Posts by Steve the Cynic

A lesser-known new feature in iOS 6: It's tracking you everywhere

Yes, that's easy, a config option that you access through the About box...

And if you turn that option off, does it mean "Prevent Ad Tracking" or "Enable full-fat Ad Tracking"?

(Yes, I know the answer. It's called a rhetorical question...)

Re: Not good

On an iPhone4 with iOS6 set to French (long story), the option is called "Suivi publicitaire limité", roughly translated as "Limited advertising tracking". Arguably this is worse, because it doesn't say what the alternative is. Is it a choice between "limited tracking" and "no tracking" or between "limited tracking" and "rich super powerful privacy destroying tracking"?

Mission to Pluto faces DEEP SPACE DEBRIS PERIL

Re: Fantastic stuff

It is indeed a pity, but remember that the pea hits the craft at the equivalent of around Mach 40...

Earth-sized planet found at Alpha Centauri B

Re: A planet by any other name ....

You call it an exoplanet because that's what it is, by definition. Exoplanets are planets in orbit round stars that aren't our very own Sol. And Alpha C isn't our Sol, so this newly-discovered exoplanet is, indeed, an exoplanet.

Duh.

Metric versus imperial: Reg readers weigh in

Re: inches (tape measures...)

"While we're on the subject can we start a campaign for tool manufactures to make tape measures with metric on top and inches on the bottom? Or better still ones without inches at all."

Where I live, the tape measures in the shops are in metres and centimetres only.

Oh, in case you forgot, "where I live" is France, land of the foie gras takeaway pizza.

WoW cities wiped out by 'exploit'

Re: Been a while since I last played WoW

"y'know further open up the market in China"

No. If it can involve pandas (or panda-like critters, no doubt) being killed, it would close the Chinese market, since depicting pandas being killed is illegal there. Guild Wars had to remove content (giant panda ranger pet) because of this.

Of course, the law in question may have been changed since then, but I suspect not.

Skydiver Baumgartner's 120,000ft spacesuit leap delayed by bad wind

Re: 24-day delay?

Maybe you fixed that, but you left in "the free fall part of his *ascent*" (my emphasis)...

:)

Oracle offers tiny tools for pint-sized Java devices

When the article said "small" I had visions of...

... things I worked with in the 1990-1993 timeframe.

The large one had 32KB RAM plus 8KB battery-backed SRAM, and 96KB ROM, using an 8088.

The smaller ones:

* A Psion Organiser II, either the full version or the industrial version with just a numeric keypad

* A MC68HC11E with 512B internal RAM and either 8KB or 32KB of external SRAM and a 16KB ROM.

* A TI Sensor Signal Processor with 576 **bits** of internal memory for variables and interpreter state, and a 4KB external EEPROM for program storage.

We ran the SSP in its non-custom-masked-part mode, where it had what was in effect a sort of VM, running internally an interpreter for a fairly conventional 8-bit assembly language.

It would nevertheless be most amusing if they said that they had got the JVM to run there...

If you see 'URGENT tax rebate download' in an inbox, kill it with fire

Re: Don't Bother

Just goes to show what I say: Human beings are too stupid to be dumb animals...

Motorola's Razr design daddy legs it, gets inside Intel

Only one thing annoyed me about my RAZR

The OK and Cancel buttons were on opposite sides of the keypad to the same concepts on my Nokia that I had before it, so I cancelled a lot of stuff after I changed over.

That said, it was a marvel. It was thin even when doubled in thickness by being folded, but it never felt flexy when open. And because it wasn't exactly tiny when folded, it was a sane size when open.

And I had the weirdest experience when I bought it. I went into a Vodafone shop, and told them that I wanted one of those (pointing to a non-RAZR Moto phone). Ah, sir, we don't have any of those, but you might like this one (pointing to a pink RAZR).

I'm usually reasonably open-minded about stuff, but a pink phone is going too far (Steve the Cynic is Stephen, not Stephanie, OK?), "I'm not buying a pink phone." He looked a bit nonplussed, but the salesman in him recovered quickly, "Ah, yes, we have that in charcoal grey as well. I'll go out back to get one for you."

Google to axe IE 8 support, cuts off Windows XP lifeline

Re: What does not supporting really mean for the end user though?

It'll be like it is if you have an old version of Firefox - you get an annoying bar across the top of gmail that hides the buttons. You know, the ones that appear and disappear, depending on stuff, which leads one, at a casual glance, to conclude that there is no way to delete messages in gmail. (Well, if you could do it, there'd be a disabled button, right? Apparently not.)

BT gets postcode knickers in twist, plants Shoreditch on Mount Everest

Re: Failing it's GCSE geography?

French is a very useful subject to have studied if you find yourself living in France...

(Disclaimer: this is the voice of experience speaking...)

The iPHONE 5 UNDERMINES western DEMOCRACY: 5 reasons why

Not exactly free - it would cost me the price of a Mac to run the development system on...

Titans of tech: Why I'll never trust 'em

Re: Business is king.

I don't want to appear cynical[*], negative, and so on, but I think you've missed an important point: "Why should I adopt this?" is a question many IT *buyers* should be asking, but frequently aren't.

[*] Well, OK, I'll admit it. I *do* want to appear cynical. It's right there in my name. But in this case, the rest is true.

Apple land-grabs iThingy feature management patent

Strikes me...

That for many applications of this, GPS will be a poor choice for determining the sensitive location, seeing as how many of the obvious candidates for "sensitive location" are indoors. Well, unless they've done something to make GPS work better indoors...

Google to rent Chromebooks for $30 per month

Re: Thanks but no thanks

Read. More. Carefully.

It is 12*30 for the first year, then 12*25 for the second, then 12*20 for the third, for a grand total of $900. Of course, that's still $400 too much...

Visual Studio 2012: 50 Shades of Grey by Microsoft

Re: Hey Microsoft, Windows 2.0 called...

I'll show my age by pointing out that Win2.0 came out when I was a student, and I distinctly remember it supporting a fixed palette containing a maximum of eight colours, none of which were grey.

Hard-up Kodak selling consumer film biz

Re: Ilford film

Those who pay any attention at all to my posts will know I live in France, near Lille. A couple of years ago I was surprised to discover that the FNAC[*] nearest where I live still stocks some 35mm film, including rolls of Ilford B/W film...

[*] For those who don't know, FNAC (sometimes written "fnac") is a substantial retail chain in France, selling books, CDs and DVDs, tickets for concerts and other events, computers, mobile phones, and other assorted electronics, etc. The "etc." part evidently includes Ilford film...

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IPv6

Re: @Steve: try again

Kirbin: I didn't mention a firewall. NAT / PAT / NAPT is a separate function from firewalls, and a box might do one, the other, or even both. The point is that the translator (note, to repeat myself, not the firewall) doesn't know how to handle an incoming packet that doesn't match an outgoing connection profile, so it drops it.

There are exceptions, in that for certain UDP situations, a (dynamically created) translation may say "from this internal IP/port, use this external IP/port, wherever it is going, and allow anyone who sends to that external port to hit the internal IP/port". This is called "cone NAT", and severely weakens the coincidental security model of NAPT. Restricted cone NAT uses the same external port for all communications from a given internal IP/port, but only allows external packets from previous destinations.

Restricted cone is less protective than fully-restrictive NAPT that uses a separate external port for each IP/port quad-tuple, but more protective than fully-open cone NAT. The trade-off, as usual, is that open cone NAT is less unfriendly to protocols with a peer-to-peer element, but also less protective.

But once again, none of this has anything to do with firewalls, except in so far as devices that do either often do both.

Relevant note: I work in the IPS engine of a firewall-with-UTM-and-NAT-and-stuff, and I'm specifically responsible for, among other things, the code that handles all the various NAT modes. Some people might think this qualifies me to talk knowledgeably about this subject.

FAIL for you, sorry.

Re: IPv6 less secure because of lack of NAT?

Pff. NAT in the sense of address hiding(*) provides one very specific form of security. With a couple of exceptions in the UDP space, connection initiation is outbound only, since the translator doesn't know what to do with an inbound connection. This prevents an external attacker from reaching in directly to an internal machine.

So, no, there are no security aids in NAT, except in one specific but very, very, very common case.

(*) NAT can be used in various ways. The most common is where you hide an RFC1918 privately-numbered network behind a single public (or "less private" - see "Carrier-Grade NAT") IP address, although as I hope you know, those in the know sometimes call this NAPT or PAT. Less common are methods for renumbering IP networks without renumbering them, and also for hiding a private-numbered host behind one port of a public IP (port forwardiing) so that only the intended port can be reached.

Does Box really need $284m in VC cash?

Re: One question.

www.box.com

Dude, just search for "box funding" and you'll find links to things that contain links to its website...

Motorola’s next Razr ‘leaks’ online

Re: 720 pixel screen?

My very first mobile phone was an Alcatel OneTouch View db, back in 2000. It had a 96 x 64 display(*), so the various (and not all correct: 32x24 is 768 - you meant 30x24) 720-pixel combinations aren't totally out-of-line.

For a 13-year-old phone, that is...

(*) Source: http://www.gsmarena.com/alcatel_ot_view_db-28.php

Hobbyist builds working assault rifle using 3D printer

Re: hrm...

A second minor correction. Cartridge cases made of copper will jam in most actions. Copper has the unpleasant characteristic of stretching permanently* under the sort of pressures you find in a cartridge case that's being fired. Use brass, which rebounds properly.

* Not by much, but by enough to make the action prone to jamming much more than normal.

Skydiving daredevil Baumgartner leaps from 96,000ft

Re: No cigar though

1960 Corvette. But leave the Loc-Nar behind.

Gabe Newell: Windows 8 is a 'catastrophe' for PC biz

Re: Touch...

Re: touch sensitive desk... "for some time" would be almost 30 years, then?

Hello, Mr. Dillinger.

...

END OF LINE.

Expert: BA doesn't need permission to google your face

It won't be used to greet folks by name...

Well, maybe, but only briefly if it is. If they try that, they will learn the lesson that American Express learned about 20 years ago. They installed CallerID checking stuff to match incoming phone calls against the phone numbers in their databases, and flashed that on the call centre staff's screens. The idea was that they could give a personalised greeting (Ring, ring, ... "Good morning Mr Cynic, how can I help you?") and have the client's files quickly available. They stopped doing it because it was freaking people out, not to mention if I use Mr Bloggs's phone to call, and the wrong file gets pulled up.

No, it will be used to help security services quickly identify targeted people without having to bother everyone.

And it wouldn't help anyone identify me. A search in any image search engine for my name will find pictures of an American drag racer and various others, but not of me.

UK's brazen copyright land grab sneaked into Enterprise Bill

Re: And in what public forum

You believe that Parliament exists to serve the will of the people? Where did you get such a quaint notion from?

Google expected to cough measly $22.5m for Safari privacy gaffe

Re: lies

Of course they love us. We're a great source of revenue...

New UK network touts FREE* mobile broadband

Mild fail here...

The bulk of my mobile data usage is IMAP email and google[*]maps, with a bit of iMessage thrown in when the signal is good enough. (I work in a building with a metal cage round it for some reason, aesthetics mostly, I suspect, and mobile signal quality inside is atrocious. Curiously, mobile signals from Belgium are often stronger than the FT/Orange ones.) I don't normally look at the web on a phone, mostly because the screen is way, way too small. So this obviously isn't the plan for me...

And I have a practical question: does the advertising count against the data allowance you'e earned?

Ministers consult public on 'opt in for smut' plans

Mobiles...

So it already works well for mobiles, eh?

Maybe.

This particular shipload of FAIL happened over here in France... I moved in, and got a pay as you go type SIM from SFR (Vodafone's French brother). That one was OK, so when my wife arrived, we got her one, and me (for various reasons too complicated to discuss here) another. These two, however, came with a serious limitation: parental access controls for the Internet, turned on by default... Even then I might not have noticed, except that they blocked access to the server used by the Google Maps app on the Winmob-based Samsung i900s we were using...

OK, said I, I'll get it unblocked. That, apparently, involved scribbles on pieces of mashed-up dead tree, and seemed entirely too much trouble. A change of provider followed, and FT/Orange, when asked, said that yes they have such a filter available, but no they wouldn't activate it for us as we are both grown-ups (and have no children...).

Breaking: Megaupload seizures illegal says NZ High Court

Re: Illegal Damage

I second that. Back in the day (1994 or so) I lived in the middle flat of three in an old terraced house. The [redacted] on the ground floor were bad boys, and Plod came calling one Saturday afternoon. They broke the lock on the outside (shared) door, and I presume on the ground floor flat's door as well. I peered outside a moment or two later, and saw one of the bad boys' mates being led away with his hands cuffed behind his back. A phone call to Plod followed. "Where do you live, sir?" "(address)" "Ah, ok, have it repaired, and put this operation number on the bill and send it to us, we'll take care of it."

Times change, so your mileage may vary if you try this these days...

Microsoft's Surface proves software is dead

Re: It's not free if it needs a dongle

With regard to free upgrades of software: "most hand-held devices" presumably isn't meant to include iPhones, then? Mine gets an upgraded software load every 2-3 months, I'd guess, and started on 4.something a-year-and-a-bit ago and is now on 5.1.1. And in money terms the upgrades themselves didn't cost anything, or nothing that can be separated from the price of the phone in the first place.

In this respect (I know that MacOS upgrades are different here, thanks), Apple *is* giving away the software on the device.

Crytek says future is free-to-play

SWOTR...

Bioware also needs to address the fact that everyone wants to play on the Empire side (I saw something somewhere that suggested something like a 4-or-5 to 1 imbalance)...

iOS was SO much more valuable to Google than Android - until Maps

Re: "Phones"

I wouldn't buy a VOIP-phoning only phone - I work in France near the Belgian border, and mobile reception in my office is horrible, so much so that I often lose data connectivity - no 3G, no EDGE, no nothing, except good old GSM voice.

Sometimes, even if I can get a decent data signal, it's on a Belgian network, so data roaming issues bite me hard. As a result, I have my phone locked on to its home network (and no, Apple, I don't like being forced into the Settings app every time I get on the Metro...), and so it goes...

FAIL for the idea of a GSM-voice-free phone.

Japan still in love with the fax

Re: Fax.... machines?

What's wrong with "fax machine" as a name for it? I've only ever known them by that name, in fact.

Or should I be asking you to get back under your bridge?

(Fuss point 1: If you are going to poke fun, learn to spell "kawaii" correctly... It has a double-i at the end.)

(Fuss point 2: This goes back to the article itself. Yes, Japanese has three scripts, but... Kanji are (normally slightly modified) Chinese characters. Hiragana and katakana are heavily modified Chinese characters. Native Japanese words and Chinese-origin loanwords are normally written in kanji. Japanese grammatical particles and other very small Japanese words (e.g. "san" = Mr, Miss, Mrs, or Ms.) are written in hiragana. Loanwords from other languages, mostly English, are written using katakana.)

Sunshine nudges asteroid into odd orbit

Re: Oh, the agony!

Fuss, fuss pedantry...

Simple radiation pressure is an on-axis force, and it is radially oriented with respect to the primary, because it is just momentum transfer caused by the secondary absorbing or reflecting the outward radiation from the primary (presumed to be uniform). At the sub-micrometre level, radiation pressure from the Sun is strong enough to completely counter gravity, and such particles inevitably leave the Solar System

Yarkovsky effect forces are caused by the fact that part of the surface of a body is hot, while part is not-so-hot, and that those parts are not radially aligned. The hotter parts emit more photons, and so there is a net force. Depending on the speed and direction of rotation (and the size of the body - Yarkovsky effect is strongest in the 10m to 10km range), the object may be either slowed or speeded in its orbit, moving either in or out relative to the Sun.

The forces are small, but their effect is continuous and accumulative.

Wireless remote control inventor zaps out at 96

Re: Ultrasonics and dogs

We had an ultrasonic one in the very late 70s. I was young enough and the frequencies were low enough that I could actually just barely hear it (well, something, even if it wasn't the control frequencies themselves). It was fun bouncing it off the wall behind you and still getting the TV to react, something an IR remote won't do.

SpaceX Dragon chokes at the last second

Re: To quote Top Gear... How Hard Can It Be™

Re: "payloads are much higher these days".

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, and leaving aside the question of average versus largest payloads, no. Back in the day, the largest payloads were in the 120 tons to LEO category, something we seem to have difficulty with today, and at a time when we knew less about rocketry and materials engineering than we do now.

Maybe that's the problem. Today, we know too much about what we can't do, and we seem to have forgotten some of what we *can* do.

Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK

Re: Agree

Re: US units. The worst part of the US use of pints/gallons/miles/etc. is that, despite some of the units not being the same size as apparently equivalent Imperial one, a substantial fraction of Americans call them "English"*. This applies more to length than volume measures, and we have the insanity of the US fluid ounce being bigger than the Imperial one, but the pint and gallon being smaller. (Imperial pint: 20 Imp-floz, US pint: 16 US-floz). Reading /Have Spacesuit, Will Travel/ as a British teenager in Britain introduced me to the baffling assertion that "A pint's a pound the world around."...

* - well, they did in the 1980s when I lived over there.

Road deaths spark crackdown on jaywalking texter menace

They are called "mobstacles"

The idiots who walk at half speed or slower while gabbling or texting, usually in narrow places where you can't walk around them.

Oh, and...

Fuss, fuss... Drivers might or might not text with *alacrity*, which is largely a function of speed, but certainly do it with *impunity*.

Root canal surgery officially more desirable than cloud migration

Simples...

Having a root canal done is painful, but once done it is over with.

The pain of cloud stuff goes on and on...

Queen unveils draft internet super-snoop bill - with clauses

Re: Note for GCHQ:-

And VPNs leading to servers outside the UK...

Naked gyrating iPad vid exposes truth behind Apple's billions

Re: Average Age?

Fail. It says the average is between 18 and 25, not that it is the average of 18 and 25.

It could be 24.99 and still meet the given condition.

Silly ACs.

Most anticipated videogames of 2012 revealed

Re: 8 Wii games?

I want to know why Xenoblade Chronicles is on the Wii list.

Oh, wait, it's evidently an American list or something, because over here in France XC has been out for months and months.

So don't read too much into any part of this list.

And there's no list for Wii U, and that's where most of the action will be for new games on a Nintendo living room console, at least late in the year, so the devs will be winding down their Wii work a bit.

Matt Groening reveals location of Simpsons' Springfield

Re: Indeed

You mean now, in Japan?

Seriously, they do. I catch odd snippets on the French ADSL-only TV channel Nolife, which has extensive coverage of Japanese pop music, and an awful lot of them look like (caricatures of) late-teen schoolgirls, complete with the skirts almost long enough to be belts, etc. (I say caricatures because *in school* their uniforms are a bit longer than that - mid-thigh is on the short side, and winter uniforms are often ankle-length.)

Then again, lot of Japanese pop stars would make the majority of Western artists (KISS and Lordi aside) look like they are normal citizens.

Japan is an odd place.

550,000-strong army of Mac zombies spreads across world

Re: Oh my....

My recollections of crocodile meat, from when Sainsburys sold it as precut strips, around 1998 or so, I think, are:

1. It has a distinct texture that vaguely looked like it would go in flakes (like white fish does) as I cooked it, but was meat-like rather than fish-like, and didn't flake at all. The texture was more like beef or lamb than it was like chicken.

2. It was nearly white in colour, which added to its resemblance to fish.

3. It had distinct, but not particularly strong, flavour that was not very much like chicken.

Osborne names UK cities to land £100m broadband bonanza

In Lille...

Three years ago, I moved from between Reading and Oxford to Lille. My service offerings over here were various sorts of HDSPA 3G for mobile data, and either ADSL2+ (advantage: don't need to negotiate with the landlord in a foreign language for permission to do it) or 100Mbps fibre for fixed-line at-home data.

And that's all I could choose from. There were no slower service offerings available at all.

FAIL for British broadband offerings.

'Fileless' malware installs into RAM

Re: Installs the Lurk Trojan?

It's worse than that, actually, in the sense of lame-press-release territory. It's nothing more than the way this stuff has always been done, for as long as malware has spread itself via the Internet. All those tasty buffer-overflow bugs, from back in 2000 or even earlier, allowed the malevolent server to plant code into the browser process, and for that code to download other code, either to memory or to files on disk.

Lame, lame, lame.

FAIL icon for the people making the announcement.

Game Group shares slide under a penny

Je ne comprend pas...

Over here in Lille, GAME has ME3. And the new Mario Party 9.

And it doesn't seem to have that choice between spotty teens or nearly-middle-aged dudes. The staff are frequently 20-somethings, and can explain stuff...

SOPA poked an angry bear and set it loose on the net

Re: Nothing is obvious in Copyrightland

It's obvious because the recipe itself - a list of ingredients and some steps to follow - cannot be copyrighted because it is just an idea. Central to copyright is that it is the specific work itself that is copyrighted, not the idea(s) behind it. In this, copyright differs strongly with patents, where the idea is covered just as much as the specific embodiment.

So I could be an imitative pinhead and write a story about the schooldays of a boy wizard, and as long as the story isn't too much like JKR's writing (I've never read it, but I understand from someone who has that it isn't great writing) I'll be OK from a copyright point of view.

Getting back to the recipe, however: My description of the recipe is the equivalent of the specific novel, i.e. possibly copyrightable, and the underlying list of stuff and method is the equivalent of "schooldays of a boy wizard", i.e. just an idea, so not copyrightable.