Posts by batfastad

Undercover BBC man exposes Amazon worker drone's daily 11-mile trek

Reality check needed

I'm sure there are far more arduous, disgusting and lower paid jobs elsewhere in the world.

Firefox reveals new look: rounded rectangles

Re: Extensions

Nooooo, that's insane. It's bloody optional!

Extensions

I reckon most of the extensions I run are basically to undo the constant Chromification and take me back to the original Firefox v2-v4. Why don't they just accept they got it pretty much perfect years ago, there's no shame in that!

Killing off toolbars/icons will be a problem for me as I have a heavily customised toolbars. So long as they keep the artist formerly know as the status bar, now named addon bar) I still have extensions that can't have icons dropped onto a toolbar... HttpRequester, RefControl, Font Finder.

Kerching! Nominet preps for cash AVALANCHE from shorter UK domain names

At least

At least they're asking current owners of the corresponding 3rd level domains first. They could just have made it a total free for all.

Google coughs up $17m to end Safari STALKER COOKIE brouhaha

NSA

"By tracking millions of people without their knowledge, Google violated not only their privacy, but also their trust"

It's not only Google doing that now is it!

Mandatory HTTP 2.0 encryption proposal sparks hot debate

Re: TLS needs to be fixed first

I always wondered why web browsers became hugely prejudiced against self-signed SSL certs, especially IE (of old) and other devices that just refuse to let you add an exception.

I've always thought the concept of putting your trust in a central authority is a bit disgusting, as there's pretty much noone I trust more on this planet than myself (sad but true). It turns out giving everyone a gentle push towards commercial CAs certainly favours the snoopers! If you have everyone running around being their own "CA" with self-signed certs and root private keys then that's much harder to subvert than a few thousand commercial CAs, who have no choice but to do whatever the gov's law men tell them.

I'd like to have seen some leniency given to self-signed certs if the cert's serial/modulus was also installed in a particular DNS TXT record for that domain. Then a visitor could be sure that whoever is in control of the web server is also in control of DNS for that domain. Though how do you guarantee the correct person is in charge of both! How would a vistor know their DNS lookup hasn't been intercepted to return a forged cert serial to complete the MITM attack. One answer could be DNSSEC... but then you ask, who has the root keys for your TLD!

BT Sport scores own goal with £897m Champions League footie rights deal

Re: Mental!

Oh yes I'm aware of the streaming sites. Not that I've ever used them of course, oh no, ahem.

I should have clarified that I actually subscribe to Eurosport Player since I refuse to pay for Sky, that and the budget never being signed off by the missus. I've always really enjoyed Eurosport coverage of all sports so I'm happy to pay them a few beans per month. Just a shame it's Silverlight and I could totally ditch Windows on my HTPC.

So my only method of getting BT Sport would be to subscribe to BT broadband and quite frankly I'd rather stick pins in my eyes.

Mental!

RIP MotoGP on Eurosport :( Now only available on BT Sport.

What's annoying is that I know how this will all turn out. They'll get bored / run out of money in a few years then coverage will end up back on Eurosport. Can't we just fast fwd past this inevitable debacle?

BT have gone crazy with these football TV rights and now that has set the market price for any future negotiations. I'd like to see a model where you could just subscribe to all your team's Premier League games, including the Saturday 3pm matches. I have literally no time or interest in watch the matches of teams I don't support. To prevent the TV money being dominated by the better supported teams, you have a standard price with all subscription money going to the Premier League and split evenly amongst all teams. Not being able to watch the 3pm kick offs (legitimately) is annoying, especially when there's live English commentary at all the games and they're being beamed live around the world.

Oracle's nemesis MariaDB releases sleekest seal yet to beta

Storage engine?

"Red Hat making it its new storage engine; Fedora making it the default implementation of MySQL in Fedora 19;"

Red Hat's new storage engine? Please elaborate!

Crowdfunded audit of 'NSA-proof' encryption suite TrueCrypt is GO

Audit

But who's doing the audit?!!

If you're not paying, you're product: If you ARE paying, it's no better

Re: A very timely article...

I've been running a test of BitTorrent Sync (yyaarrrrrrhhhhh) on our local file server and remote backup server for the design team and it's working well, since they're mostly freelancers and remote workers. Shame it's not open source though but the Linux version is well thought out.

The best thing is that it's forced them to actually bother about how they manage their active files/directories, making my life of managing their sh*t much easier. Only active issues/projects are stored in the BT sync share, with old issues moved off to a read-only FTP archive. ~20GB of large design files and hi-res images seem to be syncing quite nicely.

Want a unified data centre? Don't forget to defrag the admins

VMware Snapshots? For real?

"And if you are being really sensible you will do backups at hypervisor level anyway, instead of agent-based ones on each virtual machine’s guest operating system."

Aaaarrrggghhhhgggg. Aaaarrrrggggggghhhhhhfffffffuuuuuuuccccccccc********

Cinnamon Desktop: Breaks with GNOME, finds beefed-up Nemo

Mint user

I've been using Mint full-time now for just under a year and it's pretty good. Much better than when I last tried running a Linux desktop distro on my laptop (3 years ago). There's a few things that need adding though to maximise its appeal...

1) Desktop icon alignment in columns AND rows (Nemo)

2) Easier configuration of desktop icon and font size (Nemo)

3) Keyboard control of the favourites panel in the Cinnamon menu

Netgear router admin hole is WIDE OPEN, but DON'T you dare go in, warns infosec bod

WNDR3700v2 owner here...

And very happy with it... The OpenWRT installation was a breeze! Bought specifically to run OpenWRT and it installs using upgrade firmware page of the Netgear interface.

LOL @ internet of things

See title.

Island-hopping Beardy Branson: I'm dodging rain, not taxes

So what?

Someone who has a house in another country, is living in another country?

And who cares if it is for tax reasons? If it's not illegal then I'm fine with it and I'm not ashamed to admit that I would do exactly the same. I don't voluntarily pay more tax than I'm legally obliged to now and would make sure that continues that if I became a billionaire. The guilt-tripping by politicians and the media really hacks me off, as if they are morally superior to anyone/anything, which by definition is impossible.

I expect the Sunday Times will be running the same article for all the others on their rich lists.

Canadian operator EasyDNS stands firm against London cops

watch out

Watch out eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Discogs and Google. They're coming for you next... Since you enable people to obtain "pirated" (second hand) material.

Oh wait...

I've not bought a brand new DVD/CD for years. I always go 2nd hand on principle though even physical media is out for me these days. My physical storage space is too valuable for me to fill it with the tat that's churned out by these media cartels. Add in the time that it would take to consume their media then I'm at a huge net loss.

Anyone who decides to fund/approve activities like this, presumably diverting any tax money away from the priorities of ensuring a healthy and well-educated population, needs to be punched. Give me a refund.

Do-it-yourself Dropbox: Western Digital's My Cloud 2TB NAS box

Check this out

Here's a kickstarter thing I saw a while back, looks like they've busted through their target! It's a small gadget formerly called plug, now lima, that attaches between an external HDD and your router.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brain-of-your-devices

Just thought it might be of interest to someone looking at this.

'Hacked' estate agency Foxtons breaks glass, pulls password reset cord

Law

Make it a prosecutable offence to develop/maintain/own a website that doesn't perform basic secure password storage techniques. Salt, hash with SHA256+ and add a bit of pepper stored in the file system. Or ideally just use Bcrypt.

Having some sort of legislation to punish those who store the personal data of others insecurely would have been a better use of time and money than that bonkers cookie law which requires people to botch on nasty cookie consent bars onto sites. Just wait until people start getting nasty with the HTML5 browser storage APIs, cookies will seem like a walk in the park.

If you don't know how to store this stuff securely then you're in the wrong industry. The problem is website designers who have zero knowledge of software engineering principles thinking that reading a few PHP tutorials will allow themselves to unlock job title "website developers" and a higher salary. And companies who don't do security audits of code/databases.

British spooks seize tech from Snowden journo's boyfriend at airport

Re: He was lucky :-(

If voting was actually that powerful and able to effect the amount of change that you suggest, there is no way we would be allowed to do it.

I'm not saying that I don't vote. I toddle along and put an X in the box (the mark of the illiterate) from the menu of liars, scumbags and idiots, like everyone else does. But at the end of the day I'm still voting for liars, scumbags and idiots.

"Politicians are not born. They are excreted."

- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106BC - 43BC

Microsoft SkyDrive, Outlook stricken by cloud outage

Ask for a refund!

Oh.

MS brandishes 'Katana' HTTP/2.0 server

Lols

"Microsoft" and "HTTP server" in the same sentence? You guys!

Being serious for a second though, I hope the working group are sensible about what will be fed back into the specs from this implementation. Though maybe it needs a bit of balance since at the moment it seems like Google are driving it forward with SPDY.

Microsoft to Google: Please remove us from internet

google site:microsoft.com

Ever tried using the built-in bing search at microsoft.com to search for technical docs/info?

They must know that the only way to actually search their site is to use google and site:microsoft.com

As much as I'm not particularly fond of any mega-globo-corp-bastards, Google's search engine is actually pretty good at returning what I'm looking for. I tried DuckDuckGo for a while but the results are just never quite right.

Sky falling: 119,000 Brits flee O2, Be after Murdoch broadband gobble

Re: Static IP

I don't think Sky offer IPv6 either.

Static IP

The deafening silence from Be/Sky as to whether my static IP service would continue has forced me to move to another provider and I've needed to make similar arrangements at a few other sites. Got my MAC through earlier this week and got a migration date to a new provider. FTTC is available but I just don't need that faster speed for the higher price.

Back up all you like - but can you resuscitate your data after a flood?

Re: You're not using MySQL's built-in replication???

You don't have to rewrite application code to take advantage of MySQL replication, only if you want to use replication for load balancing/distribution. I have several DB servers with passive slaves, just ticking along. If nothing else it's certainly better than not doing it!

Even if there's slight replication lag (marginal in our experience) the chances are that the data on the slave is still more recent than your last backup.

We've recently deployed a Unitrends virtual appliance and very good it is too!

Apache OpenOffice 4.0 debuts with IBM code side and centre

Re: Now this is the way of the future of open software!

GIMP is so close it annoys me. I'm tempted to set up some sort of crowd-funding project to get CMYK support (full switch to GEGL engine needed I believe) added to GIMP. That's the only thing stopping me switching my entire workflow.

Better batch facilities would be good as well. At the moment I tend to just use ImageMagick for that kind of stuff that I've built up over the years.

LibreOffice

I'm a pretty heavy user of LibreOffice and have been since the fork. The improvement in LibO in these last few years is staggering compared to the progress OO had made previously. With LibO performance and stability appear to have improved massively, I believe they're gradually re-writing loads of old Java code and replacing it with Python. It still loads slower than Office XP though on most of my machines.

The only things that I stumble on are probably also problems in OO. Performance in Calc bogs a bit when you have a few graphs/charts going on. Though pivot tables no longer crash spectacularly like they used to in OO before I switched (often taking the document with it!). I wish there was some sort of "presenter view" in Impress like there is in PowerPoint.

Overall though either of these basically have 98% of users covered. The problem is habit and awareness. It's a difficult battle to win when an MS Office trial is bundled with new PC purchases and people just think Word, Excel, Outlook etc.

Outlook son of Hotmail goes titsup for many in the US and UK

Ask for a refund

Oh.

Internet daddies win Blighty's 'Nobel for engineering'

thing

UK.gov... "Thanks for creating this internet thing so we can spy on it, have £1m!"

"Lord Browne of Madingley, chairman of the prize trustees". What? Sounds like a made up person or a made up job. Probably does get paid big bucks though and I'm sure he works really hard and deserves it.

Premier League seeks court order to ban footie-streaming Swedish site

TV rights

The reason I don't subscribe to Sky is because I only support one football team. The last thing I want to do is pay a subscription when I have total disdain for teams in 95% of the matches.

If I could subscribe to a TV channel and just get every single match for my team or pay per view for a reasonable price, then I'd be interested. To prevent the better-supported clubs raking in more money than others you pay your sub to the league who then divide it equally amongst all the teams. Hopefully that would

rid us of the shiny suits and casual racism/sexism of Sky Sports as well.

It annoys me how there are TV cameras at all the games and they are shown live around the world yet in the country where (like it or not) it's the national sport, you can only watch a tiny percentage of the games live. It's apparently to make sure that people actually go and watch it live yet they go and charge £50 for a ticket.

Perhaps if there was a legal option available to watch a particular match live over the internet, people might, you know, pay for it. They should be asking themselves why people use questionable methods to view the sport in the first place, clearly the service the football organising cartel provides is failing. I'd pay £15 per month to watch all my team's games without some annoying kids swearing in a chatbox on the side of the screen.

It's just a shame that football, like everything else in this country, seems to be run by dumb arse blazer types and former Peers looking for a final bit of retirement cash who wouldn't know their monkey rush from their Nottingham Hotspur.

Huawei unwraps Ascend P6: World's slimmest smartphone

Looks good!

As a satisfied owner of a Huawei G300 this looks pretty good. The build quality of the G300 is excellent and the battery life is much better than my old HTC Desire. I used to get about 1 possibly 2 days out of that old thing when it spent most of its time in my jacket pocket, even with HTC Sense removed, CyanogenMod installed and data/GPS/WiFi turned off unless needed. The Huawei I'm on now I can get a full working week, using it for music and light web/e-mail.

If this P6 can buid on that then I'd be tempted if the price is right. If this is the slimmest phone ever I bet the battery life will be dire though.

I can't say I'm concerned about the prospect of the Chinese possibly being able to access any of my data. Google already have their fat fingers throughout Android, my network operator probably does whatever it likes for the UK gov so I may as well help the Chinese along a bit as well since I have no particular fondness for any of these three countries.

On a vaguely related note, it's a disgrace that you can get phones with resolutions equal to or better than most laptops. I just do not understand why it's so hard to get a laptop with a resolution better than 1366x768 for around £500 or less. Just a half-decent screen resolution please. It's annoying that I can't find much better than my 8 year old Asus with 1680x1050 without spending £800+. Yeah I know, these first world problems.

Partying, beer and C++: How to choose the right Comp-Sci degree for you

Re: Alternatively ditch comp sci all together

"Math's"

That is all.

Users rage as Fasthosts virtual servers go titsup... again

Terrible

I have ended up migrating several different customers from Fasthosts over the years because of terrible service. I'm seriously surprised they are still doing business and have any customers left. They are truly the worst service provider I have ever dealt with and by some margin.

Can lightning strike twice? Intel has another crack at Thunderbolt

Licensing costs

I think part of the problem is that USB is everywhere and cheap to implement. Thunderbolt isn't everywhere and is relatively expensive in terms of licensing for manufacturers, more than USB anyway. Most people don't need the bandwidth that Thunderbolt offers so USB 3 is perfectly adequate.

IIRC it was the relatively high licensing costs of IEEE 1394 (Firewire) that helped its downfall, despite having higher bandwidth than USB at the time.

The thing that interested me vaguely about Thunderbolt was the potential for longer distance video connections using optical Thunderbolt cables. It would have been useful when I was in the outdoor events industry and often needing to rig up dirty 100m+ links between projectors and laptops, often looking at solutions like cat5 baluns or wireless HDMI and never getting them working to any sort of satisfactory level. We never had the budgets for pro audio/video transmission gear for things like that but Thunderbolt could have been great. I don't think they ever actually formulated the optical spec though.

Three's mobile data goes titsup in mysterious spreading outage

Re: [e-mail]

I hope the body of this post is your password

El Reg drills into Office365: Mass email migration

Outlook != IMAP client

"My quixotic struggle to get Outlook 2003 and Gmail to cooperate in a friendly fashion serves me as a daily reminder of that."

Outlook, from all years, is a terrible non-compliant IMAP client. That shouldn't surprise though, because Exchange is a terrible non-compliant IMAP server.

When I last dealt with Exchange at any scale the officially recommended solutions to allow non-Windows systems to access Exchange were: terminal services (seriously!), Entourage or webmail (from non-IE browsers). IMAP has always been an afterthought in Outlook/Exchange. We made do with IMAP access for a couple of years but then moved on because it was so terrible.

Bill Gates: Corporate tax is not a moral issue

Morally repugnant

Since when is it the job of politicians to cast moral judgements? Never. The mere fact that they appear to think that they are in a position of moral superiority to pass such judgements is pretty appalling. By definition politicians cannot be morally superior to anyone or anything.

What is morally repugnant is acknowledging a problem has existed for so long, attempting to shift the blame onto others, attempting to guilt-trip companies and individuals to pay more than they are legally obliged to in tax, whilst paying the minimum amount of tax themselves, and failing to change the rules that they are responsible for.

If the rules are really complicated and difficult to change, then just say so. Don't just sit there for years and constantly whinge about companies that don't appear to be breaking any rules.

"Politicians are not born. They are excreted."

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

If you've bought DRM'd film files from Acetrax, here's the bad news

Re: The PirateBay

Please don't shove your BitTorrent downloads of Miss Congeniality 2 Cruise Control through Tor at the expense of people who really need the service.

EU boffins in plan for 'more nutritious' horsemeat ice cream

hecatonne?

What does mean?

Schmidt: Don't like our tiny tax bills? Google this... 'Change the law'

Re: Hmm...

Sprit of the law? I assume you're referring to cricket here.

Rank hypocrisy

Oh no... can't... must... resist...

It's in their interest to pay as little tax as is allowable by law. Just as it's in my interest to pay as little as is allowable by law. Just as it's in the interests of every single MP to do the same. I bet there are very few people who voluntarily pay more tax than they are legally bound to and I bet they are not politicians!

Calling it morally repugnant and attempting to guilt-trip people into making additional contributions, while failing to make additional contributions themselves is what disgusts me. Since when is it the job of politicians to cast moral judgements? That's not their job. The fact that any politician can believe they are morally superior to anyone or anything is exasperating, by definition that is impossible.

It's morally repugnant to constantly whinge about people/companies that haven't broken any actual laws, while they themselves pay as little tax as possible, and fail to actually change the rules which they themselves are supposed to be responsible for.

This is not a new problem!

US boffin builds 32-way Raspberry Pi cluster

Boffin?

Did the boffin follow the guide published on this very website by any chance?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/12/raspberry_pi_supercomputer/

Thanks to the awesome work of real boffins at Southampton Uni...

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/

Adobe price hike: Your money or your files, frappuccino sippers

Re: Upload

So how is that cloud? If the application and data is still running on your machine, like it always has. Oh right, I forgot about the special marketing department usage of "cloud".

Upload

I'm interested to know how they propose I get my files into this creative cloud in the first place. I routinely end up working with monster PSDs and InDesign files which would take a days to upload with my ADSL connection. Even needing to import local media, say 50x 10MB JPGs, would probably take most of the day. According to Openreach they're not planning on changing that at my exchange any time soon. Not a problem as file transfers on my LAN are faster than any FTTC connection could manage anyway.

What is the difference between Virt and Cloud?

Cloud != cluster

When it comes to virtualisation clusters, I always feel the word cluster is slightly mis-used. My definition of cluster (rightly or wrongly) always leads me to assume that the computing resources of each hardware node are pooled and actively shared amongst all VMs, to the point that if a hardware node goes down the software should continue to run albeit with reduced resource access if required. Though I guess that's more of an HPC/beowulf cluster definition.

In a virtualisation context, "cluster" tends to mean a collection of beefy hardware nodes with different VMs running on each. So if a hardware node goes down, it takes those VMs with it. Since your storage is usually separated these days it's simple to spin up those VMs on other hardware nodes so not a huge nightmare. Not like trying to cobble together some similar bits to get another physical machine up and running that's for sure.

But I guess to me "cloud" means you can have multiple copies of the same application/VM running on geographically separated hardware hardware nodes, with a load balancer directing requests between the available VMs. So a cluster of VMs rather than a cluster of hardware nodes. Could "cloud" be the platform that provides abstracted storage, abstracted compute nodes, and load balancing that allows your application to keep running?

Who knows, who cares, what I do know is that you're nothing without the word somewhere in your marketing bumpf.

Firefox 21 ships with performance-profiling Health Report

Telemetry

IIRC Firefox has been transmitting anonymous telemetry info for a few versions now and it does (or did) prompt you when you install/upgrade with a bar across the top of the window.

People complaining about the invasion of privacy... what alternative browser are you using? Chrome? And what's that, you have a GMail account? And you use Google Search and Google DNS? Right.

Agree on the bloat though. Sync should be an addon. The new downloads integration is horrible, with the download retention config option not being honoured. Though still the best browser going IMO. Customisation is everything to me and I would probably die without some of the addons I use. I just wish they would stop needlessly tinkering with the UI, which has been ideal since v3/v4.

Anyone not complaining about Firefox now though... just wait until the Aurora theme becomes the default later this year. Then you'll have something to complain about! Oh and I believe the addon bar will be disappearing so it will be interesting to see what happens to those addons I use that are only accessible through the addon bar and don't expose toolbar buttons.

Boffins plan to drop €250,000 TEST-TUBE BURGER on London

A veggie mate of mine has a rule that he won't eat anything with a face. With most meat supplied these days, the face is probably the best you can hope for.

Re: Too much methane

Ha ha! That was a fact I've known for years but never thought it would be required on this, an IT site. Have an upvote!

Setanta, ESPN couldn't make UK footie TV work. How will BT Sport?

MotoGP, Eurosport

Completely gutted about the MotoGP. Not about the BBC losing it. But I've been watching it with Toby & Jules on Eurosport for over 10 years so it will be sad to see that go. I reckon WSBK will be next.

What's insane is that they're trying to compete with Sky on content, yet they don't even have 1/10th of the content. When you compare the price to Sky Sports (once you've bought everything else) then BT Sport is expensive as well, per minute per channel.

It's annoying that I know exactly what will happen. Subscribers surprisingly won't suddenly ditch Sky and flock to the service and definitely won't take out a subscription to BT in addition to Sky. So they'll pump less and less money into the coverage over the next 5 years, eventually for BT Sport to be canned or morphed into some other half-baked service. And Dorna (commercial operator of MotoGP) will be begging Eurosport and the BBC to take it back.

Still not giving up my Eurosport Player subscription, still great value for £3 per month. Though it is Silverlight.