Posts by brain_flakes

RIAA DMCAs GitHub into nuking popular YouTube video download tool, says it's used to slurp music

If I show the RIAA how to use Win-G to screencap Youtube videos can they DMCA the Windows source code?

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Re: Lovely.

These changes are objectively better than the original phrasing; "primary" and "secondary" let you define a proper tree hierarchy ("tertiary" etc.) and block-list / allow-list is more explicit of its function and therefore is easier to understand (especially for non-native English speakers).

Re: Proudly ignorant

"Block-list" / "allow-list" is more explicit of its function, so is therefore objectively better anyway.

Rolls-Royce, Airbus, Siemens tease electric flight engine project

Re: Greenwash?

> although it could be buried in the fuselage, that would in turn mean lost fuselage volume and even more additional weight for the trunking and insulation.

That used to be a common configuration - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trijet

Boffins' five eyes surprise: Bees correct colour for ambient light

Not exactly a new idea.

This isn't exactly a new idea, Olympus added a separate sensor to sample ambient light for white balancing all the way back in 2003.

http://www.lonestardigital.com/E1.htm

NASA – get this – just launched 8 satellites from a rocket dropped from a plane at 40,000ft

Showing off?

"Showing off"? This is the 43rd launch of a Pegasus air-dropped rocket, seems pretty routine at this point.

Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals

Food grade potassium nitrate

Flowers of sulphur

Ground charcoal

... Now you're all on the list.

On her microphone's secret service: How spies, anyone can grab crypto keys from the air

How can that possibly work?

I really can't imagine how this could possibly work. It surely can't be listening in on the CPU because that runs at many gigahertz, well above what you should be able to pick up with a mic. There's ram which is in the 100s of megahertz, but given that's accessed in parallel how could you pick out individual lines? Anyone got any idea what kind of signal they might be using, assuming it does work as they say it does?

British cops to film you with 59k body-worn cameras by end of year

Not a bad thing?

Given how policing has been going in America I'd say this isn't a bad thing, as long as there's suitable punishment for when cameras "malfunction" or footage goes "missing" after police accused of wrongdoing get caught on camera...

One Bitcoin or lose your data, hacked Linux sysadmins told

We'll be safe

> Usually, it's Windows systems that get hit by ransomware, but a new strain targets Linux systems to extort cash.

But of course, unlike home Windows users, all Linux sysadmins will keep regularly scheduled backups of their server's data and so won't be affected. Right? Right?? :)

Oracle's Larry Ellison claims his Sparc M7 chip is hacker-proof – Errr...

Re: 4 bits one in 16

If allocation is done cyclically rather than random it may not be possible to set up a situation where your pointer colour matches a new memory block due to the order of memory allocation in the application.

Re: 4 bits one in 16

If you're in a position to flip bits in someone else's pointer aren't you already in control of the application?

Heartbleed

Would this have stopped Heartbleed thought? OpenSSL used its own memory handling code, so as Theo de Raadt explains it bypasses many built in memory protection features. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/211963

As the original quote goes, "OpenSSL has exploit mitigation countermeasures to make sure it's exploitable."

Snowball spud gun shows comets could have seeded Earth with life

I'm not saying it's aliens, but...

"This was confirmed again in 2013 when fragments of a comet that exploded over Sri Lanka were collected. Analysis of the remains found non-terrestrial life, including a complex, thick-walled microfossil similar to plankton, within the comet's remains."

U wot mate? The fact that this is the first I've heard of that, which should have been the biggest scientific discovery ever, makes me think it must have been debunked pretty quickly.

Evil CSS injection bug warning: Don't let hackers cross paths with your website

Doesn't this only affect IE7 and below?

Doesn't this only affect IE7 and below? CSS expressions were only ever in IE, and removed in IE8. I certainly couldn't get JS to execute on any of the browsers I have installed here...

Are MPs smarter than 5-year-olds? We'll soon find out at coding school – Berners-Lee

Yet MPs will also still know which side their bread is buttered on

So MPs will know how to code, what makes anyone think they won't simply continue to do what tech industry lobbyists lobby them to do?

True fact: 1 in 4 Brits are now TERRORISTS

I remember this plotline from TV

Life imitates Black Mirror?

Just TWO climate committee MPs contradict IPCC: The two with SCIENCE degrees

Why is a physicist and a chemist more qualified to answer the question of climate change than people who literally work in the field of climate study?

The Windows 8 dilemma: Win 8 or wait for 9?

Here's the choice I made:

Win 8.1 on my laptop, It's faster and more power efficient which are both plus points for a mobile machine even if it doesn't have a touchscreen.

Win 7 on my desktop, because I want to get work done on multiple monitors without things constantly full screening at me.

Londoners urged to cut landlines and take up wireless broadband

Wireless not the only way to dump your landline

Virgin Media will happily sell you broadband over their own cables without a landline.

Pine trees' scent 'could prevent climate change really being a problem'

Of course, since the greenhouse gases are still building up, pine forests must release more and more aerosols each year. Thus solving the problem once and for all.

ONCE AND FOR ALL!

MtGox has VANISHED. So where have all the Bitcoins gone?

Dammit

I knew I should have shorted my month of GPU activity's worth of bitcoins earlier, I guess I'll just have to wait until the next bubble cycle in a year or two.

Hosting outfit goes PERMANENTLY TITSUP after 'lifetime' plans kill biz

Re: "It's not remotely possible...

The cheapest lifetime deal they had was $100. Compared to my own hosting that should have given them around 5 years worth of revenue, so if they'd played it right they should have been able to last until at least 2017...

Mars One's certain-death space jolly shortlists 1,000 wannabe explorers

Re: I'm calling it now...

It worked for Channel 4 (see Space Cadets TV Series)

Re: 600,000 people supposedly have already visited or live on Mars

> Interestingly, there are several different people today who confirm seeing Obama on Mars as a teenager, who were also in the same CIA program. Take it or leave it, I don't care.

We should demand Obama's earth certificate to prove he's not a martian!

Re: In a heart beat

> but ultimately the crew are going to be permanently on a planet with only 38% of Earth's gravity there must be means to simulate 1G in order to maintain normal body function

There apparently hasn't been any research on the effect of low (such as Mars') gravity on the human body, so we have no idea how it affects the body vs microgravity (weightlessness). For all we know the human body may be able to sustain itself indefinitely at 0.4g with little or no ill effect.

Re: Surely most of these are Trolls

IIRC it cost money to apply, you'd have to be a rather dedicated troll to pony up real money...

Certain-death? I'd say there's an almost zero chance of anyone dying...

... because it's never going to leave the ground! It's either a blatant scam to separate gullible dreamers from their ~$40 application fee, or an even bigger, more elaborate reality TV hoax than Channel 4's Space Cadets.

Actually imagine that, contestants spend 6 months on their "space voyage" (on a ship that conveniently has "gravity generators" or 1g constant acceleration or some other excuse to why they aren't weightless), open the hatch and get ready to step out on to the martian surface only to instead step out in front of a live TV studio audience and find they've been the butt of the world's biggest reality-TV joke!

Antarctic ice shelf melt 'lowest ever recorded, global warming is not eroding it'

Re: Here since the ice age

How about 150 years of direct measurements coupled with estimates based on multiple climate proxies going back thousands of years?

So it's still receding

Just not as quickly as it was a few years ago?

Curiosity rover: While you humans were busy being hungover, this bot hit its 500th Martian day

Re: Predictable

> The rover also has a couple solar panels to power its control circuitry and some of its basic equipment

I'm pretty sure it doesn't have any solar panels (where are they on the rover? and why waste the extra weight when you have an RTG?). You might be thinking of the cruise stage, which was solar powered...

Torched £30 server switch costs phone firm millions in lost sales

If only they'd had a Jeff Bezos style CEO who'd go round their data centre unplugging cables at random and shouting at any team who had downtime on their systems....

Brit Skylon spaceplane moves closer to lift-off

Re: The Skylons are coming!

For the love of gods get your fracking pop-culture references right!

You CAN'T be a Silicon Roundabout hipster... you don't have Bluetooth socks

Bro, do you even run?

There's some serious heal striking going on in that video!

The facts on Trident 'cuts': What the Lib Dems want is disarmament

Re: Why on earth didn't the review cost up silos?

But if you take such a negative prediction of the future then surely the only way to be safe would be a massive nuclear arsenal on par with Russia or the US' current stockpile, after all at some point soon the technology to intercept ballistic missiles will be practical (especially if there is another cold war style arms race) so a sub or two's worth of missiles won't be any guarantee of a strike.

Also I don't care who the report was chaired by, skimming through it it just felt like it was discounting silos with out doing a full cost benefit analysis - if the cost saving was marginal or non-existent then obviously subs would be the better option, if the cost saving was very large then it would be worth considering further in my opinion.

Why on earth didn't the review cost up silos?

Given the nature of the threat that the UK faces (limited size attack from a rogue country rather than an all-out cold-war style nuclear war) having several hardened silos would seem like a sensible enough solution, and after all any nuclear attack on the UK large enough to knock out all silo sites would have a large impact on the rest of Europe from fallout etc. so they're likely to want to get involved. Not to mention the fact that NATO membership guarantees mutual defence.

All in all it seems to me the report has been created simply to "prove" that we should keep Trident rather than actually look at all alternatives.

YES, Xbox One DOES need internet, DOES restrict game trading

If they followed the Steam model I wouldn't mind so much (30 days offline play, mega discounted AA titles etc.) but pay full price for phyiscal games that can't be sold and can't be played after just one day of being off-line??

Developer codes VNC-over-GIF tool

Sidorov , Y U NO HTML5?

Gif? What's wrong with the canvas tag?

United Nations: 'Overpopulated Earth? Time to EAT BUGS'

> requires a mere two kilograms of food to produce one kilogram of what it charmingly refers to as "insect meat", a far better feed-to-food ratio than, for example, a fatted calf, which requires eight kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of beef

Here's a crazy idea, how about everyone just eats their damn vegetables and we get 2kg from 2kg of food instead of 1kg from 2kg of food?

Rules, shmules: Fliers leaving devices switched on in droves

Re: A few theories

> not triggering bombs in the hold or contacting an outside party to do so.

Surely if you were able to trigger a bomb on a plane remotely via a mobile you'd want to be safely on the ground when you did so??

'Liberator': Proof that you can't make a working gun in a 3D printer

Re: Sure, with a cheap home printer...

Actually the team that made and successfully test-fired the gun used a large (2nd hand) commercial 3D printer. I haven't seen any successful firings made from a cheap home 3D printer yet.

Without a commercial grade 3D printer the only people they're likely to injure is themselves, from bits of flying plastic.

Re: Idiot

"State" can mean country, government or nation as well as a sub-entity as in "US State"

Why not just simplify that to "Metalworking Lathe + CNC Milling Machine = Fully Working Gun"? What part of a gun can you make with a 3D printer and not a CNC Milling Machine?

Coke? Windows 8 is Microsoft's 'Vista moment'. Again

Follow this simple yes-no rule

Windows 98 - Yes

Windows ME - No

Windowx XP - Yes

Windows Vista - No

Windows 7 - Yes

Windows 8 - No

Windows ??? - Yes

(ignoring 2000 for being "biz" oriented)

British designer builds $15m iPhone for Hong Kong mogul

10 million quid? That's a whole Thatcher's funeral!

US lawmaker blames bicycle breath for global warming gas

It's really very simple, all berating-related CO2 is CARBON NEUTRAL. **CARBON NEUTRAL**. ZERO NET GAIN IN ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE LEVELS.

Every single atom of CO2 exhaled CAME FROM THE ATMOSPHERE. Plants take CO2 and turn it into sugars, animals eat those and turn them back into CO2.

The reason fossil fuels are bad is that you're taking CO2 that has been accumulating for millions and millions of years and releasing it all in one go, thus it's a **POSITIVE NET GAIN** ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE LEVELS.

Anyone trying to equate someone's breath with fossil fuels is a LYING HACK FOR THE OIL INDUSTRY.

The only possible link to any greenhouse gas emissions is if you eat slightly more, but again that's only because our food industry uses so much fossil fuel.

Keyboard, you're not my type

PS/2?

Why on earth would you want the PS/2 version instead of USB? So you can enjoy the "convenience" of not being able to chain it to a hub or using it on anything other than a desktop pc?

Nokia decrypts browser traffic, assures public not to worry

So just like Opera Mini then?

This is exactly what Opera Mini does, not really avoidable if you want a half-decent browsing experience on ultra-low end "smartphones"

Ancient Mars: Covered with life, oceans, clouds, and imagination

Surely terraformed Mars rather than past Mars

Surely this is what Terraformed Mars would look like, not past Mars as if you had surface water you wouldn't have all those crisp uneroded impact craters all over the place.