Posts by Levi

Tiwi spies on your children, so you don't have to

@AC -- more peer reviewing!

Did you actually bother to read the reference you posted: http://www.tfhrc.gov/safety/speed/speed.htm

"Without vehicles slowing to turn, or turning across traffic, the investigators found the risk of traveling much slower than average was much less pronounced." -- ie, it's not that slower drivers are inherently prone to crash more, it's that drivers are prone to crash more frequently when they are turning (and hence slowing down). The faster cars however crash because ... well, speed increases the risk of crashes.

"[other] researchers found a trend of increasing crash involvement for speeds above the mean speed in both rural and urban conditions - similar to the correlations reported in the early studies. However, no relationship between slower speeds and increased crash involvement was found."

Furthermore, the "U curve" was only found when limiting data to crashes between vehicles travelling in the same direction, yet "By far, the predominant crash type on rural roads is a single vehicle running off the road"

All of this pales however into insignificance compared to things like drink driving and running red lights -- something the USA is ridiculously tolerant of. I suspect that this is the primary reason you are more than twice as likely to die on the roads in the USA than the UK.

Speed limits are (like everything in life part) of a cost/benefit equation. The USA has decided to plot their data point significantly farther up the curve than the UK -- which happens to have the 2nd lowest rate of road fatalities in the OECD. Now stop whining be thankful you don't share the road with 14 year old drunk Americans.

Microsoft and HP tackle SQL-injection scourge

@Anonymous Coward

"Scanning for SQL injection / XSS attacks should be the WebServers responsibility. I have never wanted to pass sql / script via a querystring or form field."

The result will be an overzealous webserver blocking legitimate queries, or blacklist filtering that will inevitably miss a certain type of string and still allow exploitation. If you have developers who have even a basic understanding of security, webserver filtering causes far more trouble than it's worth. At the most basic level, any app framework that doesn't allow named or positional parameters in SQL strings is seriously defective.

Anyway, if a site allows SQL injection, it is already broken even to non-malicious users. Better hope that your name doesn't contain an any quotes (eg John O'Toole or John "JJ" O'Toole) or that you don't need to enter an ampersand (John & Mary).

Canadian toddler dies after VOIP 911 call

Re: Why didn't they say their address?

@AC: "Why didn't they say their fucking address?"

Read the article:

"Sylvia Luck said she gave the family's Calgary address to the operator, but the ambulance was sent to Mississauga."

I would hazard a guess that this is yet another case of an operator believing what was on their screen becuase "the computer said so" rather than using some actual judgment.

MySpace stripped of myspace.co.uk domain victory

Levi

"why not just offer to sell it to My Space?"

At least under the UDRP (which covers .com, .net. org -- I would assume the .uk resolution procedure is simlar), actively offering to sell the domain to someone else with a claim can be construed as evidence of bad faith and abusive registration. (Successful) cybersquatters should never solicit other parties to purchase their domain, they need to wait for other parties to make an offer to them.

Time to blacklist blacklists

Clueless junk filters

"or they could have just had AOL mailing list subscribers who find it easier to report as spam than unsubscribe from something they manually subscribed to"

Amen.

You may use double opt in, remove bounces from your list immediately, have huge unsubscribe notices at the top and bottom of your email, and have fewer than 1% of users mark your email as "junk", but if one of those lazy users was an AOL user you better pray. It is all too easy for legitimate users to end up on blacklists thanks to "zero [fault] tolerance" systems.

TorrentSpy filters pirated videos

Changing the hash

"Change just one character in this text file and the torrent hash changes."

... and so does the usefulness of the Bittorrent protocol. Instead of downloading the same movie from 1000 other people at once, users have to choose which variant to download, each one of which only 10 other peers have.

Satnav driver's car totalled by train

Women safer than men? Yes.

"They're not. Per kilometre, they are slightly more likely to have an accident. Women get cheaper insurance because, on average, they drive far fewer miles than men - and therefore are less likely over a year to have an accident."

Urban myths are wonderfully flexible things. Hard numbers not quite so:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16698153/

If you excluded drink driving and 20-30 year old males, the numbers might or might not change (you and I both don't know) .. but we're talking averages here and on average men *are* more unsafe drivers than women. They are more likely to kill, and to be killed on the road.

Personally, I'm an above average driver, can exceed speed limits and can drive while talking on a mobile phone all without increasing my risk of an accident -- but that's because I'm a man. This is also why speed cameras should apply only to women and not to me.