Posts by OziWan 38 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2009
The choir we run sings 'O Holy Night'. Written in the nineteenth century and sung with a simple piano accompaniment, it is claimed on YouTube (every time) as being the intellectual property of Sony. Utterly Bizarre. We have the same problem with 'Silent Night' (only the Warner Bros I believe).
I respect their right to protect their IP but they have gone completely insane with these sorts of laws (and make no mistake it is the corporations who have 'sponsored' this bill). America, wake up, the land of the free has become the land of who can pay congress. Seriously wake up, I am no pirate but this stuff is wrong!
There are so many good factual reports that can demonstrate beyond any doubt that the anthropological effect on our planets CO2 levels are real. This will effect us all in the long run.
The body of evidence out there is overwhelming yet some still insist on comforting themselves with the opinions of the ill-informed and the politically motivated.
I have said it in the past but I say it again. There are also people out there claiming to be 'experts' that will make very convincing arguments that black people are more stupid than white people, that the world is flat, that God created the world in 7 days, and that jews in some way deserved the holocaust. the list is endless.
Just because there are crackpots in the world does not mean that we have to give them any airtime.
This is a tech site so I presume the majority of people placing comments here are actually people working in the tech industry. Don't get me wrong there are a few comments that indicate people understand what is really going on here but the rest..... If the bunch of losers are running the computers of the world then God help us all :). (and as for the author ....)
A group of you think that Google is evil and this justifies that opinion. Another group thinks that Google is not and this just proves it. Well this time we will know.
I think they have gone for really low level patents to protect the handset makers but I have to admit (as others have pointed out) that the numbers do not add up and there must be something else at play here.... we will see!
Flammable because this might turn really nasty.
This is not a privacy bug built into major browsers. It is how html works and is damned difficult to fix (and despite being told this by numerous people, the Register continues to repeat the lie).
This is silly. The fault does not lie with the browser makers but with the idiots marketing people who are happy to invest so much effort to scam one person in 100,000,
I can also post links I guess that will tell you Jim Morrison is alive, God created the world in seven days, sex with children is really quite OK and that men never landed on the mood. The list is endless.
The evidence for the anthropological effect on CO2 level is absolutely insurmountable. CO2 levels can be measured in Antarctic ice over thousands of years, To argue against it and call it an 'hypothesis' like the article writer did is no different than the creationists calling Darwin's work a 'theory' in some hope of debasing it by using terms that most non scientific people do not understand.
There are other factors. There have been regional warm ups and even cool downs over the time we are able to measure, no one disputes that. Ccosmic rays, sun spots etc. do play their role as well, no one disputes that. The influence that mankind has, is however the one part we can control, should we wish to.
This is not political correctness, the scientist in question is simply pointing out that some people will be quick to misuse such research so 'be careful'.
In NL Traffic jams are a big problem. This data allows TomTom to provide very uptodate info back to motorists. This info is too of course useful and saleable to the people who manage the roads (it is also of far better quality than the data they themselves have). There is no invasion of privacy here, the only thing that went wrong is that the bonehead Dutch police saw this treasure trove of data as nothing more than a way of increasing their income.
Firstly if it transpires that the data has not been anonymized then Tom Tom are in big trouble under Dutch law but it will have been I am certain. Secondly, even if it wasn't this sort of data would not be admissable for any sort of prosection.
The police have used the data to identify stretches of road where the maximum speed limit is structurally being ignored and indeed have used that information to determine where they can most effectively place speed traps. I find that odd because that could also be indicating that a given speed limit is incorrect (most people do drive safely, the loonnies are thankfully a minority, albeit a very deadly one).
On the other hand, on the way home a spokesman for motorists stated that TomtTom had sold this information to the number one enemy of motorists. I find that also a little suspect. Whilst part of the police's job is simply collecting the 'speed tax' they do also serve a useful role in reducing road deaths which makes them far from the motorists worst enemy.
The information has also been used to identify junctions that need redesigning, confusing signposting, traffic hotspots, causes of jams etc. It is not all bad ..... I would say do not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
This is standard behaviour - noone is tracking you guys! Apple and Google cache the mast locations so, everytime you hit a new mast it will store it. So your home mast will be in there, the ones on your trip to work also etc., but you *cannot* use this data to track people's movements, only where they may have been in the past. I have not read the article on the 'doze phones but I am quite certain it will be the same. This is how GPS works. Dan - come on dude!!
Got some private replies which suggest my comment was not constructive :).
http://sourcedaddy.com/windows-7/understanding-isatap.html
Is a good place to start. You really do not need dhcp, dns or any of the protocols you are used to. You need a machine to answer wth a certain name (which can be auto discovered in an ipv6 network).
The 'exploit' described in the article remains a corner case to a large extent but let's face it, our hacker/malware friends have demonstrated their imagination too many times for us to not take all threats seriously.
Whilst funny the film really does demonstrate that our sense of society is decreasing. You see someone outside your house struggling. Traditionally you had two choices, pretend you did not see them or go and help them. Today, you have a third. Film them and humiliate them on the public Internet,
What the woman did was of course plain daft but the behaviour of the people filiming this is just anti-social. You have my friend weakened your srgument by posting this (which I by the way largely agreed with).
If you search for 'videos' it seems logical that YouTube results will dominate (because it is the most popular video streaming site on the net).
The same can be said for maps and to a lesser extent for gmail.
These results could quite easily be appearing not because Google is doing aything untoward but simply because they are the market leader in a number of areas.
In short google returns what we mostly want to see. It is mob rule not google rule.
(Though this is not always the case, google for Operating System and the first 'named' one you see is OS/2 ;) - was a great OS but hardly the market leader).
Large scale computing just does not work like this. There are so many examples of people who think they can apply 'enterprise' ready solutions to distributed web based apps and have failed - even with basic web sites (see the france.fr debacle for an excellent example).
I mean you no ill will but have been working in this area for many years and you really do have to think in a different manner than simply transactions per seconds.
Some simple examples (some mentioned already in the article). Think in terms of mtbf of kit when you are running a farm that contains as few as 1000 machines. Hardware failures become normal events that you have to engineer for. The idea that you can accept the 4 hours downtime per two years onb your database server and still hit you 99.9% SLA does not apply.
What about backing up 100s of TB of data? A distributed model can eliminate the need for backups.
latency - these database backends also need to return your profile page, your unread messages count and so. Cache solutions need to recalculate.
Creeping death. One node in a cluster goes down, increasing the load on the other nodes and causing the whole lot to go down.
Etc., Etc.
You know there was no malice intended. Noone has denied it, noone has pretended it did not happen. Why in God's name is everyone so quick to believe that any successful company will sudeenly start actig in some sort of psychopathic way?
I read my own argument back and have for the first time doubts ....
This is basic stuff. These sorts of flaws are easy to guard against, why do people keep asking boys to do a man's work? It is perfectly possible to write a secure website. I despair;, it could be breached with basic lack of escaping, and probably sql injection and/or xss. I really begin to wonder if there are real progammers left.
Also, Register, as others have pointed out this is just bad journalism. The while point of the site was to see if it could be hacked, it was never used for real votes and did not need to be 'pulled'.
1. If you are going to use remote management software (let us stress this - software that is giving you elevated management rights remotely!!) you must understand what it does and how it does it in detail. You cannot simply trust that the latest 'enterprise-ready tool de jour' will be secure. If you think you can, then find a new career!
2. If you call your self an IT professional as another already pointed out, working out that apache cannot start because port 80 has already been taken by another process it frankly trivial to solve. If that takes 90 minutes - find another career (windows or Unix it makes no difference).
In Holland we have a word for this sort of individual - it is 'prutser'.
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