Posts by crowley

Free Libyana: Gadaffi networkjacker speaks!

Or...

... all those Libyan soldiers are dying because they're holding guns to civilian heads.

As for your link, we've already seen the underground pits in the opened palace complex where Gadaffi's opponents were buried in the dark in stiffling heat and taking turns to get to a pipe that supplied air for the sole purpose of prolonging their slow deaths.

Yeah, that footage was a little more up-to-date than your report.

Hell, I know a teacher whose school had an OFSTED inspection lately - the sociopath kid benefited from a sudden home-schooling budget that day to keep up appearances for the pupil rating. Somehow I suspect Gadaffi's regime can pull those tricks too, and fool the naive.

Illegal war?

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm

"Protection of civilians...4. Authorizes Member States...to take all necessary measures"

That'll be to disarm/disuade/destroy those massacring the people then.

Could you point out where they've exceeded that mandate?

Thanks.

Libyans who we designate as being 'baddies'

That'll be the ones that started to massacre those crying for freedom then.

I'd really like to idly stand by whilst someone kicks the shit out of you after mugging you, just so you can see your moralistic non-interventionism in full effect.

Embrace chaos, beat pirates... buy my book, says Mason

Cinema

[For example, he said, cinema box office receipts are still growing in some countries, in spite of movie piracy. Mason attributes this to the cinema experience: “If the experience keeps getting better and better, we’ll be okay,” he said.]

Last 2 times I went to (different) cinemas, they hadn't even bothered to calibrate the projector to show the damn films in focus.

Radioactive Tokyo tapwater HARMS BABIES ... if drunk for a year

Contraceptives in water

Or just make them mandatory for long-term benefit claimants?

Maybe the right to breed could expire with National Insurance contributions based claims, so that those unemployed through no fault of their own aren't discriminated against, just the feckless wastrels.

Ofcom steams ahead with Crown rights, prepares to sell family jewels

Choice?

"Ofcom's role is only to define a legal mechanism by which they can be sold rather than make any decision about selling"

The ConDems will of course have cut the MOD budget enough to incentivise the sell-off.

"Do what thou must, etc" may be a better subheading?

Govt working on 'browser-based' solution for new cookie law

Granularity of consent

"Debate has raged about whether sites will have to ask new users for that consent outright or whether web browser settings that permit cookies can be taken to mean that consent has been given."

"Debate has raged about whether men will have to ask new girlfriends for that consent outright or whether a non-virginal state can be taken to mean that consent has been given."

Of course we give consent to be tracked by everybody, rather than simply needing to enable cookies to access a particular service... scumbags.

Intel sends 'Poulson' Itaniums to the shrink

Err

Well, I guess I was taking it too literally, that it won't be -necessary- to recompile, and assuming that the wider pipeline can be loaded with instructions for another thread - but now I think back about it, it's the execution units that get shared and each thread would run in a separate pipeline.

Yeah, ok, that's a second 'brain-fart'... at least my coding today has been more successful...

yep

"Will the application be able to submit 2*6-wide instructions to the same core without any modification??"

Assuming the application runs more than one thread, it should still do pretty well.

BTW, what are the odds that this focus on low power consumption / heat emission is to head off ARM's entry into the server market?

If you're going to take the pain of switching architecture due to those points, you might as well switch to EPIC to get the performance boost as well.

Opera Mini BREWs up

Nice

Really enjoyed the bit referring to BREW in line with the pre-Jobsian neo-fascism I experienced.

Intel demos MeeGo 'tablet user experience'

No, he hasn't

It WAS too slow.

Now, maybe the settings can be adjusted to reduce the delay before the context menu pops up, but looking at other moments of lag, I just had an imaginary LED flickering as it struggled to thrash an imaginary hard-drive to swap it's virtual memory out and load the menu. (remember Windows?)

It was pathetic.

Google Chrome extension bars domains from search results

+1 for blocking Foundem

as title

Google open video codec faces second challenger

Re: And we all have fiber-to-the-home

Yep - I reckon this is divide and conquer.

They make an inferior but legally safe alternative so that the more nervous will abandon VP8, and release products that are seen to be inferior.

In the meantime, VP8 would have lost momentum - thanks to its market being cannibalised by defectors having been driven by FUD to use this crap - and no longer represent a viable option due to lack of support from the ecosystem, the current development towards VP8 H/W support dropped from silicon products by then, the proliferation of another file format making it more tricky to adopt another.

Oh, and you can bet this new format will be forward compatible with H/W H264 decoders, so migration to licensing H.264 will be the only realistic option.

Let's just hope they set the performance so low that nobody takes it seriously.

Pink Floyd guitarist pays McKinnon's health bills

re: streaky

"Are we really arguing AS people don't know the difference between right and wrong"

No - we're arguing that AS people are given to obsessive study which can incline them to be so focused on pursuing their line of study that they don't really register the bigger picture when transgressing boundaries most other people would be wary of.

If you can't tolerate and accommodate peoples myriad imperfections/idiosyncrasies, you'll be perpetually disappointed. Or a Nazi. And as pointed out above, this particular failing is also an asset - if harnessed in, say, the pursuit of science. Give him a job, I say.

Vodafone says sorry for pro-Mubarak messages

Redemption

Nice effort to redeem themselves, that free credit bit.

Shame they couldn't use their systems to prefix all the propaganda text messages with some indication of the source - I get texts from 'Vodafone' and 'Voicemail' without any such entries in my contacts, so forcing an ID of 'Mubarak' shouldn't be hard for them.

New auto-crowd tech writes better articles than pro writers TRUE

Editing overhead

Well, it's just going to invoke Amdahl's Law - but with parallel writers instead of CPU's.

"European readers: there are 100 cents in a US American dollar, which is worth a variable amount compared to your Euros pounds roubles etc."

Fuck you! (aimed at the individual Turkey responsible, not the entire Reg team!)

'Air laser' tech could sniff bombs, probe atmos from afar

Magic

I understood it as meaning that the UV laser energises the cylinder of air it's focused upon in such a way that the energy is then emitted as an infrared laser pulse. That is, they actually create a laser emitter from the air itself!

This IR pulse is then distorted by the gas in its return path, allowing the bomb substances to be detected - somewhat similar to spectrum analysis I guess...

I'd be intrigued to know if the pulse is -only- emitted along the return path to the original UV laser pulse, or if it is omnidirectional. If the latter, perhaps it could be detected so as to trigger some other... effect. I guess that would also allow unguided laser communications around corners, though presumably only with a very precisely targeted receiver, and at a quite appalling data rate.

UK.gov braces for Anonymous hacklash

Re: (Err)Or...

"Denying a service...." etc.

You do realise that going on strike denies the employer from making a service, do you not? And that marching the streets may impact on the availability of shops? And, gosh, perhaps all that linking arms with handcuffs in buried concrete pipes, etc to block construction sites, access to infrastructure, etc might deny services too. And what about trucks driving slowly in the fuel protest?

Say what you can about 4chan muppets - it does not detract from the fact that denial of service is well established as a form of civil disobedience type protesting.

But lets take your suggestions:

Complaints - Easily ignored

Petitions - Still ignored (petitions.gov.uk?!)

Rouse support - To have little meetings that are also ignored

Independent party - With our FPTP voting system? Please...

There's a reason there's a long history of direct action protest.

Vodafone confirms Egypt lock-down

Re: Spectrum Licence?

License - good point from the bigger picture.

Somewhat invalidates my last comment... cheers!

Hmmm

Not the best example for the point you're making.

Vodafone will be losing money by removing service, rather than benefiting from the increase in use by the protesters.

But yes, the warm regards that dictatorships and corporations have for each other is fairly well documented.

UK proximity payments by phone this summer

Nope...

It isn't an end to cash YET.

Motivations of marketing/taxation/etc will encourage it though.

Don't be sorry. I recognise that paranoia is a form of egotism - it's not a problem I'm having.

I don't live in fear. I don't even know who "the man" would be if I did.

Anyway, enough 'straw man' - got any counterpoints?

By the way, how come all these comments bitching at mine and others concerns about losing the privacy in transactions are all ACs? Smacks of hypocrisy, no?!

Re: Tin-hatter...

No, I just don't think each and every intimate detail of my life is any of their damn business, and so I'm not willing cattle waiting to be milked by the corporate machine.

There IS life outside of the consumer model of humanity, but my god they'll do their best to interrupt what little unprofitable spare time you still possess with some manipulation to consume, based on an ever sleeker, reduced, simplified, demeaning model of a human being.

But still, I won't deny anyone's right to be a one-dimensional economic unit.

It does however seem that my right to be otherwise may be increasingly constrained if the NFC bandwagon leads to a replacement of cash, and privacy.

Err...or

"gone are the days when known criminals or people who fund them can get away with holding bank accounts they aren't allowed to."

Hmm.

What about those that ARE allowed to? (3rd world dictators seem to do well)

What about secret accounts in Switzerland/Lichtenstein?

You seem to naively assume the world operates the same rules for everyone.

A lovely mentality for cattle, I'm sure...

When I can search the transactions to find out every time oligarch X or minister Y paid to take a shit at Paddington station, I may be more inclined to agree - but I'm pretty sure it would be me that has my behavior tracked, analysed, profiled, then manipulated in various ways that do violence to any notion of individuality we may hold.

Err...or

You again.

Personally, I withdraw CASH and spend it anonymously.

As 'Circadian' said before, banks/gov don't like that freedom.

As I said before that, I won't use NFC without that freedom.

Do you not like the freedom to operate independently of a data warehousing system?

Does it substitute for Jesus, and make you feel loved or something?

Err...or

Aah, yes, old AC, 'the Beast 666' and all that...

...except he promoted the axiom "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", and elaborates here:

http://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib77.html

with:

1. Man has the right to live by his own law—

to live in the way that he wills to do:

to work as he will:

to play as he will:

to rest as he will:

to die when and how he will.

2. Man has the right to eat what he will:

to drink what he will:

to dwell where he will:

to move as he will on the face of the earth.

3. Man has the right to think what he will:

to speak what he will:

to write what he will:

to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will:

to dress as he will.

4. Man has the right to love as he will:—

"take your fill and will of love as ye will,

when, where, and with whom ye will." —AL. I. 51

5. Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.

Which might just provide enough scope to will for consumer privacy.... don't you think?

So, move on, no irony here...

Err...or

No, the word 'CASH' was specifically used.

And I think we should all have the right to buy a bloody coffee without being hounded by various external interests wanting to manipulate our every waking moment.

Nothing Nowhere

For me to use NFC, it would have to be something I can stick onto the back of my phone/wallet/car key/etc, bought like a PAYG sim, and topped up in whatever manner I choose (cash).

Otherwise it's a bit too 'mark of the beast' for my tastes.

Big new wind turbines too close together, says top boffin

Eh?

60Kw for 4.4 hectares of land? I wonder why it never took off in the intervening years...

First DOS-based malware celebrates silver jubilee

Absolutely, curious, yes

I remember back in 1990 writing a piece of code for our school's BBC network.

(running Arcnet rather than Ethernet in those days I guess?)

I'd discovered the network ROM extension added some BASIC commands, one of which would send a text message directly to another computers command line. (or into a little window on the Archimedes desktop, I think)

I then discovered that it wasn't possible to run it in a for loop to send the same message to every computer (0-255, no 32bit IP addresses then!), because a failure to send to a valid recipient would cause some kind of exception.

I then discovered it was possible to register a handler to catch this exception and resume the loop. Infinitely.

I never had the bollocks to run it, as you had to be logged on - so I wrote all this down and gave it to some kid where I was working, who went and ran it on his own school's BBC network.

Report was that he successfully brought the network down, and was suspended for 2 weeks for his trouble. I guess that was one of the earlier DoS attacks really.

Raygun dreadnought project reports 'remarkable breakthrough'

Yeah? Try this:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAe7V7tcBys&feature=channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4nnLP--uTI&feature=channel

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/5158972/Starlite-the-nuclear-blast-defying-plastic-that-could-change-the-world.html

http://itotd.com/articles/653/starlite/

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

Hackneyed cliche

I, for one, welcome our <regurgitate article adjectives here> overlords.

Oh - except they're a bunch of right-wing, armageddon seeking, religious nutcase yahoos*...

...the ones who get to use the weaponised version, anyway.

[prays for a lethal new swine-flu variant activated by low neural density]

* I highly recommend 'The Authoritarians' - free at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

Lame Stuxnet worm 'full of errors', says security consultant

"the most credible of which suggests...

...it was developed by US and Israeli intelligence agencies"

No, I think the most credible is that the Chinese developed it to slow the Iranian nuke work whilst toeing the line with sanctions objections, to maintain their 3rd largest oil supply.

http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/2010/12/14/stuxnets-finnish-chinese-connection/

The article lends further credibility to that theory.

Boeing customers spy distant Dreamliner

Ha!

And this is the best they can do against Airbus, even with the help of Echelon spying on them?!

Ubuntu Qt equality promised post Narwhal

Re: Remember, this is Linux, not Windows

My use of the words "Disable it" should hint that I'm aware of retaining a choice.

It's just a pain in the arse...

But, my apologies - talking about changing distro was indeed a tad overdramatic...

...Ctrl-Alt-F1 to banish it from the screen and change it might be just dramatic enough?

Re: Tell me:

Well, given some of the comments this site gets, I thought people could bring their own E?

(ok, ok, it was just a typo)

P.S. Please don't ration my ale.

Unity==POS

Am I the only one worrying that it might come time to change distro?

Unity just litters the screen with shit I'm not using, probably aint interested in using, and hides the stuff I do want. Ha, and try losing that screen real estate on a netbook!

What rational was used to go from the ease of 3 clicks through a hierarchical Gnome menu to scrolling down a bloody great list, or typing in the name in a bloody search box?

Even as a touch-screen user, I think I'd hate it. Disable it. And scale up the gnome menu with the accessibility controls to help those with impaired sight.

Gnome Shell 3 on the other hand, zooms out to the stuff you're already using.

No contest.

Oh, Qt? Probably a good move actually. (for phones at least)

Apple's Jobs stand-in touts iPad's enterprise reach

80% evaluating...

...is not 80% buying then. Good :-)

Plastic Logic scores $700m from Russians

Too ambitious for first product

Over-featured, aimed at high end markets... surely they should've just sold the bloody screen and device driver as components to other companies - one's with experience in making products.

Or gone for some low end mass production tack instead, just to get themselves established, and make the technology visible?

Rolling adverts on cereal packets, or even jiffie bags.

Or perhaps those wrist tags they put on people at music festivals.

Or strip displays on shop shelving, so the product/price/special offer can be updated more efficiently.

But no, they wanted to do a high priced executive toy with Wall St Journal subscriptions.

Idiots.

Steve Jobs takes 'medical leave of absence' from Apple

Short selling

Other way around I think.

You borrow shares for a fee, sell them, buy the same quantity back in a month or whatever when the price has dropped, and give tham back with a small margin to the original owner.

Badness-browsing Belgian busted on Brit break

I call bullshit...

...if he's openly browsing the content in a bar, he obviously think the pics are legit.

(human stupidity may be infinite, but please...)

Rather leads me to think that PC Plod can make accusations about borderline images that place the burden of proof on the viewer - who no doubt has great difficulty contacting the porn sites administrators and persuading them to supply an audited trail of documentary evidence that leads back to the fresh-faced, flat-chested, oiled-up lady with the shaven minge's birth certificate.

Given that my 30+ girlfriend can still occasionally get ID'd when buying alcohol, I'm pretty damn sure that if there were any dodgy pics of her at a porno-legitimate 18 years of age (shall I ask the exes?! ;-) they would lead to prosecution if the Plods were sufficiently motivated to press a charge.

The Social Network scoops four Golden Globes

She was right...

...You turned out to be the high priest of populist dumbing down of culture as people learnt to restrict their self expression to your autistic worldview; one which gives people the same scope for individualism as a f**king nazi youth armband.

(however was The West Wing so good?)

Cable vendor slapped for unproven claims

Sorry to be contrary, but...

I've had a cheap HDMI cable cause picture distortions. (corruptions NOT qualitative differences)

My theory is that the metal wiring was too thin, too impure and so too resistive to always let the signal be meet the threshold to be detected. I think crosstalk from adjacent wires might have been responsible.

Whilst I agree with all the comments about digital/checksums/etc, it must still be noted that the signal is ultimately analogue, and so can be rendered intermittent, at least, by some effect.

Given that usually logic will require a <20% voltage range to register low, and >80% the voltage range to register high, I can see how resistance combined with crosstalk could lead to a certain wavering of the attained peak voltage for a high, but am not sure about lows.

The problem here being LVDS, I presume the issue would manifest in a more complicated manner - but ultimately result in voltage differences that wavered on the detection threshold.

Alternatively, if the wire quality wasn't consistent for the clock and data lines, there could be a phase shift that would cause data loss - perhaps triggered by some capacitive effect? *

All I know, is that though I have NOT seen a -qualitative- difference, but I -have- seen a signal come through so variably as to cause the odd few pixels or lines to be dropped/corrupted in each frame - with the remainder screen area being received perfectly.

(And I thought any effect was impossible until I saw it - and then took the duff cable to work so a colleague could be equally surprised!)

* I'm not an electronics guy, but write device drivers and use an oscilloscope to check/verify signals on dodgy new hardware enough to have acquired a few ideas.

Re: Polarity

I can only imagine that the bridge rectifier was imbalanced due to cheap diodes, and that this affected the noise that the power supply was leaking into the output driver.

Yes

If I knew someone who'd bought one of these cables, I'd tell them it's best use would be to strangle them to death with it.

Perhaps their offspring would have a better sense of priorities as a result.

UK.gov descales public data with new corp launch

Charging for OS maps

I was fairly annoyed when the OS only opened up the less detailed maps to online view, but on the other hand I don't see why Joe Bloggs down the road who never goes hiking should have to subsidise my maps either.

Of course, the 'Explorer' walking maps contain both relevant and largely unchanging data regarding topography/streams/valleys/forest/paths/etc and irrelevant dynamic data on city buildings that is arguably more to do with planning matters than 'exploring'.

Perhaps the former aspect should be released in high detail as it has already been paid for many times over, and the latter charged to planners/etc who require up-to-date information.

That way walkers won't be subsidising them.

But it could then be argued that the main use is by the council itself in arbitrating such matters - and that indeed the taxpayer should fund the whole business.

IF that is the case, then surely the only reason to not release the data is so it can be flogged to some Tory-Boy mate, who then flogs it back to the public for a nice mark-up; and so the walkers/etc subsidise the councils duties for all taxpayers, and helps another true-blue scumbag get even richer.

Not impressed Mr Maude - but perhaps there's another angle on this?

ISPs battle EU child pornography filter laws

Yeah

I was offended by that insinuation too.

Though - when passing chav infested areas, 'Battle Royale' does spring to mind... ;-)

Google Books spanked by Amazon Kindle

touch-and-zoom

Not useless.

Will be very handy for books with diagrams, etc.

US politician: 'homosexual agenda' behind TSA groin grope

Re: "homosexual breeding grounds"

They consider the homosexual condition to be a result of indoctrination.

Therefore they 'multiply' by corrupting God's own people (on the 'straight' and narrow-minded path).

To believe this was possible, one would have to have a pretty strong sense that ones own self would be corruptible in the presence of such opportunity!

97% of INTERNET NOW FULL UP, warn IPv4 shepherd boys

apply to your ISP for port mapping!

Not necessarily.

Services could be modified to work via a STUN server instead.

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

People's Republic says it will purge self of illicit software

roll their own...

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

"...created by the Institute of Software Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Financial help came from government-owned Shanghai NewMargin Venture Capital...

...Chinese governmental ministries were ordered to uninstall Windows 2000 from their computers in favor of Red Flag Linux."