Posts by Igor Mozolevsky

Virgin warns 800 punters for file-sharing

RE: RE: Disconnect Them

> But what if I don't want to use crappy Itunes and don't have an Ipod?

play.com sell drm-free mp3s and while they're not in your "price range", they are totally reasonable...

RE: Wow? Really??

> they [VM] did seem to provide me with a wireless router preconfigured with

> ok security and with username/password of the router different to the routers

> default. So if someone did hijack that dudes wireless then Virgin may be using

> rubbish key generation algorithms (sound familiar??)

A German Court in Hamburgh (if I recall correctly), back in July 2006, had already found the owner of an unsecured WiFi connection liable for trading of copyrighted music through peer-to-peer, so go figure...

Although I would question how forensically sound BPI's methods are. If I'd received one of those letters, I'd write back to the ISP and deny any wrong doing and require them produce evidence to back up their allegation. There's a reason why ISPs with a brain are not being bullied by the BPI...

RE: @AndyC

> (b) means that they can ask for damages. Which for non-commercial file

> sharing is about, ooh, £0

Erm, not quite - it's the money they lost because you didn't buy the product plus the money they lost because others, to whom you've supplied the product, did not pay for the product either...

Retailers risk libel nightmare over 'no-work' database

This might be an obvious solution, but...

"Mireskandari cautioned: "Frankly, if I have CCTV showing someone stealing from the cash register, then I'm confident I can sack that person, but I wouldn't want to share that information. It's a real risk.""

I'd definitely share it with the police...

Police raid CeBIT stands

Hmm...

I thought there were not software patents in the EU?..

Home Secretary in ID card gaffe

re Civil Servants

>I would just like to point out, as a lowly Civil Servant, that most of these ideas

>and most of the data losses have occurred as a result of "initiatives" brought in

>by so called whizz kids from private industry, you know the ones, the directors

>that are so bad they can't even be employed under the "old boy network"

>anymore.

Clearly the civil servants fail to understand that the "whizz kids from private industry" are willing to spin anything to get the budgeted cash, and it's the civil servants' responsibility to ensure that the solution they buy actually meets some criteria... Has anyone in the Gov't ever thought of actually hiring someone "in-the-know" to audit all these solutions?.. Has anyone *actually* been held accountable for any of the recent cock-ups???

>The real Civil Service has constantly pointed out the flaws in their systems but >has been constantly misrepresented as idle sickie taking reactionaries rather

>than honest hard working people who do the best they can in adverse

>conditions with poor leadership and even poorer equipement. Before blaming

>the workers, just look at who the bosses have been that created all these

>cockups in the 1st place.

Yes, it's the evil bosses that leave laptops in various places, don't dispose of sensitive data properly or mail CDs with individuals' data around the country without a thought...

RE: Unfair

[snip drivel]

> Anyway, hopefully I've written enough to dispel your fears about this new system,

> I'll just go and get my coat. That's right, the white one with added 'fashion' straps

> and buckles.

and now we know who votes these guys in! :D

UK teen is world's youngest certified ethical hacker (maybe)

RE: Three cheers for certifications...

> And before taking any pot-shots, just ask yourself if you would feel comfortable in the office of a doctor with no diplomas on the wall.

AFAIK, the doctors have to have a significant amount of hands-on practice before they're let loose into the world on their own... I definitely would not feel comfortable with a doctor who had a diploma in reading a selection of books on anatomy and tinkering with corpses... Don't even know if someone like that would even be allowed to perform and autopsy...

Camelot pulls scratchcard amid numerical anarchy

RE: Uninformed comment follows

> There are even situations where people who "do have GCSE" mathematics may

> consider numbers absolute -- for instance, surely a line at -110V is at a higher

> voltage (albeit negative) than one at -10V? Then again, I've forgotten most of

> my education, so that may not be the case.

You mean direct current, right? The sign does not indicate the "amplitude" of the voltage, it effectively indicates the direction of travel of the current -- nothing to do with maths -- it's to do with electronics, and sinks and sources of electrons...

Security site knocks spots off Mac OS X Leopard firewall

RE: A woman using BSD

> Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't Darwin based on BSD?

The kernel is mach-based, the user-land is BSD based...

Macs seized by porn Trojan

Patch for human stupidity

How do Apple dare not install that in their latest OS!!! Atrocious!!!

Met Police guilty in de Menezes case

Erm...

I'm not usually the one to say it, but... And the relevance of this to IT is?..

Data recovery firm sounds Mac hard drive damage alert

RTFM

http://www.silvermac.com/2006/how-to-save-your-macbook-pro-hard-drive/

TV-Links man: 'I'm no master criminal'

Huh?..

I can't believe the industry is so thick to sue, instead of seeing it as an opportunity to jump in and offer a decent pay per view at a decent price - there's clearly a demand there!!!

Clearly, let's sue to make an example instead of let's do proper business and actually fill a hole in the market thinking is at work here!

When is the industry going to wake up to the fact that

WE ARE SIMPLY TIRED OF WAITING FOR FILMS/SERIES TO BE RELEASED AT LEAST HALF A YEAR LATER AFTER THEY HAS BEEN RELEASED IN THE STATES???

They're not losing money because of pirating, they're losing money because of idiocy and ignorance!

/rant over

British computer society blunders on BCC

Apparently ellipsis is not a valid comment title!

I personally blame the "Bored of your job? Don't have any career prospects? Get a job in IT!" adverts!!!

Re: Hm

> Quite why I pay my BCS subscription, I don't know. Toilet roll is cheaper,

> more effective and keeps your constitution healther than an £80 a year

> membership bill does.

I've stopped giving them money for nothing a long time ago, and instead pay ACM and IEEE CompSoc - at least you get some magazines that are worth reading!

Dreaded Blue Screen of Death mars some Leopard installs

Ok, so explain to me

how is third party incompatibility together with user stupidity (not to check that compatibility) is Apple's fault?.. Are we going to say it's car manufacturers' fault then drivers put diesel instead of petrol and vv?..

Record industry pushes ISPs to cut off file sharers

Oh, the uneducated fools

"Where people have registered music as an intellectual property I believe we will be able to match data banks of that music to music going out and being exchanged on the net"

Clearly the PR machine hasn't thought of the obvious things like compression, encryption and anything else that changes data?.. Exactly what are they going to be matching over what? No bloody wonder government IT projects fail so often!

Top judge: put everyone in UK on the DNA database

RE: nothing to hide bashing

> Isn't one life saved worth more than your principals on DNA sharing?

By the same argument, I would presume that you'd rather lock up 20 innocent people than to see a guilty man set free?! If so, I do sincerely hope on day you become one of those 20 innocent ones!

"If saving a life means having no liberty then what is that life worth?" - myself

@It *is* a deterrent!

... which works so well with the repeat offenders??? You know the difference between RE-active and PRO-active, right?

RE: Ten quid says this judge is about to publish a book

>It's interesting to hear just how many people would blindly accept this, but the whole debate about

>whether it violates our rights is irrelevant because the idea (at least in its present form) is simply

>unworkable.

It's pretty easy - make the NID compulsory (eg. tie in NHS no to your NID card, and not let you see dentist/GP or god forbid be involved in an RTA without the NID card) and DNA one of the metrics...

RE: presumed guilt

> As has been said before, the ID is good,

no, it's utterly stupid - for it to work for any crime "prevention" every single police officer would need to carry card readers that could authenticate the card and validate it a central data bank, the populous would need to be trusted to write "CRIMINAL" or "TERRORIST" on their own cards, otherwise how would the officer know (c'mon they're not psychic!) and everyone without the card needs to be locked up (in the already overcrowded prisons) until their identity is established...

So to sum-up the idea is good, in theory... but as many of us know, it is only in theory that theory and practice are synonymous!

RE: What's the problem???

> There should be no reason why our DNA shouldn't be on record, if you're not guilty of anything

> then you have nothing to worry about.

So you have already volunteered your DNA at the local police station to set an example??!

'Happy slapping' vids prompt Brown to push net filters

One would have thought that...

if someone was stupid enough to do something illegal and film themselves in the process the law enforcements would be able to do something about that certain someone... Clearly it is not the case!..

@ Julian Cook

Ah, of course, it's the 'net that started the whole pedophilia thing right?..

Genetic researchers fill 1TB a week

I wonder what coding they use...

Any chance their data looks like

<xml>

<structure>

<dna>

<helix>

<turn>

<pair>

<nucleotide>

<aderine/>

<tyamine/>

</nucleotide>

<nucleotide>

<cytosine/>

<guanine/>

</nucleotide>

</pair>

.

.

.

</turn>

.

.

.

</helix>

</dna>

</structure>

</xml>

?... just for the ease of using a COTS xml parser?

Google flirts with online OS

Is it just I?..

... who thinks that allowing a third party to store you documents and spreadsheets with no guarantee for privacy is not such a good idea?..

America wastes gazillions with always-on PCs

RE: SSH

"What would be nice is some way to make the machine run in much lower power mode - a bit like suspend-to-ram for a desktop pc, but with the ability to wake on remote login, or cron."

You mean ACPI Power State 3? and Wake-On-LAN tech? That's available and I use it on daily basis...

RE: Lets not forget the supermarkets...

The problem is that most execs are looking to save money now, instead of in the long term, so they buy cheap hardware that is expensive to run and is utterly incapable of doing things within reasonable time, instead of spending a bit of cash on a decent ITX box that only sucks ~20W in total... The number of times I've seen IT guys open the self checkout tills 'for maintenance' with ugly mid-90s looking boxes screaming due to overuse!..

UK government tunes out debate on DNA database

Re: What;s the big problem? Posted Friday 15th June 2007 13:17 GMT RE: What's the big problem

>Personally, I don't know what all the fuss is about? As a law abiding citizen I have

>nothing to hide and can only see positives from a full DNA database. I’d hope it

>would speed up law enforcement’s efforts to get dangerous criminals off the streets.

>What are people trying to protect?

You are travelling on a bus in the morning to work and deposit a fair few DNA samples whilst you're sitting down... You reach for a handle bar to lift yourself off a seat, and notice that your fingers touched some viscous dark red substance...

Later on in the evening the police bash your door in and arrest you on the suspicion of attempted murder, as it turns out that at some point before you sat in the seat there was a fight and some guy got stabbed. Having recovered your DNA from the scene and your fingerprints from the bood stain (remember the dark brown substance?) the police deduced that you were involved in the incident. Now they have a cause to turn your home upside down, detain you for questioning, drag you to the court for remand, and basically turn your life inside out...

On the plus side, it'll keep you away from posting nonsense here!..

Security researchers poke holes in Safari

RE: re iClowns

> You seem to be confusing your Safari vulnerabilities (quite hard to keep up though, isn't it)....that issue was reported by a separate individual.

Given that most of them are not actually vulnerabilities, yes! Maybe some ought to go and look up a difference between a security vulnerability and a bug that makes software crash... Maynor, himself, called ability to crash an app a DoS vulnerability - which kind of makes pretty much every application vulnerable to DoS, as he classified it... So every time my windows box crashes, I'll file a critical DoS vulnerability with Microsoft?.. Huh?..

Re: Not much of a security researcher

> How about this:

> You are walking down the road, and notice a man drops his watch. You say "you've dropped your watch", and he hit's you over the head with his briefcase.

> The next day, you are walking down the same road, and the same man drops his watch. By your logic, you should again tell him, and be beaten again for trying to help. Most people however would just keep walking. I know I would.

Well, what do you expect if you pull the watch of his hand, replace it with some third party watch, put it on the floor and then alert him to that?!

RE: Send in the iClowns...........

>> "just because you can write some code to make a program crash, doesn't make you a security wonder-guru!"

> No but finding 4 critical security issues missed by developers in an afternoon puts you well on the way - even in a cobbled up patchwork quilt like Safari.

Don't make me laugh - you can write a malformed URL, which gets parsed (presumably by MS's URL parser) and that will lead to a crash... Wow! That is definitely a critical security issue... Remind me, how many times do other programs crash?..

Re: OMFG, a BETA version has BUGS!!!

> Quite, however it makes a lie out of "Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one" statement.

Just because something is *designed* to be secure, doesn't make it secure because of various other steps/technologies involved... Have people stopped reading security books???

A new classification of security vuln's?

How is feed://%* a security vulnerability, exactly what security property does it compromise surely it's a dependability/reliability issue??? Same goes for other "security" bugs - just because you can write some code to make a program crash, doesn't make you a security wonder-guru!

As for calling the above "DoS" attacks, I've never laughed harder! Whom exacly are you denying service? The user? No, they are able to restart the app. without a problem, and all they have to do is not go to *you* website, or click *your* link. Thus making *you* (the "guru" that put the link up on *your* website) the real luser!..

/rant over

OMFG, a BETA version has BUGS!!!

Seriously!

In other news, numerous companies ship production grade software with major security holes...

iTunes Plus - plus user details that is

Re: Data protection

Simon Foxwell wrote:

> I'm no lawyer but wouldnt this be a breach of the data protection act in some way?

How? You're are the one who gets to keep the file with your information, if you chose to broadcast that, how is that Apple's fault?.. :-/

and so what?..

They should've done it right at the begining. As much of anti-Big Brother society as I am, I don't see what is so particularly wrong with this... At the end of the day, I know that the music that I buy, I will not upload to any p2p sites, mainly because I'm not daft and I'm not going to give something that I've paid for away; and as an added bonus I can copy the music between devices that don't support Apple DRM...

So honestly, what's the big deal???