Posts by Dr Paul Taylor

GCHQ boss: Crypto-genius Turing brought tech to British spooks

what Turing would be doing now

Why on Earth do you suppose that Turing would have continued to be a spook if he were still alive today?

His 132 academic descendants are doing plenty of other things:

genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=8014

Global action takes down tech support scam

Nuisance calls in general

This is good news, though, like pulling up weeds, there will be new ones tomorrow.

However, the underlying problem with scams like this and other nuisance callers is that there is apparently no way of tracing telephone calls. When I tried complaining to BT or C+W they said they couldn't do anything about it but I didn't believe them. After BT demonstrated their inability to fix a simple exchange fault, I joined ICUK and am on first-name terms with them. They too say that there is nothing they can do and are pestered by the same things themselves. Presumably they're just too small to have the clout to do anything about it. On the other hand, I am quite sure that the Police would be able to trace the calls, if they wanted to.

Yet it seems to have been accepted that "email is not secure" (although El Reg readers know how to trace it) but phones are. So we have banks phoning customers, without even caller ID, and asking them their "security questions", whilst telling people not to do exactly that with email.

Euro watchdog to charge Microsoft on web browser choice boob

split the browser business off

Wasn't that exactly the objective of the legal process against M$ in the dying days of the Clinton administration that was killed off by Bush?

More fundamentally, making the Web browser the same as the file browser was pretty stupid in the first place. Recently, I copied some files (photos of my dad, whom I mentioned the other day) to a computer that used to have Internet access but no longer has (belonging to his schoolmate). When I had done so, it was impossible to open the folder because Internet Explorer wanted to explore the Internet but couldn't.

Politico's locked room mystery Linux install crime solved

pun

This seems to be the nearest that El Reg commentards have got so far to the obvious pun on "breaking Office Windows".

As for Linux installation "deleting all my files", I for one have been pretty pissed off when Ubuntu trashes /usr /etc, especially when it ends up screwing up initramfs so that that machine ends up being unbootable.

Analogue TV snuffs it tonight on UK mainland

more like fifty

My father Cedric (Ced) Taylor was involved in the development of PAL colour television receivers at Ekco in Southend from 1962 to 1967 and then at GEC Hitachi in Slough from 1967 to 1986. He died in February this year, two months before his TV signal did.

Watching Olympics at work? How to avoid a £1k telly-tax fine

Disenfrachised

You feel disenfrachised up North, do you? Maybe you would like to swap places with the people of my part of East London, who have missile batteries on a residential tower block on one side of the park and a massive police encampment in a marquee on the other.

Will UK.gov crack down on itself for missing Cookie Law deadline?

More unwanted stuff on websites

The methods for obtaining user consent can include using 'pop-up' prompts on users' screens that ask for consent to cookies when the individuals access web pages.

What method is to be used to obtain consent to pop-ups? A cookie, maybe?

Disabled can't 'Go Compare' on price comparison websites

short+long sighted

I was short sighted too, but now I have presbymiopia, which is the combination of short and long sightedness that starts late 40s. If the text is too small, I simply cannot read it at ANY distance. I don't regard myself as "disabled" but I can well believe that 20% of the population has this sort of problem,

I routinely increase the text size, but all too often some blockhead web designer has "optimised" it so that it is only legible on HIS screen using HIS browser.

Bring back early 1990s straightforward HTML, which browsers can resize and rejustify.

Ten-year .co.uk domain names now available

Nominet registration for individuals has an opt-out for personal data.

Not so for .eu

US ecosystems basically unaffected by global warming, studies show

sudo science?

Well, I suppose God has root access to the system.

6,000 sign e-petition to put Turing on £10 note

Faraday's mining lamp

Faraday invented Davy's safety lamp for miners, according to the biography by James Hamilton. Priestley, as you say, stuck to the wrong theory of phlogiston after Lavoisier had discovered Oxygen and explained combustion. There are plenty of other British scientific superstars, though, and it's about time they were properly honoured, like the French do.

Australia considers national digital archive

common sense

What a daft bunch of comments!

I don't know how the existing "compulsory" lodging of stuff in the British Library works for books, but I don't imagine that they expect you to give them copies of every note that you scrawl to the milkman, even if you print it beautifully using a word processor.

Of course we need digital versions of that. Amongst other things, it will remove all vestage of a need for commercial academic publishers.

Google and the Internet Archive (Way Back Machine) collect and index all the garbage. This has turned out to be surprisingly useful compared to what we had a generation ago. But the point of a library is to sort out the valuable stuff from the notes to the milkman.

The 'one tiny slip' that put LulzSec chief Sabu in the FBI's pocket

unfortunate name

Montsegur is almost a needle of a rock in the Languedoc with a ruined castle on the top that was the last stand of the Cathar sect in the early 13th century. The Catholic Church conducted the so-called Albigensian Crusade and the (Parisian) French state what would now be called genocide against them. Large numbers of people were burned for heresy. A certain Englishman called Simon de Montfort was in charge at an earlier stage.

Google will swap you a box of crisps for your web privacy

and via other sites

Also, it seems to be nigh impossible to visit any other website without (disabling NoScript and) telling Google about it via GooglAPIs or similar.

Boffin's blog blast births boycott of publisher Elsevier

> the journals do not contribute anything and are just extracting profit for doing nothing.

That is precisely the case.

Authors,. at least in the mathematical sciences, typeset their own papers in LaTeX, for free.

Other academics referee the papers, for free. I have no idea how the author of this story got the idea that reviewers get a fee.

Publishers INTRODUCE errors in the name of copy editing.

French court fines Google $65k over search suggestion

still there!

Google.fr still offers the following at the bottom of the page in response to the query "

Lyonnaise de G":

Recherches associées à lyonnaise de garantie

lyonnaise de garantie escroc

lyonnaise de banque

'Hands off our books, content miners! Those aren't cheap'

Intellectual armed robbery

Once upon a time publishers used to copy-edit, typeset, print and distribute journals. They never did peer review - fellow academics always did that, for nothing.

For over 20 years authors have been typesetting their own papers in LaTeX. More recently publishers have stopped even printing or distributing journals. They just run difficult-to-use websites, which I can do for myself, thank you. As for the copy-editing, ie the introduction of errors, don't get me started.

Academic authors are compelled to submit to the theft of their intellectual property by universities and goverments. Research funding and employment are increasingly determined by indices of journals. These are compiled by the publishing industry, on a commercial basis not an intellectual one, for example favouring homopathy over category theory.

After robbing academic authors of their intellectual property at gunpoint, publishers then sell it back to them and their universities in vastly over-priced journal subscriptions. I remind those who point out that governments and universities pay for the research in the first place that the "copyright transfer" is not to the university but to a commercial organisation that has contributed NOTHING to the process.

I don't care much about the music and videos that people copy, but I strongly suspect that the corporations that make so much fuss over this issue are directly related to the ones that steal my intellectual property off me.

Web czar: 'Drag your nan online'

Exactly

My grandmother threw a fit on the one occasion when she was asked to use a telephone, my parents refuse to use computers (Mum has Alzheimer's anyway) and I refuse to use F***b**k.

Maybe MLF could do something useful like making GPs use email.

Anti-gay bus baron rages at being stuffed in Google closet

A monopoly with an agenda

Sounds like Souter is getting a taste of his own medicine.

God particle back in hiding

already written

It was written by Lee Smolin and called "The Trouble with Physics", although it could equally have been called "The Trouble with Any Academic Discipline".

Here lies /^v.+b$/i

Second coming

There are those who study "continuations" aka "control effects". In the continuation-passing style, which is used for compiling functional programming languages suich as (NJS)ML, the "continuation" aka return address is passed as an argument, as it is in Assembly code.

It is therefore possible that the continuation may be called once, never or even more than once.

When I first heard of this it reminded me of the restoration of the English Monarchy in 1660, when all of the signatories of Charles I's death warrant were declared traitors and hanged. Those that had died in the meantime were dug up first.

Most Adobe Reader installs are out of date

bus timetables

In particular, why is it (apparently) obligatory for bus and train timetables to be presented as "downloadable" PDF files, when and ordinary HTML web page would be perfectly adequate?

Rustock zombies halved as clean-up efforts continue

spammers paying for lists?

Viagra and Nigerian spammers would be unlikely to pay for email lists, whilst any company with an ounce of respectability would not sell them to criminal organisations, so I am sceptical that this is the explanation.

How are email addresses collected?

A colleague of mine who is immune to any explanation of IT makes a fuss about having his name on email lists because of spam. He believes that the recipients of multi-cc emails pass the addresses on to spammers.

I used to think that they were collected from mailto: links on webpages, but that also seems unlikely given that most people's email addresses don't appear on webpages.

Email is not of course secure but it seems unlikely that it is so insecure as to allow wholesale harvesting of addresses in transit.

That seems to mean that they come mainly from malware that purloins the contents of people's address books. I wouldn't like to speculate on which operating system might be most vulnerable to this.

Can someone with professional knowledge of this enlighten me, please?

British Library hands 200 years of history to Google

Infrastructure rights

Maybe we should see this as building infrastructure in cyberspace.

I seem to recall that ownership of the Channel Tunnel passes from Eurotunnel to the State after some period of time during which they get to recoup their costs. Old bridges that we now walk or drive over for nothing used to have tolls. That's how you get the private sector to do things that we need.

So long as the BL and its readers get to use the digital version for nothing after ten years or whatever this seems to be ok. What we don't want is for Google to own the BL indefinitely.

unreadable data

> unreadable in any modern program[me] I have available

strings? C? or are they not "modern"?

I'll bet your 22-year old program is easier to reverse-engineer than PDF is.

Redaction FAIL: Dull nuke sub document revealed in full

Redaction

> The correct, secure redaction method is to print the documents (either electronically redacted as above or by use of a black marker pen) and then scan the result.

Thus rendering the document completely useless for searching or quoting, reducing its quality for printing and reading, whilst increasing its size. If there's any piece of technology that's more abominable than MS W*rd it's the scanner.

Surely the correct way of editing a document is to use software that shows you what's actually in the file (eg Emacs) and then remove the bits that you don't want.

what was the technology?

It doesn't come as a surprise to me that this is an old story and that the documents were boring. However, the reason why I looked for the story on El Reg was to find out what format the documents were in and how their authors thought they had "redacted" them.

The Torygraph mentioned PhotoShop: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8457506/Secrets-put-on-internet-in-Whitehall-blunders.html

So as part of the armoury of those who would like to persuade our less IT-literate colleagues that MS W*rd is not the only way of generating text, please could you tell us what technology was (mis)used here.

Protection of Freedoms Bill is released

Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006 too, please

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/51/contents

Essentially gave any Minister the right to change any piece of legislation. The Tories and LibDems voted solidly against it at the time, plus six Labour rebels and the minor parties, but that they are in govt it suits them to use it.

'Methanotroph' bacteria feasted on blown BP rig's methane belch

so where has it gone?

Please can you tell into what form these bacteria have converted the methane? Are they just going to belch it back out again in some other part of the ocean?

Ofcom mulls popular number charge

04

How about moving all corporate numbers to 04xxx and have the telephone equivalent of .co.uk .ac.uk .gov.uk and .me.uk.

I use 8-digit London numbers, but Ofcom wrecked the idea of area codes with the confusion over 020 7 and 020 8.

Old PCs: When it's time to die

bloatware

"why do I need to upgrade my local box when my most common interface to my world lies within a web browser?"

Because the browser is the only thing that doesn't work on the ten year old hardware.

No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed

automatic testing

Are you referring to the program that I provided students to test whether their implementations of algorithms were correct? They found that very useful.

Maybe you are posting anonymously because you were amongst the 1 in 4 students who cheated on their coursework by copying. Or perhaps you objected to being asked to think, which was the point of the original article.

I taught Algorithms at Queen Mary

and they wouldn't renew my contract.

http://paultaylor.eu/algorithms

London Transport plans Oyster bypass

no way!

No way does TfL get direct access to my bank card.

The Oyster system is already set up to make it oh so easy to incur penalty charges.

On the DLR, for example, there are no tickets gates, so if anything distracts your attention when entering or leaving it is easy to forget whether you're "touched in". The readers at the check-in points often fail to register, whilst their displays cannot be read in either rain or moderate sunlight. Some types of ticket machine can show whether you're "inside" or "outside" but the newest ones do not.

Colonel who slammed Afghan HQ PowerPoint culture is fired

Parkinson's law

This story sounds precisely like the one that underlies Parkinson's Law.

As I recall (sorry, I can't find a link), sometinme during WWII, Major Parkinson found himself in charge over a weekend when by chance all of the more senior officers were unavailable. He was unable to deal with the mountain of bureaucratic tasks that faced him. So they didn't get done. However, the sky did not fall in. He later wrote a quasi-academic paper about this.

Copernicus reburied with full Catholic honours

Became heresy in 1616

Copernicus died in 1543, but it was only in 1616 that his ideas were condemned by the Inquistition, largely as a result of Galileo's clumsy academic politics. The Vatican had far bigger fish to fry at the time, as it was fighting the Counter-reformation over much bigger theological issues.

Copernicus's books were meant to be "corrected" but, according to Owen Gingerich in "The book nobody read", this was done to only half a dozen copies in Italy, and none elsewhere - even in Spain, which was in the grip of the genocidal and far more murderous Spanish Inquisition.

Google Books loses lions of literature

index?

The "search" box on this site seems to search their discussion forum, not their index.

Can anyone work out how I might use this site to check on the registration of my objection to including my academic textbook?

BT names 63 more exchanges for fibre upgrades

Wanstead

Wanstead is on the inner edge of Suburbia, definitely more expensive than adjoining Leytonstone and Forest Gate, and quite a long way away from the Olympic site.

Pressure group aghast at Hillingdon ID card scheme

what if you're on the edge of the borough?

Aside from being the thin end of the wedge, this is yet another aspect of local authority behaviour that discriminates in favour of people who live or work in the middle of the borough (eg for the council) and against those who live on the edge (or at a triple point).

My London borough is forever spending my money on tarting up Walthamstow, which is a bus ride or two away from me, and its idea of adult education is to put on classes in Chingford, which is three bus rides away. It's far more convenient for me to use shops or services in the neighbouring boroughs.

Kent Police clamp down on tall photographers

The flip side

of this attitude of the police that Everyone is a Terrorist is they do their best to avoid doing anything at all about real, albeit low-level, crime that affects ordinary people on a day-to-day basis.

Last year I was robbed in the street by a Gang of Four that was incompetent at basic pickpocketing. Reporting this took a hour's wait the following afternoon in an empty Police Station, where the only other two callers were persuaded to go away. The main issue for the Plod on duty was the exact location, because it was on a police district boundary, so there was a buck-passing opportunity.

This made me so angry that I filed a complaint online. However, as they are unable to distinguish between complaints about jobsworth behaviour and being beaten up, shortly afterwards I was visited by a vanload of coppers. I explained what had happened, and suggested that this was out of proportion, and was persuaded to sign a form saying that it "could be dealt with locally".

Hint: make use of the facility to report complaints online.

The other week my walking boots were stolen by a scam pseudo-charity called "SCH Collections". After much persistence, I managed to report this theft online. However, when I suggested that they might look up SCH on the Police National Computer, I was told by a police officer that (and here is the IT angle), ...

> Unfortunately a company name cannot be looked up using the Police National Computer.