Posts by Justicesays

Game designer spills beans on chubby-fancying chap with his stolen Mac

Re: Crime and Punishment

So what level of crime does merit the attention of the police?

Should we just take all the theft and burglary crimes off the books? They are essentially going unpoliced, as even the low hanging "we know exactly who did it,and where they are" crimes of this nature are being ignored.

This is simply going to open up the doors to community based punishment actions, acts of the nature described in this article are just the start. Shortly there will be a "Scum in your area" website, which will name and shame people for their crimes (rightly or wrongly). Oh wait, the UK justice system is designed to prevent that from happening by not making truth a valid defence in a libel case.

I guess the site needs to be run from some offshore location , anonymously.

Shouldn't be too hard to get advertising revenue from Security, Alarm and personal defence companies.

Ofcom: Parents, here's how to keep grubby tots from buying Smurfberries

Re: The obvious solution

Was I the only person who read the articles about how the "social game networks" are actually funded by essentially con men, spammers and rip off merchants ?

http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

This is the same ecosystem that is moving to FTP apps on your mobile phones.

Enjoy.

Re: Can you no longer cap your call balance?

Apparently "Capping" is (somehow) not as firm as you would think.

There is (or certainly used to be) a delay of up to a couple of days before the cap kicked in if you went over it.

This is what I like to think of as the mobile phone companies profit margin.

Of course, if you are on PAYG they can instantly detect how much you have used and stop outgoing calls straight away...

Oh S**T, here comes a robot to take my job

Re: bad example

Well,

In the "old days" you would give handwritten stuff to the typing pool to type out neatly.

If you had your own typewriter what you typed would be full of overstrikes, spelling mistakes and would take you many times longer. Only the "many times longer" applies with a desktop PC, and that is mitigated by the amount we have to type, we naturally get fast at it (generally), and can copy stuff from the internet ;p!

Now the only time I hand write stuff is a few scribbled notes before browsing the server room or in a meeting.

The cost, ease of editing of the desktop PC meant there was no future in the typing pool.

I'm not sure however that we should (or even could) keep on obsolete jobs roles that are replaced by technology.

In a free market economy, company 1 , which adopts (say) cargo loading robots for cost reasons (faster, no vacations , no accident claims) will outperform company 2 (that uses traditional manpower and thus pays more for it). This is assuming the new technology actually works as advertised,

Eventually company 2 will be undercut by company 1, and unless it moves to some niche role where docker robots cant do the job, it goes under.

The only way to avoid that is a) Banning docker robots b) Nationalizing the manual docker company and operating it at a tax-payer subsidised loss

Company 2 refusing to adopt the robots does not save the jobs, it simply costs the company its existence.

Tax man to take a bite of tech employees' free meals?

Re: Perfectly Normal for this to be taxed

Erm,

No, here is how HMRC actually handle it

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/eimanual/EIM21671.htm

They don't tax it, at all, assuming is is provided completely free of charge (and not via some kind of opt in , salary sacrifice scheme) and is available to all employees, and not some kind of banqueting club.

I do like the special exemption for directors to have better meals and wine while the plebs get bread and stew

The gaming habits of Reg readers revealed

Re: No suprises in any of that.

I own a tremendous amount of PC games due to Steams nefarious sales.

I've even finished some of them.

There is however a large shift in gaming time from single player "pay and play" style games, where you can expect someone to buy a game for £30 and play it for 27 hours then buy a new one, to games where people will quite happily play co-op or pvp multiplayer for weeks, months, even years (including MMO's in this).

People playing these games don't have the same motivation to buy a new game every few weeks.

Huddled immigrant masses face 'British values' quiz

Re: Chances are ...

And you think that's surprising?

How many people in the UK do you think can tell you how many counties there are and name them all, without looking them up. Oh, and then name all the crown dependencies and overseas territories.

Backdoor root login found in Barracuda gear - and Barracuda is OK with this

Re: SSH scans?

Moved my ssh to a different port, plus I put an ipchains wrapper around that port to block incoming ips for 5 mins on three consecutive failed ssh logins, which nicely honeypots anyone trying a brute force attack that finds the port in the first place. Haven't seen anything in the logs since I moved the port, so your average random attack doesn't bother with a port scan, just looking for low hanging fruit.

You could also use a port knock sequence if you felt inclined, or only use shared keys for access.

Leaving it unprotected on the standard port does expose you to spammy attacks,

UK games market clutches chest, bleeds out sales in 2012

Re: I love steam

"however...

downloading your entire steam library after something goes horribly pear shaped with the machine... not cool!"

Erm, this is vs digging out the physical media for your entire gaming collection, installing each from (multiple) CD/DVD's , dealing with any additional DRM they have (registration codes etc), and then, PATCHING the whole lot to the non-broken versions, with the patches for older games only being available from third party sites full of crapware and adverts?

Oh, and then losing all the save games (unless you actually back those up unlike your game installs)

Yeah, Steam makes recovering from a borked PC a real hardship, what with avoiding almost all of that ,apart from the occasional GFWL or "home grown" and generally shitty DRM or multiplayer login system .

Oh, and Steamcloud saves.

Dotcom titan funds 'Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Patents'

Re: No...

Compression Algorithms are math

H.264 is not patentable , period

Oh wait...

Opposable thumbs for FISTS, not finesse, say bioboffins

Was it just me or

Did anyone else read this as

"Man who doesn't like to lose arguments goes as far as to submit a paper to support tenuous position in argument"

Frankly, the theory strikes me as a bit barmy.

Evolution of thumbs specifically to increase punching power vs. adoption of behaviour that prevents breaking of fingers when hitting people using already available bodily appendages.

I guess he proposes some time lag between when our ancestors were capable of picking up sticks and wielding them as weapons and when we actually started doing it.

That first hominid with the stick must been all "Don't bring a thumb buttressed fist to a club fight" as he became king of punching land.

Samsung spaffs $3.9bn on chip factory in TEXAS

Clearly getting a handle

On how the impartial Texan patent court works....

Boffins cook raw numbers, hope to bake PERFECT kilogram

Not sure there is much point in a Quantum Kilogram

After all, if you know exactly how much it weighs you won't know where it is!

After Sandy Hook, Senator calls for violent video game probe

Re: Still flogging that horse I see

"yet there's no chance of similar penalties and restrictions applying to gun ownership?"

To be fair, this case, the killer stole semi-automatic weapons from his 52 year old mothers house.

So I don't think a ban on automatic weapons, age restricted ownership of guns, or only restricting guns to homes would have made any difference in this case.

If there is almost one gun per-person in a country, then a person will have no trouble getting hold of a gun.

You also have FA chance of getting them all back if you decided to ban guns outright.

I imagine the result of trying an outright ban would be riots, with the rioters having (obviously) guns, due to the amount of gun nuts, which might well lead to civil war, at least on a small scale.

Once you have made your ultra-violent bed ,feathered with Guns 'n' Ammo, you pretty much have to lie in it.

Search engines we have known ... before Google crushed them

Re: AltaVista.digital.com

After the porn sites started dropping whole dictionaries in their meta tags to show up on search results it became a lot easier to avoid them in search results.

I think I started adding

-aardvark -xylophone

to all of my none-aardvark-and-xylophone related searches

Rude web trolls should NOT be jailed, warns prosecution chief

Re: Bad law

Or worse, your social status, who you know, who you insulted, your religion or skin colour.

If the decision to prosecute is rather arbitrary then you open yourself up to all kind of abuses (or accusations of abuse)

Canadians nab syrup rustlers after massive maple sap heist

Well, you dont.

Based on the article, turns out its quite hard to sell $18m of maple syrup when

a) The police and maple syrup industry know someone has stolen it

b) You don't actually have a legitimate source of maple syrup to show to buyers.

Unlike drugs or something, its not like users of maple syrup need to avoid police attention.

They would probably much rather avoid a charge of receiving stolen goods.

So you get caught when one of them reports it.

Apple confirms Amazon ebooks bendover, EU watchdog drops bone

They have just taken the easy way out

Which is to do nothing about the VAT on ebooks, while giving excuses like:

Well, only rich people can afford ebooks readers.

Its impossible to tell the difference between an ebook and computer software, especially if the ebook has pictures or music in it.

etc,

Then eventually dead tree books will become a luxury item , due to the small number sold/high prices, and be re-classifed as such, and subject to VAT as well.

But there will still be VAT on ebooks as "Well, its too late to do anything about it now".

And another VAT exception will have been entirely eliminated.

NASA reveals secrets of Curiosity’s selfies

Re: Simple

You Fools!

Clearly these are images of the rover reflected in the shiny hull of the flying saucer it is currently investigating.

That explains the distorted image, AND the announcement NASA were going to make and then pretended was just about clay or whatever.

UN's 'bid to wrestle control of internet' stalled by asterisk

Re: "stalled by asterisk"

Wait until they get around to discussing if # should be called "hash" or "pound".

Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support

What he should have said

Is that if the 386 lot don't like it, they can fork off. (the previous linux kernel)

Samsung's smart TVs 'wide open' to exploits

Re: ReVuln seem like nice people

You can also turn off your telly or other device.

Neither might be convenient however (you might live along the A127 for instance)

I wonder what they do if they find a critical vuln. in say, airplane flight systems,air traffic control or life support?

Does the CAA/whoever have to bid against Al Qaeda ?

Re: ReVuln seem like nice people

No, you appear to be thinking of security researchers who publish vulns in their entirety without seeking payment (with or without privately informing the vendor).

These are people publishing the fact that they know there are vulnerabilities in a device , and will sell the knowledge of that to the highest bidder, be it crims, governments or the (now pressured) device owner.

In your analogy they announce there are crash causing potholes somewhere on the A127 and offer to sell a map to the highest bidder, be that highwaymen bent on robbing crashed or stopped cars or the highways agency - they don't really care.

Entire US Congress votes against ITU control of internet

USAians, Your elected representatives

Working for you Google.

Littlest pirate’s Winnie-the-Pooh laptop on the way home

Re: Hey microsoft!

They probably made a copy of the hard drive for evidence purposes.

That's copyright infringement right there!

Unfortunately there is probably some kind of "Fair use" term for law enforcement

Flash memory made immortal by fiery heat

Re: I Think Wear Leveling Will Still be Needed

wear levelling seems like a lot of overhead for general use in this case.

Swapping some blocks out when they look likely to fail after three years constant use would just require a bad block/relocation table like regular hdds have.

Whereas an "old" SSD block would fail in a couple of hours in the same situation, so wear levelling makes alot more sense.

'Look, isn't there some way we can get Julian out of here?'

They are getting him out of there, this is part of the plan,

And the "chronic lung illness" is part of it.

Here's the scene, policemen standing around outside the embassy when a doctor and an EMT come through carrying a stretcher.

Minutes later a thin blond man comes out of the embassy on the stretcher, wearing a oxygen mask.

Police run over, much commotion, arrest blond man there and then, doctor objects to mask being lifted etc.

Police get in ambulance and all concerned driven to hospital.

When they get there, EMT breaks off , goes to a quiet place and removes "Mission impossible" style mask, revealing The Assange, with dyed black hair, dark fake tan and a goatee.

Quickly jumps in a waiting vehicle and speeds off to a beach where a zodiac/speed boat/french fishing boat crewed by Argentinian special forces is waiting.

Boat whisks him out to sea where they meet up with a container ship bound for South America.

The Assange is inserted into a pre-prepared container with living quarters / septic tank / water etc. all self contained, and seals are affixed showing it was consigned in Spain 2 weeks earlier.

A month later he appears in Ecuador.

The "doctor" mingles with the hospital staff and disappears.

The man with pneumonia (the real EMT sans disguise) turns out to be a disposable foreign national with a now much enlarged bank account to make up for the time he will serve.

VPN ban makes for nervy times behind Great Firewall

Precipitous , I do not think that means what you think it means...

"the precipitous nature of doing business in China"

Should this be "precarious" by any chance.

Unless doing business in China was a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse of course.

Elon Musk envisions small town of vegetarians on Mars

Re: Because...

"Talking about settling Mars is about as plausible as talking about using wormholes to travel to distant galaxies."

No its not.

Wormholes are a purely theoretical idea that humanity has no concept of how we could generate or make practical use of , vs rockets which have been in use for over 60 years, and have already demonstrated the ability to send stuff to Mars successfully. I would have to say there is a huge qualitative difference in those two endeavours.

Humanity could give a good go at colonising Mars if we dedicated a considerable proportion of our resources to it, using only existing technology.

Whereas opening "wormholes to distant galaxies" is total sci-fi bullshit

Google to UN: Internet FREEDOM IS FREE, and must remain so

Re: To be fair, at least one point they make is valid

"meant that the end users, and the ISP's were paying part of the cost of people watching iplayer instead of the BBC paying the entire upload cost.

If my understanding is correct, one can see why the ISP's thought the BBC were taking the piss and wanted to charge the BBC for bandwidth transferred P2P."

And then of course the users would pay less?

No?

Thought not.

Apple cultists slaver as Mothership landing now foretold in 2016

Re: It doesn't look like the most efficient use of space.

code monkeys

Re: Form over function.. again

I'm hoping they have a little tram system at the least.

Ideally turbolifts of course.

Ten... PC games you may have missed

Re: PC Games?

A Demo?

Given how short the game is, the demo must be only a couple of minutes!

Astronauts (or other 'nauts) could find life on Mars quite healthy

Solve two problems at once, with H2O

"But that still leaves a lot of potential for explorers to be hit by harmful radiation during solar storms and so on. Shielding materials would necessarily be heavy, and thus probably impractical to send along on an interplanetary trip."

Water is a pretty good radiation shielding material, esp. against high energy cosmic rays (compared to metals which generally emit showers of secondary particles should a cosmic ray hit them).

And it doesn't tend to become long term radioactive either.

Plus, presumably astronauts will be bringing along water in any case (what with all the drinking and so on).

which would save on special purpose shielding, certainly for a storm shelter.

Long flat tanks under the skin for general travel, then pump the water to a smaller centre shelter area with much deeper tanks when a storm is due.

Pretty standard sci-fi concept.

Galapagos islands bombed with 22 tonnes of Blue Death Cornflakes

Re: Species specific rat poison.

Blue apples?

SECRET 28 'scientific experts' who Greened the BBC - Revealed!

Re: Impartiality and scientific theories

On the other hard, if it turned out the seminar was run by David Ike and the Church of Scientology, you would like to know, right?

Windows boss Steve Sinofsky exits Microsoft

Re: Is he going to take Ribbon with him?

Probably not, as the idiot that has replaced him was the inventor of the Ribbon.

So now everything will have Ribbons.

I'm surprised that Windows 8 didn't feature a "Start Ribbon" instead of the IFKAM UI

Judge: Your boss has no right to your emails held by a third party

Re: They should have used email archiving

Except most companies prefer to make sure any "unnecessary" emails are deleted in a "timely" fashion.

This co-incidentally saves a lot of time and possible exposure in any pre-trial discovery that goes on.

Saves finding any 3 year old email from your head of QA saying that the product shouldn't be released in it current form or something.

Automatic archiving just creates a huge gold mine for the opposition lawyers.

Habitable HEAVY GRAVITY WORLD found just 42 light-years away

Re: DesPlaines

Probably not "his best works" because they are not his works at all.

EE wrote a novella using that concept.

His estate authorized Stephen Goldin to use the concept and name to write a series.

10 years after he died.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_D%27Alembert

BBC in secret trial to see if you care about thing you plainly don't

Re: So..

You are amazed that many people don't see the benefit in switching to an overpriced, lower quality, less portable and more power-hungry technology that offers very few additional benefits?

I personally don't see why we should have to switch to something that is crap in the hope it gets better.

Here's an idea, make it better, and then everyone wouldn't mind switching.

Make the technology small and cheap and energy efficient enough that people could include it in car radios and so on for very little additional cost. Then travel back in time and do that 10 years ago so we might be willing to switch now.

Alternatively, make it small and cheap now, and then lets wait 10 years and see how it looks.

Don't make it large, expensive and power hungry, then remove your only benefit by (deliberately) making it low quality on top, and expect people to go "Yeah, lets switch to that"

The only ones who will befit from switching off FM is those who will get to sell off the frequency space to this allegedly huge number of commercial stations just waiting in the wings.

Assuming of course any commercial radio station can afford to fund itself once the same advertising cash is split between however may additional stations we end up with.

Re: So..

You some kind of shill for the DAB lobby?

Lets face it, DAB radios are still currently large (unlike an FM radio that can be small enough to be built into headphones, mp3 players etc.), power hungry (DAB radio power consumption about 40x that of an FM radio)

and the quality is shitty, (as the people pushing it are more about how many channels you can fit into the available frequency space than the quality of those channels, more money that way).

If you dispute this, please indicate your matchbox sized or smaller DAB radio of choice that runs for 40+ hours on a single AAA battery. Or any DAB receiver that runs on a watch battery.

If I wanted to listen to digital radio at home, I would use the internet based digital radio option, rather than buying a crappy DAB radio.

If I wanted to listen to the radio in my car (like almost all radio listeners do), then I guess I'll use the FM radio that has been built into almost every car on the road today. The cheap, reliable FM radio that doesn't require multiple digital decode circuits constantly running to handle the station shifts as I travel around.

Assuming the DAB lobby pushing their inadequate technology doesn't manage to bribe enough MPs / Celebrity shills to get FM turned off of course.

Some great math being used to "prove" DAB is popular, like only counting "kitchen" style radio sales, rather than including all the FM decodes built into phones, tablets, mp3 players and (or course) cars.

Or counting people listening to radio (at home only of course) on their PC's/Tablets as "Digital radio" listeners, thus implying they are using DAB and we should turn off FM to get more of the DAB they want to them...

US Copyright Office approves phone jailbreaking and video remixes

Re: Why does anyone outside the US care?

"although the USA has quite gone as far as using the prisoners as forced labour. Yet."

Presuming you meant "Hasn't", You realize the US has a prison population of over 2 million, and the vast majority of these are forced to work for $0.25 per hour or be locked in solitary?

That large swathes of the US economy requires this "Prison labour" to remain competitive with offshore production.

Laws like the "three strikes" law have been criticized as primarily existing to keep the US prison population high to provide a suitable cheap labour pool.

EC: Microsoft didn't honour browser-choice commitment

Re: what browser market?

The main reason browsers are free is because Microsoft forced the first commercial browser (Netscape Navigator, maybe you heard of it?) out of business by bundling a browser in their OS for free.

Which is why there was a monopoly ruling to break Microsoft up in the late 90s, into an OS vendor, and a separate software vendor.

Then I guess various palms were greased, as eventually the department of justice bottled and said they would just let Microsoft get away with telling the PC manufacturers that they could bundle non-Microsoft software with their hardware offerings without getting cut off. Because that seems fair.

So you logic of "why would I care about Microsoft bundled IE because all browsers are free" is completely backwards.

Browsers are free because Microsoft bundle one, so they all have to compete with that. And the Anti-trust authorities let them keep doing it even after it was deemed to be abuse of monopoly.

Bloke jailed for being unable to use BlackBerry Messenger freed

Re: A shame, shameful prosecution

Simple,

They bring you into the station and say

"How about we just issue you with a caution and you don't do it again? Save the trouble of taking it to court etc."

And of course they just fail to mention that a caution is the same as a conviction in the eyes of the law, and if it is for a sexual offence (like "public exposure"), you can go on the sex offenders register.

And because you wont have a lawyer with you when they offer it, you wont know that and think "Cool, just a warning then", not "Like I'm going to admit guilt and go on the sex offenders register for something like that!"

Get their stats up nicely though

Tesla drops veil on top secret solar Superchargers

Re: cars per day?

This is why the use of the Supercharger "Damages your battery", otherwise they would always be empty.

So, rather than pay for electricity, get it for free but pay Telsa the $20000 (this figure made up) for a new battery 2 years earlier.

Sounds like a great deal..

Google in new Maps patent row - but not with Apple

Hmm. Coincidence?

So, just after iOS 6 ships with a heavily publicised standalone mapping application (albeit one that looks terrible in comparison to Google Maps), a company pops out of the woodwork to sue Google and get an injunction against their mapping system.

Maybe Apple has taken up the Microsoft tactic of sponsoring lawsuits...

Cambridge boffins: Chip and PIN cards CAN be cloned – here's how

Re: There might be a better way...

Uh huh,

And then, if someones card was used you could absolutely prove it was them because no-one else could possibly have the magic password?

Except you seem to have made a big assumption, that your bank is trustworthy.

Past cases of where Cards and/or PINs were delivered and use fraudulently were eventually (after court cases and so on, as banks refused to admit it) proven to be only plausible if committed by corrupt bank employees, often two working in collusion to bypass internal protections (guy who can make a change working with guy who can delete the logs of the change for instance)

http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2010/05/25/an-old-scam-still-works/

German Pirate party punters 'don't pay their membership fees'

Re: "Saying this out loud"

I think he is right that if the advert said

"You wouldn't copy a car you liked the look of ,given the ability to do so near instantly and for free, and with no detriment to the present owner of the car"

most people would think , "Hmm, I would you know, if only to give driving that lambo a ago. I'd delete it afterwards though, honest"

Conflating theft and copyright breach is doing the content producers no favours.

People aren't stupid and will reach the above conclusion themselves, and then feel justified that it "wasn't stealing" because all they did was copy Bob's DVD. Bob still has his DVD, right?

Whereas they would do better to actually indicate who is getting affected by copyright breaches, and what the moral effect that has on content producers and society.

WiReD surgically removes damaged neurotrash 'expert'

Science "Journalism" works something like this

Scientist: So in conclusion, I can say we have successfully developed a cold resistant strain of wheat that could increase yields in colder climes.

"Journalist": So , for instance, you could grow wheat in the Arctic?

-Scribbles down headline "Scientists develop wheat that grows in the Arctic-

Scientist: Well, theoretically it could survive arctic temperatures for a short while, but

"Journalist": Ok, all done here, thanks.

-Back at the "Science Journalism Cave"-

"Science Editor": We'll need some extra input on this one, maybe you could contact some environmentalists, this "Wheat in the Arctic" sounds like the sort of thing that would rile them up and we can get some great quotes.

-Some phone calls later-

Nutty Enviromentalist: How dare these so called scientists despoil the practically untouched arctic wilderness. Just another example of how Humans are exploiting the whole plant. And the Arctic ice is already under threat from global warming, and now they want to thaw more of it to irrigate their Arctic wheat farms!

Driving a car? There's an app for that

Re: Real World...

I wouldn't worry about it,

We already have something thats a lot like this, they are called "Taxis", but use a meatbag Human for navigation instead of an android phone.

Based on that and the fact things rarely get cheaper, you wont be able to afford to call for a car very often anyway.

Anyway, the idea is you wont own a car, you will subscribe to "Autocars" (not the magazine) who will be a near monopoly or part of a cartel to keep prices unreasonably high. They will have slightly too few cars to provide everyone with a car when they need it, but will take car of fueling and maintaining the cars while gently extracting all your cash for the privilege.

If your car gets low enough on fuel to require a fill/charge up, you will be summarily ejected from the car to the side of the road while it goes off to find a maintenance point. Eventually another car will come and pick you up from the pouring rain to continue your journey.

Welcome to the future.