Posts by Turbojerry

A few reasons why cops didn't immediately shoot down London Gatwick airport drone menace

It's not like they can triangulate the signals!

Apparently only the Nazis 1939-45 had that technology, all the vast signals intelligence apparatus we have is apparently done with string and tin cans.

The future often starts as a toy, so don't shun toy VR this Christmas

I've been interested in VR for a long time, and it was god awful for a long time. Then Oculus came along and I got a DK2, their second development kit, and it was ok as a seated experience, there were a bunch of interesting demos and some things were actually pretty fun, using a program called Vorpx I experienced Portal 2 and Half-Life 2 in VR and that was quite good. Then the HTC Vive was announced, and there were a bunch of Youtube gamers trying them out, having the ability to walk around your room and have your hands present with the Vive wand controllers seemed to make a huge difference so I put in a pre-order. I have to say, even with limited resolution and field of view it is enough to really make you feel like you're somewhere else, if you search on Youtube for Brookhaven Experiment, you'll see people actually freaking out as they are attacked by zombies in VR. I didn't freak out playing Brookhaven, but I felt genuine fear and my adrenaline pumping, even though I knew it was just a game. I would highly recommend that anyone try a demo at one of the Curries stores that have demos or where ever they can even if they have no interest in buying one as experiencing it is really the only way to understand that we are just at the edge of something new.

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

Images are just data

By doing this the government has said any data that is encoded as an image without an attribution can be used by anyone, how long before torrent clients automatically encode the data they send as a gif / TIFF / BMP etc?

Congress puts PIPA and SOPA on back burner

Filesonic has disabled sharing

The banner on their site says "All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally", they haven't changed the siteslogan tag though which still says "The next generation of file sharing platform". Combined with the take down of MegaUpload I can see this being a warning to those who think storing and sharing information via "the cloud" is a good idea.

Plods to get dot-uk takedown powers - without court order

I'm going to become a Special

Then I can take down google.co.uk that will be the warm up to taking gov.uk offline, remember gov.uk have engaged in copyright infringement such as with the Iraq dossier they copied off the net without permission or attribution so the law will be on my side, and if anyone in the government wants to interfere with me going about my duties as a police officer I'll be glad to arrest them all from the PM on down.

Wikileaks' DNS pulls plug, citing collateral DDoS damage

and what is the alleged "sex crime"?

Not wearing a condom, a kid you not, and the woman who complained to the authorities was so distraught at Julian not wearing a condom she got him breakfast afterward.

Sky confirms UK Online closure

Sad indead

I've been with UK Online for a few years, and they have been excellent, I won't be moving to Sky, obviously, as I can't get Be where I am the only choice will be to move as they are the only decent equivalent if I stay in Britain. So much for all the OFCOM BS about getting better broadband services in this country, perhaps the Coalition might do us all a favour and give them a poke or better yet take the network away from BT altogether and let a thousand LLU services bloom.

Mandybill: All the Commons drama

Wikileaks will definately be blocked

Joseph Goebbels said it best, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

The Great Firewall of Britain is born

Not a surprise really, the only thing that could have stopped it would have been Guy Fawkes, I guess if we want open access to the Net we'll have to use a proxy service like the Chinese do.

UK gov admits gamble on massive net snoop plan

A cunning plan

1. Reg readers produce pretty brochures, website and PowerPoint presentation for the technology.

2. Get government to spend the money on our "solution"

3. Never deliver the project, it's not like they would notice any difference from all other gov IT.

4. Freedom and Profit!!! FTW!

Ofcom gets power to punish pirates

Carter helps repressive governments

What about people using Tor / Freenet / I2P2 etc to help people in countries with repressive governments circumvent their Internet restrictions, if their connection is used to share a copyrighted file will they be restricted to? What about people with WiFi with no encryption? Or cracked WEP? Or paid for with a cloned CC? Or using a web torrent service, will mere use indicate a copyright violation? Or being part of a botnet? Who is allowed to make a copyright complaint? Can I send them my noisy neighbours IP address and create a legal DOS attack? Or maybe against a company I don't like?

If this goes through it will destroy so much and gain very little as I would suspect anyone filesharing with even a tiny bit of knowledge will either use an anonymous proxy / Usenet / web torrent download service etc and therefore will not be caught, in other words, epic fail.

UK tech quango eyes 10Gbit broadband

A simple formula for what should happen

Core network should run @ xGE where x is the current standard every time the standard goes up one notch the plans for backbone upgrade should be completed within 6 months and roll out started within 12 months and completed within 24 months for all major metropolitan areas and 36 months for the rest of the country, businesses should have access to the backbone directly at xGE and consumers at xGE/10, all connections should be full bore without download limits and this formula should be overseen by a government body and enabled by primary legislation, successful delivery of the network should mean a tidy bonus to those in charge, failure should mean they are fired and banned from holding any other government job.

Cyber attack could bring US military response

The bombing of 2600 meetings starts

... in 5 minutes. - Obama channeling Reagan.

"In America, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the Muslims, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Muslim;

And then they came for the hackers, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a hacker;

And then... they came for me... And by that time there was no one left to speak up." - me, channeling Martin Niemöller

Vatican endorses Darwin, slights intelligent design

Now all they need to do is

Say Nazis, IRA terrorists, Spanish Inquisitors and pedos are evil, expose all in their midst and hand them over to the authorities where necessary and get rid of the Nazi Pope.

You're barcoded: The sneaky under-25 route to compulsory ID

How to beat the "credit crunch"

1. Nip over the Channel.

2. Buy large quantities of booze.

3. Sell to anyone who doesn't have "proper" ID / Benjamin Button / etc.

4. Profit!!!

Miliband refuses to release torture documents

Perverting The Course of Justice

Is a crime and Milliband should be charged, but he won't, justice is dead in this country.

Parallel importer jailed for up to nine months in Microsoft case

Global arbitrage

This is allowed for labour, stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies but not for copyrighted or trademarked goods, creating inefficient pricing of those goods, this stupidity is spreading for example Kenya and Ethiopia trademarking it's coffee- -

http://www.gachewacoffee.com/2008/03/kenya-repositioned-as-coffee-trade-mark.html

It is a form of protectionism and can only lead to more inefficient markets and lower economic growth.

UK.gov backs ISPs on charging content providers, throttling P2P

HQ iPlayer == Bittorrent

As for charging content providers, the whole point of the Net is you buy an IP connection and what goes through it is dealt with according to certain rules which everyone knows and follows, if you choose not to play by the rules of the Internet you aren't supplying an Internet connection, plus of course the deep packet inspection necessary would fall foul of RIPA and EU privacy laws, I'd love to see people from the IETF pile on to uk.gov and our esteemed EU Telecoms Commissioner, Viviane Reding too. Even if this got off the ground everyone would just switch to Tor and encrypted VPNs or SSH connections anyway, so all it does is make things more difficult and expensive for the user. They don't suggest things like multicast and caching to alleviate congestion, which seems the obvious thing to do, but then why have a cheap engineers solution when you can have an expensive, slow, loophole filled solution created by corrupt politicians.

Open source anti-Semitic as well as communist shock

Semitic is a Language Group, Not a Race or Ethnic Group

Please get your terms correct-

http://www.counterpunch.org/hamod07122003.html

The correct term for the spoofed email would be anti-Zionist not anti-Semitic, sadly the likes of Bernie Madoff do lend credence to those who view all Jews as dishonest crooks, though the Madoffs of the world are nearly all rabid Zionists as the idea of being a Master Race chosen by God and endowed by him with the Chosen Land means they view all non-Jews as subhuman, a psychopathic belief system no different than any other tyranny of one group over another.

Deviants, perverts, 'weirdos' - who's going down?

Gedankenexperiment

A little thought experiment. Could crime scene photos come under this law? Lets assume yes, then the police with those photos would be criminalized, so they go, the case is then taken over by other officers, who are now also criminalized and so on. Okay lets say the police are excluded, what about other people who handle the photos, barristers etc. they would be similarly criminalized, what about coroners who have the photos for an inquiry? As the law is so broadly drawn I can imagine that the possession of other types of evidence to be used in court proceedings may criminalize those who require it for justice to be done. .

Stop'n'search gets touchy-feely

Have the Met created more problems than they have solved

I was going to ask out of those 31,797 people stopped and searched how many might have signed the OSA and be in a position to compromise British security in some way, given that one poster has already mentioned signing the OSA and working in defence as I once did on the basis of a very unscientific roster of posters here that would make it 500+ people if 1% were angry enough about it to do something to breach security then the Met have not enhanced our security but compromised it at least 5 times.

BT price rises go down well

In a deflationary environment

only abusive monopolies can raise prices, these require corrupt officials and government to look the other way, and I'm more convinced than ever we need a cleansing in this country to cut out the rot that is at its heart.

UK.gov 'to create anti-net piracy agency'

Business Plan 2.0

1. Set up botnet

2. Set up ISP with anon VPN included

3. Use botnet to infringe copyrights

4. Sign up botnet members who have been accused of copyright violations

5. PROFIT!!!!!!!

Alternatively if you are a terrorist don't set up the VPN ISP and just use the botnet to destroy the internet in the UK.

Take a hammer to your hard drive, shrieks Which?

Thermite

Much more fun than a hammer, and has the anarchists cookbook geek factor.

UK.gov to spend hundreds of millions on snooping silo

@@The Trousering AC

You're not thinking like a real Supervillain, as this would include the electronic communications of the Treasury and Bank of England, so we could do a 419er on the entire government, then hire the military back as our goons and waterboard Gordon and the rest of them for evar! BWAHAHAHAHA!

'Milestone' Microsoft service pack staples .NET's stomach

What is the point of .NET?

I know it is used by many MS only shops, but other than lots of buzzwords (Managed Code etc) I've never understood the appeal, and I know that many who started by evangelising it have turned away in recent years, Java is at least crossplatform-ish (differences in threading etc), though these days it seems just as easy to use C++ with all the cross platform libs (Boost, wxWidgets etc) out there. Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to why it should be chosen except for your thrown together, bog standard, VB.NET DB apps?

McKinnon UFO hack 'looked like cyberterrorist attack'

re:don't sneeze

Not everything the American government views as terrorism, there are a few exceptions-

1. IRA terrorists murdering British people.

2. Israelis murdering anyone they feel like who isn't Jewish.

3. Americans murdering anyone they feel like who isn't American.

4. Ex-Cubans murdering current Cubans.

FBI sets out case against anthrax 'rogue scientist'

Battelle

So the anthrax was produced by Battelle, the same company who employs Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov AKA Ken Alibek formerly of Biopreparat, the Soviet bioweapons manufacturer, who brought the technology to create the small particle, highly aerogenic anthrax used in the attacks to the US, but the FBI expects us to believe it was Ivins, who didnt know how to weaponise the anthrax? Of course the other question is why would a smart scientist like Ivins put anthrax with granularity smaller than the holes in a paper envelope in one to send it? Of course if it was part of the CIA operation that sent anthrax substitute around the US in tests that had a much larger grain size than the Alibek / Battelle weaponised anthrax it would make sense, but then we have CIA and Battelle bio-terror conspiracy.

Inside the tent, the best bioterrorist money could buy?

re:weaponised

The anthrax would have to be milled to separate the spores and additives added to stop it clumping to form the highly aerogenic anthrax used in the attacks, this is consistent with the processes that came out of the Soviet bio-warfare program at BioPreparat and the technology was transfered to the US by Dr. Alibekov who went to work at Battelle Memorial Institute not Ft. Detrick so Ivins would not have had the know how or technology to do the weaponisation.

Senate approves FISA makeover and telco wiretap immunity

The moral of the story is

Don't ever communicate with Americans as you're probably being spied on, unless you want that free trip to Gitmo, afterall, you're not American, and therefore a terrorist. God these people are psychopaths.

Transatlantic data sharing talks stumble over access to justice

All your IDs are belong to us

So what is to stop someone in the US government committing ID theft against 300+ million EU citizens? Nothing.

Gordo's DNA database claims branded 'ridiculous'

By the same logic

All 13,964 offences would never have been commited had the population of the UK been locked up in labour camps, I guess that's going to be in the next Labour manifesto.

OpenSolaris still has some Linux copying to do

Solaris drivers

Drivers are a huge problem especially for disks and that includes with GRUB the bootloader. I have tried to install OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 on my main machine and it refuses to recognise the SATA/PATA drives in GRUB after the install so it doesnt even load Solaris, so I bought an old IDE card and put one of my old drives on it, I now get to stage2 in GRUB and then it restarts the machine, so my alternatives are run it on an old P3 box which it does install on, but is slow (I'm cross-compiling several hundred thousand lines of my own C++ code) or run it in a VM, which makes it about as slow as my old machine, unless anyone here could recommend a PATA or SATA interface card that is compatible with both GRUB and Solaris?

UK culture sec wants a public service web

NewSpeak Impartial == Minitrue propaganda agency

A few things you'll find on the unregulated Internet but wont find on your "impartial" British TV stations -

1. Evidence of Iraq NOT having WMDs, such as the debreifing of Hussein Kamel Saddams cousin and Iraqi defector, aluminum tubes being used for rockets not uranium centrifuges etc.

2. Evidence that the evidence presented to justify war and then it being an intelligence "mistake" was a deliberate lie and was an orchestrated black propaganda campaign that went back many years, even before 9/11, e.g. the theft of documents, seals etc from the Niger embassy back in 2000 that was used to create the forged documents that claimed Iraq was buying uranium ore from Niger.

3. Evidence that the anthrax attacks on some American politicians was a culmination of a CIA anthrax letter project and DIA Project Jefferson high quality anthrax.

4. Evidence that Dr. David Kelly was murdered.

The economy: A big Arab did it and ran away, claims PM

If you want a dose of reality

Why oil is going through the roof at Market TIcker

http://market-ticker.denninger.net/2008/05/thrombosis-thursday.html

I would really recommend anyone who's interested in what is really happening in the world markets read his daily blog, he may use some trader terminology but once you get passed that his analysis is very good.

IBM's Cell blade boosted by memory and floating point gains

Less processing power than my GeForce

I get ~500GFLOPs out of my nVidia Geforce graphics card with faster (GDDR3) memory and how much do they want for a Cell blade I wonder, a lot more than my graphics card I suspect and I'm a generation behind, the 9800GX2 will do over 1TFLOP, of course you need an algorithm that can be parallized to get that, but using the CUDA SDK it's pretty easy to write code, it's not Occam on a T800 hypercube, but it is much faster if not quite as much fun.

I want a baby, coos broody Paris Hilton

@Baby naming

It's name shall be Damen and it shall be marked with the number of The Beast!

ISP reporting network to pierce bandwidth smokescreens

@Neil Greatorex

Any Entanet reseller, full 2meg for around £35/month, one of their resellers is www.ukfsn.org who use the profits to support UK open source if you're so inclined. Note: I have no affiliation to Enta other than as a satisfied customer for the last 18months.

Alienware ships 'most powerful' 15in laptop to Brits

re:I'm typing this on an m15X

Actually it should be useful for more than games as the Nvidia 88000GTX can be used for parallel processing under CUDA.

Boffins chomp noggin-nobbling narcotics

Obligatory Bill Hicks quote

"Today, a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration and that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and you are the imagination of yourself. Here's Tom with the weather...!"

US student planned to ice Chuck Norris

@Sarah Bee

You're way to Kew-l for S-kew-l...

FIPR: ICO gives BT 'green light for law breaking' with Phorm

@Alexander Hanff

Speak to him on the phone, record the conversation and send it to the Reg to go on as a radio prog.

Steel Cloud servers to power US Navy robo-cannon kit

re:Easy to avoid

Iraqi snipers already do that, Google for Juba.

Tory tackles Whitehall on Wiki-updating spooks

Top gov.uk contributions to Wikipedia

... Iraq possessed WMD up to the second Gulf war...

... Dr. David Kelly wasnt murdered...

... Tony Blair is not a sociopath who lied Britain into a criminal war...

... MI6 being run by oil companies is just a conspiracy theory...

... The ID Register and ID cards are to protect your rights as subhuman slaves to the master race of MPs and civil servants...

... The disks werent lost or stolen, they are merely temporarily misplaced...

Sweet, sweet smell of comments in code?

The author is very naive

As many have said comments are incredibly useful in many ways, what hasnt been mentioned is when you need to point to supplementary documentation, for example when using an algorithm from Knuth or PhD paper or an SSE2 tutorial or when explaining hacks required when closed source you are linking to or hardware that does not behave as documented. That said comments do not always enlighten, I still would like to get my hands on who ever commented the SPICE source with such wonderful comments as // sanity check. Also comments are very useful for anyone joining a team, you can tell from quickly scanning the source who on the team knows their stuff and who hasnt a clue, and if management should start tossing out the good coders you know it's time to call the headhunter,

Cambridge boffins draw map to Free Our Data

Simple compromise

Online data for free, paper copies and CDs charged at cost plus, that would allow useful mashups of gov.uk data while still generating some money.

Brown: Jack Bauer spook horde to tackle terrorism

Threats to Great Britain in order

Near term

1. gov.uk invading other countries thus starting a war with 1.5 billion people i.e. 1/4 of the human population of the planet, including some with nuclear weapons (Pakistan)

2. gov.uk saving it's over extended banker buddies thus destroying the value of the currency

(2 may infact save us from 1 if gov.uk cannot afford any more war, we'd be poor but alive)

Long term

1. End of cheap oil and gas / climate change

2. GM crops transfering genes to weeds creating superweeds that take over available crop land and cause mass starvation.

Coastguard, plods swoop on fake Facebook yachtmaster

Compare this to

Our boat had the gas pipe to the cooker cut, the police dropped the case as there was a lack of forensics, and they could not be bothered to interview people and follow leads, so in Britain 2008, attempted murder double plus good, forging an RYA certificate double plus ungood, you can draw your own conclusions.

Security boffins unveil BitUnlocker

@Tim Spence

"and take him to your local disused warehouse to torture "

Boy you are behind the times, no one uses warehouses these days, it's Deigo Garcia so the torturers, sorry I meant very nice CIA/MI6 personnel, can get a tan between torture sessons, I also hear the mess bar does some wicked cocktails.

UK rattles 'three strikes' filesharing sabre (again)

IP addresses are personal information, as seen on El Reg

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/22/eu_article_29_group_hear_our_roar/

"IP addresses - particularly when times are logged - can be tied to locations and often to individuals, and as such can be viewed as personal information. Exact details of the compliance regime are expected to appear in the full report."

So surely that scuppers any transfer of IP address information as it would be against EU Data Protection laws.

Also one assumes that the data from the torrent has to downloaded to verify that it is infringing, if the person that uploads the torrent includes data that is copyright to them then the BPI would be infringing on the uploaders copyright and therefore could be taken offline themselves. Or perhaps an even more cunning plan would be to add some scientology texts to music torrents, so the scientologists and the music industry could battle each other over who was infringing whos works, sort of a copyright Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla?