized brain

Better platform needed

Never mind software, to scale it would need an (analogue) ASIC: a mix of op-amps and analogue sample/hold buffers presumably. A thousand transistors per neuron, a billion transistors per chip (lower than production chips right now) and you'd need a hundred thousand-chip array to match a human brain's complexity ... somewhere in the hundred-million mark for cost? Beyond any plausible research grant, but might just about happen as a major government research project.

Give it a couple of years, a hundred billion transistor chip, I can imagine that actually being feasible.

Or, of course, you go the biological route: grow a few hundred million neurons in a little vat of nutrient, see what happens... There have already been some small experiments like this with insects, haven't there?

AWS cloud growing three times as fast as dot-comming Amazon

Re: Here comes the Walmart of IT

That's the difference between "IT" - which covers exciting stuff like making sure the printers are full of toner, swapping backup tapes, resetting forgotten passwords: the stuff that gets automated away to nothing anyway as time goes on - and the actual computing industry. S3 stops me needing to run fsck or configure RAID arrays: it means when I write and deploy a web application I don't need to think about configuring storage hardware, it certainly doesn't replace the need to write the software in the first place!

Any job where the main requirement appears to be possession of opposable thumbs is likely to go that way, if it hasn't already, whether it's slicing up dead animal or sticking plastic packages in slots on electronic devices: if people to do the job cost much more than minimum wage, the job would be automated away entirely! Writing software, designing circuits or chips? That's another kettle of fish entirely (OK, there's software out there clearly written by people whose only qualification for the job was having digits to operate a keyboard with, but I like to think Darwin will take care of them eventually...)

Data cop slap for Brit text pests

A large part of it is the greater prevalence of premium rate numbers - one comment already mentions the little trick of "reply STOP to stop these texts", where sending them a reply costs you £1.50, almost all of that going to the spammer.

I don't get *many* - a few weeks since my last one I think - but they are irritating. It's the regular landline spam that really bugs me, though, mostly because it's much more intrusive than a text. Despite being TPS registered, I get random tools trying to peddle their blasted solar panels, insisting that because it's government-subsidised they are exempt from the TPS prohibition on marketing calls...

A ban on phone ownership/use in the first instance, with a stiff jail sentence for violations or repeat offenders, would fix it. The VoIP "virus" scammers might be beyond range of the court, but disconnecting the offending source networks from the UK phone networks should make them much more pro-active about disconnecting the scammers from their network instead.

Leveson tells media to set up independent regulator or bow to Ofcom

The new West Lothian Question

One detail many seem to have missed is that press regulation is a matter devolved to the Scottish government - meaning whatever law Westminster might pass for England, Scotland will not be covered. Salmond had already rejected the idea of statutory regulation, even if Westminster did impose that south of the border; with the report published, he seems to endorse the compromise approach - but would the Scottish ombudsman body be the same one as England's? (Remember, during the Ryan Giggs gagging mess last year, the English gagging order only prohibited those south of the border from talking about him - so the Sunday Herald was free to publish the story.)

The concept seems a bizarre compromise to me: a "voluntary" regulatory body under the oversight of Ofcom, it says ... but opt out of that and you get regulated by Ofcom instead. Avoid government regulation - by involving the government regulator!

"Clearing" the police - the same police who took bribes and provided the press with illegal information - was a rather bizarre contortion too. Shouldn't they, of all people, be expected to obey the law?! (Those were plain old crimes, though: no need for an "inquiry", just a proper investigation and prosecution.)

ZTE make benefit glorious world's tiniest 4G dongle

"ZTE make benefit glorious world's tiniest 4G dongle

Available in Kazakhstan now. Is very nice!"

This explains a lot about the grammar in Reg articles lately ...

Virgin Media vid misery blamed on unnamed peering network

I gave up on Virgin a few months ago (when my 100 Mbps upgrade was, I think, a year overdue on the original schedule?). Despite the so-called "50 Mbps" connection, online video tended to involve significant buffering, games had sever lag - and perhaps most interesting of all, uploading content over SCP to my own colocated servers was surprisingly slow - and consistently so, too. The server had plenty of bandwidth to spare (I could upload much, much faster to it at any time of day from any other ISP), smelling very strongly of some sort of traffic throttling.

Interesting that de-peering Atrato from LINX appeared to fix the problem; Virgin say they were peering with Atrato at both LINX and AMS-IX, although Atrato's main service offering is transit between the two ... forwarding loop between the two?

Microsoft v Google judge could shape the world in new patent punchup

Re: Fair and reasonable.

"And you'll never be asked or allowed to join a standard-setting body every again."

That should be the core sanction. If the h.264, 3G, LTE etc bodies had some sort of patent defence written in - so if company X comes along saying "ha, I have a patent you need for 3G which isn't in your pool, give me $345bn or you can't use 3G", the reply would be "ok, but you can't use 3G, GPRS, GSM or USB either. See you in bankruptcy court."

Ironically, though, that would be effective against anyone *but* a pure patent troll. Any handset manufacturer would have to join the patent pool, play nicely and accept their fair share of the standard body's royalties - but if an "outside" company somehow got hold of an essential patent but didn't need to use it themselves, they could still hold others to ransom.

Brit retailers tell Amazon and Google to pay their taxes

Re: Morally?

Sadly, this one, in multiple ways: 'facilities time' (government employees getting a government salary yet actually working for the union not the government, part or even all of the time), 'modernisation funds', the government collecting union dues free of charge for the union rather than making them do it themselves...

It's being scaled back slightly at the moment, but still widespread.

Apple versus Samsung: everything infringes everything

My ruling

Samsung, you have infringed Apple patents and owe them a kajillion dollars. Apple, you've infringed Samsung's and owe them a kajillion dollars too. Now, shut up, go away, pay your lawyers lots of money and get back to designing phones and tablets.

I think I can actually understand some of Jobs's ire towards Google in particular - with Schmidt on Apple's board and the two companies working so closely together early on (YouTube, Google Maps etc didn't get on the iPhone by accident!), only to have Google invest a fortune in developing a rival OS just to give it away to Apple's competitors does seem rather disingenuous. Pretty much what you'd expect from Microsoft usually, in fact...

Flash is dead ... but where are the tiers?

Re: The simple, elegant solution...

That makes a lot of sense in fact ... you could use the cheapest (i.e. lowest write-frequency) TLC Flash, since it's only getting written once each power failure; save a fair bit over the "average" write time, both by pre-erasing the whole device ready for the next dump and then by writing entire device sectors at a time. No need for fancy wear-levelling - the wear will be completely uniform anyway, with each sector getting a single write each power failure...

I'm sure I've seen devices going in this direction in the past - pure RAM disks on PCI(e) cards with an external PSU to keep the contents alive when the machine is off. A tiny niche market due to cost, of course, but that will change in time.

ZFS has had a Flash cache 'tier' of sorts (L2ARC) for a while, and even Microsoft's ReadyBoost could be argued as being a move in that direction. Given the price differential, do you really need to *move* data between tiers rather than accept the slight overhead of duplication for simplicity's sake? If you're paying through the nose for a few Tb of Flash cache, do you really mind having a few extra Tb of cheap spinning rust behind it? I'd prefer the robustness of "if the Flash caching device dies, the data's still safe, it just gets a bit slower without the caching".

Restaurateur jailed for customer sex profile revenge plan

Taking criticism badly

I once posted a negative review of a local Mexican restaurant (we'd been regular customers; my brother had an ulcer and wanted something non-spicy, so ordered his regular order "extra-mild" - it arrived with a pile of sliced chili pepper on top!). Strangely, the next review posted had the same name on it as the reply to our email complaint to the manager, only he didn't sign the review "customer service manager"...

This one really takes the biscuit, but why can't these people just accept they screwed up and try to improve? It's not as if the complaint was subjective, like being "too spicy", "too salty" - but "no olives" and it has a load of olives in, it's as clear-cut as it gets!

RIM shares jump as analyst decides it isn't as dead as he thought

Re: So...

"It means that your company internal emails stay private, even when piped through to company mobiles. The emails are encrypted by the BES and decrypted only once they've arrived on the mobile. Neither BlackBerry, governments or ISPs can read it as only your company knows the key (or at least that's the idea). The Indian government in particular got very irritated and irrational about this..."

SSL delivers precisely the same: your server holds a copy, your phone stores a copy (encrypted, on anything recent including iPhones) and everything passing between the two is encrypted. My ISP can't read my mail as it comes from my (non-ISP) mail server to my machines - nor can the government.

"Compare that with Gmail and Apple where, AFAIK, email is encrypted for transmission across the internet but is stored in the clear on Google and Apple's servers"

It's stored in the clear (or at least recoverably) on whatever server you use, including the Exchange systems BES talks to. If you put your server in the US - whether it's Google's Gmail server, Apple's iCloud or indeed something you wrote yourself in COBOL - their law enforcement can turn up with a warrant and seize the server and contents. They can do that if you use BES to access your Exchange mailstore too.

Using Android or an iPhone does not give Apple or Google any more control over your mail than RIM have if you use a BlackBerry: in every case, your server holds the mail, it goes over the Net encrypted. BES doesn't offer anything special in this respect at all.

Judge to Apple: You WILL tell Samsung what you got from HTC

Re: Attorney's eyes only = "samsung"

It is a bit odd: Samsung's *lawyers* (who are apparently from an outside firm, not Samsung employees) will get to see the figures, but not show them to their client. If they can't show the figures to the client, how can they use the information for anything?

If HTC are paying as much as Apple claim Samsung should, it might fatally weaken the case - at which point, the lawyers will say "sorry Samsung, we lost because of stuff we're not allowed to explain"? If it's much less, they say "well, Samsung, we've got a really strong case for knocking the price down from $1bn to a number we're not allowed to tell you"? Later, "great news! Instead of $1bn, you just have to pay them a secret amount of money you'll never know! Just give us a blank cheque and we'll fill in the secret amount for you later..."

The whole system needs an overhaul, but in the current context I suppose how much HTC paid for the patents is very relevant to the legal question of how much Samsung should pay for them - letting Samsung's lawyer see them, but not Samsung themselves, is a bit odd but probably the best they can do.

Human Rights Watch proposes new laws of robotics

Re: @tkioz

One that sticks in my memory is one character, Bigman, breaking out of jail by putting a weapon to his head, telling the robot that unless he's released he'll kill himself. "May not allow a human to come to harm through inaction" - so the robot released him to prevent the suicide. So much for automated security!

I'd say the rules are fine as they are, though. More than half a century ago it was illegal to shoot civilians with rifle bullets; it's just as illegal to shoot them with guided missiles now, and half a century from now it'll be illegal to shoot them with interplanetary plasma warheads - do we really need new laws, or just compliance with the existing ones? (Of course mistakes and crimes both happen, too - but new laws rarely help prevent either.)

Legally, is unleashing a psycho-killbot on somebody any different from planting a landmine on their doorstep or indeed just shooting them yourself? Or, if it's accidentally unleashed, is causing somebody's death through accidentally releasing a psycho-killbot any different from accidentally releasing toxic gas or a runaway train that kills them?

Boffins biff over ‘twisted radio’

Re: Actually

The 56k limit was imposed by the digital-analogue conversion at the exchange (8 kHz sampling at 8 bits, with one bit being 'robbed' for other purposes leaving 56 kbit/sec). You can indeed transfer much more data down the analogue bit of the line, but that'll all be lost when it's converted to digital by the exchange - indeed, that's exactly what ADSL and VDSL do, adding much better equipment at the exchange to recover multiple megabits a second of cleverly-modulated data the PSTN exchange can't handle.

Netscape founder pays off MASSIVE tax bill with Facebook shares

Re: Tax Bills

The ones I feel sorry for are those who get caught in tax traps - I seem to remember some poor sods in the UK who received a "bonus" of shares, which then tanked - leaving them with a tax bill which actually exceeded the value of the shares they'd received! Painful. (I think the idea was for it to be a perk: get given shares at £10, sell later at £20, but only pay the income tax on the £10 you were given them at ... fine until they crash to £1 but still cost you £2+ each in tax...)

Google to UN: Internet FREEDOM IS FREE, and must remain so

Paying for links to the peering point

The system has worked fine for years: ISPs agree on a set of peering points, I pay for the connection from me to those points, you pay for the connection from you to them. We split the cost of the points themselves. It doesn't matter whether you're a "server" or "client": you just pay for the size of pipe you want. Of course it's more expensive if you're further off the beaten track, so getting a 100Mbps link right in the middle of a London datacentre is much cheaper than getting one to my home in Scotland.

The shift to charging "server" users more so they subsidise "client" ones is a betrayal of the equality that marked the Net from the outset, as well as plain old greed on the ISP's part. Now, if other countries want to demand bribes from the likes of Google, who do you think will end up having to pay that? The users - either through getting squeezed harder with more and more ads, or outright subscription charges.

10 Gigabit Ethernet still too expensive on servers

Re: problem is...

For a small network (20-60 machines?), 10Gb for the server going into one switch, then another 10Gb to the other switches if they're not stackable, would make perfect sense. 1 Gb can be a bottleneck these days: one fast workstation could saturate it, or a network backup, or syncing two servers up, but a well-placed 10Gb link or two could make a big difference without any need for 100Gb anywhere.

Meanwhile, at work, our enterprisey IT department wanted four figures for a single GbE port ... having just rolled out FE everywhere, they said it would mean putting in an all-gigabit access switch specially, which would then need its own fibre links to the aggregation switch too...

British Ruby conference cancelled after diversity row

Boot on other foot?

How many Asian conferences has he complained about not having enough white people presenting?

The only way to select speakers is to take the best X people available - whether they are black, white, straight, gay, whatever. If that means an all white male lineup - or indeed an all Asian female one - so be it. Now, if they'd excluded someone on the basis of gender, race or anything else irrelevant, that would be wrong - as wrong as *including* one on the same grounds, which seems to be what Susser thinks should have happened.

Discrimination: just say no. Maybe boycott any conference Susser supports, just in case.

HP: AUTONOMY 'misrepresented' its value by $5 BILLION, calls in SEC

Doesn't having found then lost (through the fixed term contract ending) another job since Autonomy get you some JSA eligibility again, since you're no longer 'voluntarily' unemployed?

Sounds like a lousy place to work, I hope you find something soon!

As for the overpriced ink emporium, I don't have a lot of sympathy: they seem to be all lawyered up to compensate for their inability to compete any more. Lousy printers that drink ink, plugging Itanic (and shacking NonStop to it when they killed off Alpha to make Intel happy), buying then killing Palm ... all they have going for them lately is some nice budget desktop PCs (got a few at work) - the business line they tried to kill/sell. Do they have a death wish, or just really really lousy management?

Of course, Autonomy WAS worth $5 billion more when HP bought it ... but they of all people should have known, that was before it ran out of ink!

Sacre Bleu! US fingered for Flame attack on Élysée Palace

Re: Reading Unencrypted Emails?

The ability to read them is no surprise of course - otherwise, they'd be encrypted - but the *act* of reading them is a major diplomatic breach: the Embassy's communications are supposed to be completely untouchable by the host country, whether encrypted or not. Admitting to snooping on them should be an enormous 'faux pas', if our government actually cared about sticking up for its treaty rights...

(Not that there would be anything too interesting anyway: I'm sure we aren't naive enough to *rely* on the legal protection for anything really sensitive!)

Telcos react coldly to renewed UK.gov smut-censoring push

Re: Yes

That's the trouble: we already have CleanFeed, using the IWF's watch list. That's OK, we were assured, it only blocks child pornography, and that's illegal, so no need for an opt-out or any safeguards ... then it restricts Wikipedia for a while. Then it starts getting used for copyright enforcement too. How long before it's blocking "extreme" political sites? BNP? Hamas? Animal Liberation Front? Greenpeace? I'm no fan of any of those, but we need to head this filtering off NOW, before we get any further down that slippery slope.

I'd rather enjoy the irony if ISPs were to block access to all the pro-censorship sites, though...

AWS flicks switch for S3-to-Glacier migration

"Define "real time"?"

With S3, I can give you a URL to a file stored there, you can view it straight in your web browser: no separate retrieval step or waiting for a batch process to complete. With Glacier, you ask for the file to be brought back from tape, then it pops up a while later.

I've been using S3 for static web hosting for a while (as have some rather bigger outfits, like Twitter!) - the response times are pretty reasonable, nothing to complain about on that front.

Google seen sniffing over a Dish of mobile spectrum

Given what Google did with the 'block C' spectrum in the US, I would expect Google to invest some money in influencing events - they pushed a "network neutrality" clause into place (prohibiting the winning bidder from locking handsets or restricting the handsets used), then were content to leave the auction knowing the winner would have to do what they wanted anyway.

Maybe they'll chuck a few billion in to help Dish get a service up and running, in exchange for it developing in the direction they want?

The sad thing is, LightSquared were using their loophole to built a network consisting entirely of ground-based "fill in" stations - when what I'd really like to see is a satellite-ground hybrid, with a satellite giving basic "universal" coverage even when out of range of any ground-based towers. (I know the size of antenna and power needed is a pain there, making the Thuraya and Iridium handsets hefty bricks, but still...)

Long-suffering Virgin Media victims see no end to vid PURGATORY

Peddling the "fibre" lie

"Fibre will always be faster"

Yes, I'm sure it would - but Virgin don't offer that, they just lie about the nature of their coaxial copper wire service. (Sadly, rather than correct them, the other operators have decided to join them, calling BT's fibre-to-the-cabinet VDSL offering "fibre" too.) BT are genuinely offering a fibre service - 'FTTP' - at 330 Mbps downstream, in a handful of areas; Virgin aren't, as far as I know.

In theory, Virgin's 8-way bonded EuroDOCSIS 3 could share 400 Mbps downstream and about 200 downstream across that network segment (a street or bigger), while BT's VDSL2 could deliver 100 Mbps in each direction. In reality, on either system you're constrained by the network backbone and peering/transit - which, with Virgin, seems to be a major bottleneck now.

When I was still on Virgin's 50 Mbps service, Sky Anytime took a while to start play, then still sometimes had to stop and rebuffer; the instant I moved to Entanet's VDSL service (sync at about 66 Mbps), on-demand content started in seconds and never stopped to buffer. Now, Virgin have been talking about their 100 (and later 120) Mbps rollout for years now - but if they can't fill up a 50 Mbps pipe, what use is a 100/120 one?!

Easy to use, virus free, secure: Aaah, how I miss my MAINFRAME

RBS problem

The RBS mainframe did exactly what it was told to - perfectly reliably and efficiently. Unfortunately, what it had been told to do was something incredibly stupid which took days to fix.

Now, a more useful rollback/undo mechanism would certainly be useful in that particular piece of software, but that's a fault of the programmer and the operator, not the technology itself: 'delete all pending transactions' would have been just as problematic if it had been ordered on a big Oracle/Solaris cluster or any other platform.

It does make me nostalgic, seeing the efficiency achieved in those days; the first 'big' system I was sysadmin for had 384 Mb of RAM and a pair of 167 MHz processors, servicing many dozens of active users plus some heavy number crunching - substantially less power than almost anything you can play Angry Birds on these days!

I share the concern someone mentioned about the ultra-locked-down 'standard' central deployments, though. All too easy for lazy jobsworths in the middle to obstruct and impede the userbase, rather than delivering a decent service like they should! (Particularly bad in a university: when one department's users need big screens, heavy duty graphics cards and a dozen CAD packages, while another just browses Westlaw and other websites, can one size ever really fit all? Should it try?)

Power to the people - if you can find a spare socket

Office wiring

Working for a university spinoff, I had to get a new office fitted out - as the first occupants, we had walls, a window, an extractor fan and overhead lights, nothing more. The university's own electricians quoted about a grand to put sockets along the two long walls; a local contractor charged about the same but included a dozen runs of Cat5e at the same time. (Three-part conduit.) Result: each desk's got a pair of proper 13A sockets nearby - not surge protected, because that would add stupid amounts to the cost - with a surge-protected 4 or 6 way strip plugged in to power computers, monitors, phones and whatever else needs some electrons to feed on.

Thomas: earth is very important for anything with any exposed metal - i.e. any desktop PC, among other things - and a fuse means a short-circuit causes a powered-off device instead of an electrical fire. When it comes to safety features, I'd rather have my equipment "vastly over-specified" than get electrocuted, TYVM.

Phone users favour Wi-Fi for dataslurp

No surprise there

For one thing, I find an increasing number of places I go to have free WiFi - even if I had a fully unlimited data plan, for the same of a few finger-taps I'd want that extra speed.

I went out for dinner tonight - free WiFi in the restaurant. Meet my brother for coffee a few times a month - free WiFi there too (in fact a choice, being a shopping centre: the coffee shop has its own, the O2 store downstairs offers another). Even the train home from work claimed to have free WiFi, though not actually working yet - apparently the early stages of some sort of pilot service.

At home and work of course I have WiFi anyway; these days, if I am out sitting down anywhere (when I'm most likely to do any non-trivial downloading) there's probably a 50-50 chance I'll have free WiFi: 3g is only needed to cover the other half of venues, plus the time in transit between them. Why pay through the nose for 4G when you can get the use of decent broadband speeds via WiFi for free anyway?!

Lawyer sues Microsoft rather than slot an SD card into his Surface

If I were MS, I'd probably have marketed them as 16 and 48 Gb (knowing 16 of the 32/64 Gb would be pre-eaten) ... but this guy really doesn't have a leg to stand on: even back when desktop machines came with drives measured in megabytes, a chunk of that would be used for the operating system and applications.

I like the solution of wiping his tablet's storage entirely, then saying "there you go, all 32 Gb is free now... good luck making any use of it" though. (Like the old BOFH quote: 'you now have 10Mb free in your home directory.' 'You mean you've doubled my 10Mb quota?' 'No, your 10Mb home directory now has 10 Mb free.')

When GiffGaff falls over, is it even news any more?

Re: They buy it

The problem is, the "unlimited" (as long as it's not tethered, on too large a screen, in a non-phone-call-capable device, wrong phase of the moon...) offering is a short-sighted and damaging loss-leader. They're paying O2 by the megabyte, so anyone using much over a gigabyte each month on those plans is losing GG money. I like the idea of unlimited tariffs, but when it's structured this way it's just not sustainable.

They delayed the problem a bit by slapping the 1Gb limit on £10 - but I can't imagine the £12 "unlimited" loss-leader holding up for long, particularly since most of the users can happily stay on £10: the £12 figures will look even worse as it collects only the heaviest of the £10 bag's users.

Personally, Three's £6.90 tariff is a much better deal: I don't tether or do serious downloading on my mobile handset - I have a 3G tablet, WiFi at home and work, so 500 Mb on the phone is plenty. (A £5 'gigabag' gets me that data, but forces me onto PAYG rates for calls+texts.) The lousy reliability record lately is pretty much the last straw - and of course their screwed up "adult content filter" irritated me severely for the day or two it took them to get it disabled on my account after imposing it without my consent.

FOlA judges: Secret 28 who made the BBC Green will not be named

Re: TV licences aren't exactly compulsory.

"as I can see, the BBC consulted with a group of experts for purposes of producing journalistic TV show"

That's the whole problem - it wasn't about a TV show, it was about changing their interpretation of their statutory obligations. If they'd interviewed, for example, 28 people in Northern Ireland anonymously to get an insight into life in times of terrorist violence, fair enough, or they had a whistleblower telling them about MPs bogus expenses claims - THAT is what the exemption is supposed to be for.

Moreover, the BBC said it was based on "scientists" ... now they're back-tracking on that and admitting that the 28 actually included (unnamed) political activists and others, but refusing to be more specific. Were there any actual scientists, or just pressure group representatives? Shouldn't we know, before billions of pounds of our money get spent on it?

With private companies, we have the option of switching to an alternative supplier: if I felt Tesco were being dodgy, I could buy my shopping in Asda instead. With public entities like the NHS, I don't have that option, but it's accountable through the ballot box instead. The BBC, alone, seems to think it should be exempt from *both* safeguards, accountable neither to its customers in a free market nor to our elected representatives like everything else from the Post Office to the NHS. Why should it get such special treatment?

A bitter spill to swallow, or 'how to smeg up your keyboard'

My brother gave his Lenovo laptop a generous portion of coffee a few years ago. Rinsing didn't help much; I think by the time he got it to me, I think the damage was done.

The real struggle was trying to get a replacement. Lenovo said "talk to IBM" (who were as baffled as me by that suggestion: the model in question dated from long after IBM's sale of the whole product line). A few days of phone tag around different bits of Lenovo got me nowhere: apparently, "replacement parts" are concepts they don't quite grok outside warranty repairs.

Eventually, through eBay I found a guy in China selling various bits of Lenovo kit, including keyboards. US rather than UK layout, but that didn't bother my brother, having lived in the US for a few years earlier. Not a bad price for it, either. (The vendor said he could probably have sourced a UK layout if I'd wanted, but it wasn't worth the wait.)

Top IT bods bail out of new Universal Credit online dole system

Keep It Simple?

The government seems to have a great love of massive, big-bang projects which try to invent their own wheel and do everything in one monolithic fiasco - then they act surprised when it fails like the previous dozen attempts did.

One day, they might adapt and build modular components that exchange data sensibly - then they can build, test and upgrade components in manageable chunks ... unless maybe those in charge get nice post-screwup jobs out of screwing up at enormous cost to us? Nah, that couldn't happen, surely...

Conroy says filter demise a win for community consultation

Slippery slope

The problem is this does not "ban" it - as you say, it's already illegal - but sets a precedent and puts in place a mechanism for *filtering* it.

"We only use the filter to block child pornography - that's ok, because the stuff's already illegal anyway, right?"

"Oh, we'll be using it to block pirated software, too, because that's illegal."

"This site's making adult content available to users without a DNA sample and triple proof of ID, and that's illegal now, so we'll block it too."

As soon as the government is able to filter *some* bits of the Internet, you cross the line - moving the debate from "should the government be allowed to control your private communications?" (Hell no!) to "which of your private communications is the government allowed to block?". In the UK, we've already reached the 2nd step above, with prudish Luddite MPs already demanding that we move to step 3. With hindsight, CleanFeed should have been fought off vigorously right at the outset, since it acted as the Trojan Horse for sneaking censorship into our ISPs to begin with.

Apple seeks cooling fan patent for iPhone, iPad

Re: Cooling

That sounds sensible - the time you would most need the fan, surely, is when *charging* the battery? In particular, faster charging means more heat - or, from the other direction, more effective cooling of the battery during charging would mean you could charge it faster.

I don't think this is where Apple are heading with this patent, but imagine a charging dock with a small cooling fan. Instead of the 2.5 or 5 W (USB at 5V, standard 500mA or 'high power' 1A) we see now, have the dock ram in 25W and a cooling (filtered, dust-free) flow of air to stop the battery cooking while you do it.

The poster earlier might have a point about using this not as a fan but as a pump, shifting cooling fluid around inside the case to dissipate heat better. With smaller and smaller CPU/GPU cores, we're getting heat packed into increasingly tiny spaces: some sort of heat pump or other mechanism might be needed soon to stop the core nuking itself just because the heat can't be moved away fast enough.

BBC in secret trial to see if you care about thing you plainly don't

"Most homes have more than one radio in different places."

Really? Mine has ... zero, unless you count the one fitted to the car. I can't even remember the last time I listened to actual radio (as opposed to online audio streams) ... but I'm pretty sure it would be in the car, needing to check traffic news. As for DAB: never tried it, never really wanted to beyond the standard geek curiosity about new tech.

Glad to hear the BBC getting rid of legacy budget-drains, though, and hopefully freeing up spectrum for better applications in the process.

Intel to slip future Xeon E7s, Itaniums into common socket

Converging, or shoe-horning?

My inner cynic suggests this is more a case of tweaking the Itanium chips to fit into a Xeon board so Intel don't have to keep cranking out Itanium-specific components any more, just the chips themselves.

The "core-out" design, memory controllers and other bits are essentially borrowed from the Xeon as well: just how much new design effort is Intel putting into Itanium at this point - and how much of that is the result of HP pressure, rather than a real business case for doing so?

On the other hand, will the commonality cut both ways - so it will be easier for HP to put Xeons in their future Integrity kit instead of Itaniums? (The software's already done one architecture switch, from Alpha to Itanium, so another wouldn't be a huge shock.)

Gaping hole in Google service exposes thousands to ID theft

Not just insurance

My employer offered a local discount card through their online store system, and I bought one. The final stage said "you have now been logged out; to view your receipt, go to http://store.example.ac.uk/receipt?id=123". Wait ... if I was logged out, how could that URL authenticate me?

Sure enough, changing the 123 yielded the details of other customers: what they bought, how they paid, delivery address etc. Whoops. I contacted the internal person in charge, who said "oops ... that's hosted by an outside contractor, we will go and shout at them now". To be fair, they did get it fixed when I pointed it out, but it's alarming a fault that obvious existed in the first place!

Egypt takes hard line on internet pr0n, calls for total ban

Not just over there, sadly

Could we help them in their scheme by donating Claire Perry MP, who wants to inflict the same prudish nonsense on us in the UK through the Department of Education, which has suddenly decided it somehow has authority over the Internet?

I hate busybodies like this whatever their motivation and nationality - we need an international law version of the US First Amendment prohibiting this nonsense. Like the famous Star Trek misquote says, "censors indicate no intelligent life"...

Bradley Manning submits partially-guilty plea in WikiLeaks case

Re: A crucial bit missing.

Presumably death would be the *maximum* sentence - the plea-bargain would involve admitting some of it in exchange for something rather less permanent, like 10 years in prison. Admitting he revealed information he wasn't allowed to, for example, but denying that he did so in order to help 'the enemy', making the charge and sentence less severe. "Yes, I pushed him down stairs, but I didn't mean to break his neck and kill him, that bit was an accident" - still murder/manslaughter, but a shorter sentence than if the court convicts you of deliberately killing the person.

Quite why he dumped such a massive stash of random junk - obscure gossip about diplomats etc - I still can't see: 'blowing the whistle' on some particular underhand dealing, I could understand, but chucking a huge dump of classified stuff to a website en mass? An odd thing to do.

RIM good for secret jobs: BlackBerry 10 cleared for Restricted data

Secure handsets

Boeing are working on a secure Android-based handset; apparently the NSA built its own Android-based "Fishbowl" handset with Top Secret approval and distributed about 100 of them.

Dell had a DoD-approved handset too, though only approved for "secure unclassified", the level below the RIM device; NSA's is two levels *above* RIM's, as is at least one of General Dynamics's Sectera devices (Top Secret voice calls, Secret data, IIRC.)

"Most secure"? No: this leaves RIM a very long way behind the actual "secure" handsets out there - and at least some of those run Android and even Windows Mobile, so it's not as if it's a market that won't accept standard commercial software.

WTF is... RF-MEMS?

Re: fat phone

Not alone there; the first "mobile" phone I used had a lead-acid battery and shoulder-strap, which was a bit much, but I've never complained of a handset being too big since then - too short a battery life, too small a camera lens, too small a screen, but never too big.

Now, a toughened waterproof double-thickness iPhone/S3 with four times the battery life - that, I'd want. Sacrificing anything else to make it thinner/smaller? Forget it.

Who needs flying cars when we can robotically sort Skittles?

I recall a similar student project at York University back in 1997, sorting marbles by colour - just two variants there though, and a great deal faster (flipping a dividing gate between two positions with an electromagnet) - sorting the marbles as they rolled down a chute as a "stream", rather than stopping to examine each one before going to the next. Easily adaptable to this of course: split 3 colours one way, the rest the other, then adjust the settings and re-sort those two batches.

Still, quite a neat little project; he could probably make it 2-3 times faster just by keeping the feeder rotating and sampling the moment the next morsel passes the lens, if he wanted.

Boffins foul VM sandboxes with CPU-sniffing hack

Re: Doesn't work with SMP??

It's nice and easy with hyperthreading, because the attacker thread and victim thread are actually sharing a CPU core, but a lot of these side-channel attacks will work to varying extents as long as *something* is shared: the L2 or L3 cache on a multi-core chip, main memory bus within a single server - the hardcore crypto guys even retrieve keys using only the power supply, looking for the tiny power fluctuations as you manipulate a 1 or a 0. Not to mention the likes of TEMPEST, where just being close enough to pick up radio frequency leakage or the light from a computer monitor can be enough to reconstruct the data or screen display.

If you're handling nuclear launch codes or running an online banking service, you worry about this stuff and put your processor in your own bunker with its own generators and air conditioning ... if you're hosting TheReg, you don't even bother with SSL in the first place, let alone take hardcore precautions to safeguard the ultra-precious SSL key!

Something to bear in mind if your keys are very, very valuable (i.e. will have people with serious resources coming after the key): the likes of Windows Update's software signing key, for example - or root/TLD DNSSEC keys. Of course, that's one reason why most of these signing systems are designed for *offline* signing: you can keep the actual keys on a piece of hardware locked in a safe, and it's pretty tricky to hack into a switched-off laptop in a safe somewhere...

RISC OS comes to Raspberry Pi

Co-operative multitasking

Co-operative multitasking in itself *can* work well - it's great for simple high-throughput servers (pretty much how Novell's NetWare was built, though it added basic 'pseudo pre-emption later') - though it does fail badly in a lot of cases too. There's some basic command-line-only multitasking available on RISC OS in the form of TaskWindows, which might help with the package manager, and someone actually got quite a long way towards implementing a pre-emptive scheduler under the name Wimp2 (the original desktop being 'the WIMP').

(Quite an impressive feat that Windows managed to jump from cooperative to preemptive multitasking along with the 16-32 bit move, while keeping the API almost identical; there are a few catches in the RISC OS API which make this more difficult, as I recall, which is a shame.)

Hardware hacker proves Apple Fusion Drive works on older Macs

USB for a reason

He was using USB deliberately - not as a sensible setup for actual use, but to make a more obvious difference between the SSD's performance and the hard drive's. Obviously in a "real" installation you'd want to use SATA for the drive - and as for "what if it gets unplugged while you're using it" ... probably much the same as on any other system when you yank a system drive suddenly: instant crash and either a serious FS rebuild or a restore from backup. (You might be lucky and find enough system innards living on the SSD to survive or at least shut down cleanly, but I really wouldn't bet on that.)

End result: a lot like having a regular SATA "hybrid drive", but with more flash in it and less data duplication - and just like any other drive, you should make good backups! Nothing new there. (Though since I've found HFS+ fairly flaky in practice, I'd be extra-careful with the backups...)

Big cell towers now outnumbered by briefcase-sized jobs

What I'd really like is a multi-network femtocell: gateway GSM/GPRS/whatever onto the Net regardless of network. Easy to imagine coffee shops etc (the places that already provide public wifi) doing it as a public service in the same vein.

Difficult, I know, it would need either one company to offer up their expensive spectrum to help all the others (riiiight!) or a license-free slice of spectrum for the purpose (good luck getting handsets to work with it). Maybe UMA is the nearest we'll get, and that doesn't seem to be catching on yet with networks or most manufacturers.