Posts by Pawel 1

New Tosh drive can wipe out 4TB 'near instantaneously'

Re: I imagine...

How about some "evidence destroying" charge?

GlobalSign says 'isolated' webserver was hacked

Re: Blacklist Em

GlobalSign seems to be doing a good job here, why blacklist them? Website is essentially a poster (or a shop front) - if someone paints grafitti over it it's annoying and probably means the owner should work a bit on security, but will happen from time to time. In Diginotar's case, attacker got crown jewels.

It's official: IE users are dumb as a bag of hammers

Errr...

Google "crystallized intelligence" and "liquid intelligence".

Feds seize $15m from scareware monger's Swiss account

Victim most likely to get compensation here

is probably Symantec. When they catch a person selling fake Rolexes, who gets the damages? Those who bought the watches or Rolex?

So...

are they going to return these money to people who bought his wares? No?

How typical...

Eureka! Google breakthrough makes SSL less painful

"If it ain't broken..."

"...don't fix if".

I've got a bad feeling this may lead to significant increase in bugs allowing for session hijacking.

Linux kernel runs inside web browser

Is it just me...

or do you also think that there would be a lot of people interested in this and thinking of Chrome OS?

Porn found in Osama bin Laden compound

sounds like...

some black PR/spin, and even if it is true, that's how it would probably be viewed in his circles.

DIY kit computer goes Forth against Braben's RaspberryPi

Re:Re:Python

Oh, so you want them to start hardware hacking too?

Elite coder readies £15 programming gadget for schools

Or better

Give two USB ports instead of 1!. Ethernet-USB adaptters are easy to get and might be non-essential in many applications, but connecting one would cause the device to have no way to get signals from the outside.

I think

the guy is trying to fight with attitude like yours. Knowledge doesn't have to be useful.

Where's ethernet jack

for hacking-away at network protocols? And some form of easy-to-hack connector (like LPT was)?

If they put an ethernet jack and some easy-to-program port on it, I'm buying 10 for my pet projects!

PC rental store hid secret spy hardware in laptop, suit says

"it is disabled using Device Manager so no matter what software is installed it won't work."

Not exactly. Even if there weren't other methods available, how hard do you think it is for some software to re-enable all devices of the type "camera"?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1438371/win32-api-function-to-programatically-enable-disable-device

Mine's the one with a pack of blu-tack in the pocket.

Welll...

You should read some horror stories about Computrace LoJack...

Legal goons threaten researcher for reporting security bug

Put yourself in the shoes of the researcher.

You've just done a lot of work to work out how to exploit a vulnerability and suggested ways to patch it. You've emailed the company with the info and, being a good boy, have been waiting for them to fix it. No money changed hands. Is it to much to ask to be able to publish details of the vulnerability? If/when this guy is looking for another job in security, a portfolio of discovered and published bugs will help him, just like it helps an artist to have some works of his to hand. It's also, undeniably, an ego gratification. So what?

Also, you need to be aware that whenever a vendor releases a patch, vulnerability details are already public - it's easy to automatically extract the differences between two file versions and then work out the details of what was wrong - and it is a commonly happening for windows patches, so people who don't patch are already at disadvantage and publication by the discoverer doesn't change a thing.

Ubuntu seeks Android-packin' Windows deserters

Again

How much time would it take you to click on on the desktop environment selection combobox at the bottom of the login screen and get Ubuntu 11.4 with GNOME2? I reckon under 2 seconds.

Revealed: Secret security plan should Kate leave Wills at the altar

Maybe

they did - but would you say that's something they would want to make public?

Amazon: Some data won't be recovered after cloud outage

Wikipedia

says (quoting some weird source) that amazon had 102 billion objects on the S3. Use that as a guide for the scale of their little operation.

Dropbox snuffs open code that bypassed file-sharing controls

Aaand

no-one can instantly share the files based on their hash because there's no de-duplication going on.

Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

Give it another try

Problem is it runs gnome settings converter at a few boots after install which eats all the ram for some stupid reason and causes the kernel to kill random processes (which it displays as "crash"). It is actually a single, but rather critical bug you're seeing. Boot it, leave it for half an hour (and re-login if you a message that it crashed. )

Ubuntu's high-risk Linux Narwhal beta floats

Upgrade

Won't force you to use unity.

FSF to Google: Free Gmail's JavaScript now!

Not exactly

No one is asking google to let users put their customisations on google servers - you can simply use a local proxy server or a browser plugin for swapping the code; it's more about philosophy - Stallman likes gmail, so he wants it consistent with his principles. He also may want to run an open source version on his own server.

I don't think google will release gmail js as free software because there's not much incentive to do so except PR - they arguably have the best webmail interface you can find and some of their business depends on selling it as a service (google apps). They are unlikely to lose much if they released it under some copyleft or "non-commercial use" license so they might do it to remove bad smell coming from honeycomb.

Err

This code is already public - javascript, remember? Fsf isn't asking for the backend this time. It asks for permission to modify/reuse stuff already delivered in unobfuscated source code form

Steve Jobs vindicated: Google Android is not open

Re: Compare contributions

So... You're saying webkit isn't production code?

UK cyclists hit by fraud after online purchase at website

You don't wave these rights

But it usually requires a proper court to confirm this. When you buy something via paypal and at that very moment paypal charges your credit card, then it can be and is regarded as single transaction. (though banks will be rather unhelpful then and you need to go to court).

It's a different story of course if you top-up your paypal account at one time and then spend from it at a later moment.

Moving to Windows 7: Is it worth it?

Title

Missed win NT and 2000 over there. Doesn't work out so nicely then.

Fukushima update: No chance cooling fuel can breach vessels

You should probably update your story

Current radiation level near the reactors of that plant is 100-400 mSv/h, which has immediated health consequences.

Feeling heat from Macs, Microsoft sells PCs sans crapware

Title

Have a look at windows embedded standard. They have all the tools, they just won't make them available to the "general public".

Re:perhaps

The last part probably means Windows Live et al. + a trial of office, which actually might be useful to some people; more importantly, these things don't run in the background so with current capacities of hard drives shouldn't matter too much for the user.

Microsoft bans open source license trio from WinPhone

Wording of that fragment

Means that GPLv2 and possibly even LGPL are excluded too.

Court orders seizure of PS3 hacker's computers

Not true anymoreq

according to various sources, Sony now makes a modest profit on hardware.

Also, I thought price dumping is illegal (from the tax point of view)?

Police DNA retention ruled lawful by NI High Court

So, simply speaking...

no one gives a f**k about the ECHR ruling. Wonderful.

Ubuntu - yes, Ubuntu - poised for mobile melee

Welll...

I presume you didn't have to compile PulseAudio to get what you wanted, and all that stuff was in the repository. Where's the problem then? Such an advanced user as yourself surely doesn't think that installing an extra package or two to get required functionality is a problem?

To me, some policy decisions (like cautious-launcher not letting people to execute anything with wine from a CD - it asks them to set the 'x' bit, but it's kinda hard for beginners to do it on a read-only medium).

And?

You can change the theme to what you want. Plenty of them at http://www.gnome-look.org

Creepy as hell: Facebook developers get to know you better

here's the title, as you wish

No-Script with handcrafted ABE rules is your friend. Mine only lets pages from facebook.com and fbcdn.net send any request to facebook.com.

Critical IE update in biggest ever Patch Tuesday

Title

You can integrate the patches fairly easily. I would expect people doing any work on my computer to know such simple tricks.

Ad networks owned by Google, Microsoft serve malware

Title

Do you remember that lovely gdi+ bug not long ago?

NASA sells PC with restricted Space Shuttle data

Problem is

If you can send a big fat shuttle to orbit the earth, making an icbo is peace of cake, so open sourcing ain't gonna happen.

Wikileaks: Berlusconi useless, Pope Catholic

Title containing letters and/or numbers

You may not remember but some time ago there were a few reports of "red mercury" and a lot of speculation on what it is - mostly conspiracy theories.

Now, one of the memos confirms that it is part of plutonium enrichment process.

In 1994 (?) a mix of mercury compounds and plutonium was found by police in germany on some individual (see wikipedia for links).

Connect the dots.

I need to hide, helicopters are near...

Google to scrub slurped UK Wi-Fi data

hasn't google

said before that they will delete the data asap, but don't want to do it straight away to not be accused of removing evidence? ICO has done exactly as google requested-given them official seal of approval for remiving the data. Gotta love the gov here...

Fanbois howl as OS X update bricks PGPed Macs

Oh yeaah

I remember that one very well. Ended up with missing libc and klibc (the latter being a bit harder to diagnose and fix, as busybox from emergency shell was able to run md, but the actual md executable from initrd wasn't able to boot - so by mounting my RAID manually at boot I could get it to work, whereas the very same commands put in a script in initrd would silently fail). Spent 2 days on fixing that.

Hitachi refrigerates rack rears

It means

what it says - that only 1 kJ is required to remove 43.5 kJ of heat from the system, per second. It's not producing energy, it's simply doing 1kJ of work per second to decrease overall system entropy - it likely isn't the whole story as at the other end, the water is evaporating due to heat, so 3rd law of Thermodynamics isn't violated ;).

Also, for many years you could have had a home heating with apparent >100% efficiency - installing a heatpump to remove energy from the surroundings and heat up your home during winter is much cheaper than using the same energy for heating directly. And, given the current craze about CO2, is also more 'enviromentally friendly'.

No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed

You don't know what SI units are, do you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte

vs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

App Store II: Steve Jobs sucks Mac's soul

As we don't know

what does Apple mean by the option to install software from other sources, I don't think you can say they are limiting your freedom. MacPorts can be considered a different 'repository' and as long as it and its likes are allowed to co-exist with the Apple's system, I see no problem.

Somali rebels threaten mobile banking group

Russia tried it with Afghanistan

and as you know, these weapons were later used against them when the finally decided to attack it.

US didn't attack Afghanistan and Iraq to get rid of terrorists - they attacked them to plant there governments that would treat US preferentially when selling Afghan mineral ores and Iraqi oil.

Somalia doesn't really have much natural resources, so the US won't attack it. End of story.

Sooo....

Paying locally-run business operations - bad.

Paying a bigger company - good?

al-Shabaab is a de facto government in that part of Somalia, so it's more akin to taxes, than bribes.

iPhone, BlackBerry, Droid: purveyors of pestilence

25127?

Well, that's sorted then. Company that has no idea about error calculation (elementary statistics) is not the one I would pay money to. Would you?

Front End / Client Side Web Developer

HTML5 on El Reg??

Where exactly, Sir?

All your pages start with "DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "

Thai mobe outfit warns of deadly roaming charges

Now that's a business plan..

charging customers a roaming 'receive call' fee for calls that end up in their own network, on their own server - just like they would while they were not roaming.

Ellison wrestles Google to strangle 'unofficial' Java

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

What article claims (that Dalvik is a implementation of Java SE for mobiles) is far from true. It doesn't implement neither SWT, nor Swing for instance. It is another 'type' of JVM, situated somewhere in between ME and SE, being incompatible with both. It is actually much more similar to the Sun vs Microsoft than this article tries to suggest - Google has created it's own custom version of Java, incompatible with most end-user software; efficient - yes, but totally against any regulations Sun and now Oracle imposed, and also mostly incompatible with other software written in Java.

I expected more from El Reg.