Posts by djnapkin

India’s Supreme Court demands government detail internet shutdown rules

When I was in India some time ago there was a prominent story in the broadsheet Times of India. Students at some university were protesting that their "right to cheat" had been taken away for some examinations. Apparently cheating was a time honoured tradition at these exams. Wish I'd kept the newspaper. This was before the web took off. I assume they were using notes on paper?

Older AMD, Intel chips vulnerable to data-leaking 'Retbleed' Spectre variant

Re: worry more about the fixes than the problems

Very good point, and not one I've noticed other suggest, up to now. Makes a lot of sense. And, if we are going to take the usual hit from anti-malware, do we really want a 70% speed drop as well?

Apple Pay bags Cupertino another antitrust lawsuit

Re: Don't get your hopes up.

In the article itr was pointed out that on Android no fees are charged. Therefore I'd reckon your claim that "incumbent payment processors can charge MORE than Apple, not less." has no basis.

Creator of SSLPing, a free service to check SSL certs, downs tools

Pingu

I must be masochistic because I would be interested in the challenge of running such a tool. I've never let lack of prior experience get in the way.

On another angle ... I notice one of the major obstacles was keeping the *nix operating system up to date. If only he'd run it on Windows ... (ducking for cover :-)

Day 7 of the great Atlassian outage: IT giant still struggling to restore access

Re: Ah....remember....."cloud" is cheaper......

We also used to use the commenting when doing a bulk close on tickets. That was in previous job with on-prem. I shake my head that they haven't fixed that in their cloudy option.

Re: But but but....

They are stopping on-prem? I wonder if that will still go ahead after this disaster?

Crack team of boffins hash out how e-scooters should sound – but they need your help*

Until the UK gets up to date and legalises them, they miss the opportunity to regulate them.

Or maybe the UK thinks the war on drugs went well.

Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

Where are we up to, with Bitcoin's energy use? Last time I looked, it was exceeding that of Ireland, or Croatia.

Re: Expanding horizons and equations

That isn't how I took the comment and comparison at all.

The regex comment is very well known & high profile, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who enjoys it but didn't know who coined it.

The comparsion was purely pointing to Zawinski's excellent ability to turn a phrase - something that is well apprecited by the denizens here, to be sure.

Less than PEACH-y: UK's plant export IT system only works with Internet Explorer

Even in the world of lazy, befuddled public servants, this is egregious slackness.

Web trust dies in darkness: Hidden Certificate Authorities undermine public crypto infrastructure

Well, well, I thought that the root certificates in the browser, for example the 151 built-in to Mozilla browser, were pretty much hard coded in there.

It would be good if the article explains how the browser root store is added to.

Good news: Google no longer requires publishers to use the AMP format. Bad news: What replaces it might be worse

Re: Use Bing!

> If you have a specific fetish that you want to see images of, Bing beats Google hands down.

Absolutely. I reckon if I searched for "turtle" Bing would give me pictures of them humping or whatever it's called with turtles.

Back on topic though,. it really gripes me how much Javascript is in web pages and yes, as a web developer, I agree it is totally due to lazy programmers.

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

Hmmm, let me check the date on my calendar. Oh, 1st April, well look at that.

Kinda goes without saying, but shore up your admin passwords or be borged by this brute-forcing botnet

Re: My sympathies

I'd love to discover where that surname came from. Perhaps an anglicisation (?) of a European or Russian name.

I recognise my site is too small and not a target for this, but the distributed attack surely would punch a hole in our "five shots and you are out" defence against brute force login attempts.

Darn.

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

Re: They shoot themselves in the foot

I had a rather different take on the article to you. I thought it was well laid out and covered the progress of the optimisation, with great clarity. I'd say the results from optimising on a multi threaded CPU were impressive. The overall message of optiising your software was well carried.

Threading is beyond many programmers, and running on a GPU is surely a specialised art - and I am not sure how many servers, either inhouse or cloud, would have GPUs. Perhaps they do. I just have not heard of that being a thing.

Re: C rocks.

Yes it does, until the wrong subscript variable is used for an array index and you can't figure why you occasionally get memory corruption in a large program, causing disaster.

Not that this ever happened to us.

Re: DEC Fortran

512KB? We used to dream of having that much memory around 1980. The Unisys mainframe was as big as several cupboards, and had 192KB of memory. Each memory card was 16KB but was the size of what would be a large motherboard today.

Sure taught us how to make sure our programs were optimised.

JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you're not alone... a chunk of pros also feel JS is 'overly complex'

Re: JavaScript is "overly complex".

Re "but I've always written all the JS I use myself, with the exception of the odd tool such as CKEditor" - do you use jQuery? I find it doesn't impact the performance of my sites at all. Plus, the user's browser almost certainly has a cached copy already.

Re: Frameworks

Web pages with all the framework overhead run like dogs. No one ever wants to optimise or cull. We devs only to add more stuff into the page. Performance dies as a result.

Clean CSS, just enough JS to do the job (and no more) - otherwise your pages suck. And you aren't a real programmer if you can't do it that way.

Australia on the cusp of showing the world how to break encryption

This is not intended to break end-to-end encryption.

It is just so they can ask Google/Microsoft/Apple to hand over gmails, hotmails, or whatever is held in the cloud.

Why Firefox? Because not everybody is a web designer, silly

While Chrome is better for web designers (like me), for using the web, Firefox is massively better.

Firefox has features that make using it a pleasure. Whenever I use Chrome to surf the web, as opposed to debugging a DOM/CSS problem, I am reminded of how little attention Google pays to real world users.

Browser history searching and the URL bar are just one example.

Ombudsman slams Centrelink debt recovery system

Will the head of this project be lopped? If not, why not?

Human memory, or the lack of it, is the biggest security bug on the 'net

Re: But users ARE the problem!

Indeed. For example my wife has KeePass with AutoType at her fingertips, and uses Firefox to remember her passwords for sites. Despite this she uses the same two passwords everywhere. Until I notice, anyway.

Was it Gary Clail who sang, "There's something wrong with human nature" ?

Top 10 SSDs: Price, performance and capacity

Re: 4K Writes much faster than Read?

Sequential reads are faster than writes, sorry.

4K Writes much faster than Read?

In the last chart the small file throughput figures, shows the 4K writes as being faster than reads. Around three to four times faster than reads.

Is that right ? Am I missing something here ? Pretty sure there's no head movement latency in these critters. Sequential reads are all slower than writes, as I'd expect.

Apple Pay is a tidy payday for Apple with 0.15% cut, sources say

NFC already here in Oz

I am puzzled by these comments that the banks in UK or wherever need to get into the NFC game.

Because here in Australia, pay-by-bonk is quite widespread. Most of the retailers that do a lot of transactions via card, already have touch technology readers.

We just touch the card on to the reader for payments up to $100 and no PIN required.

These terminals take the traditional swipe, plus the chip-n-pin, and now PayWave as it is called here.

Is this really not widespread elsewhere?

Password manager LastPass goes titsup: Users locked out

Re: Lastpass

Keepass software is not closed - the source code is freely available. I had a look through it recently, when I was musing about running up a copy on my own website as an emergency thing when travelling. More to it than I had expected.

Broadband slow and expensive? Blame Telstra says CloudFlare

Dividends

That's one reason why the share dividends are so good. Inequality in action, see it right here.

Mozilla's 'Tiles' ads debut in new Firefox nightlies

Tiles? What tiles?

New Tab Homepage

- by Ben Basson

Been using it for yonks. Even paid the guy a donation. Might be time to do so again.

"A very simple tabbed browsing extension that loads your homepage when you open a new tab. If you have multiple homepages, the first is chosen."

Aussie telcos to sell user location data to marketers

Yeah, so how are they planning to push those ads? By feeding the ip back to doubleclick so the ad appears in your tiny browser screen in your phone.? Good model ...

Telstra 'issue' hid ADSL availability from rival carriers

Yes, it has been well known for years that Telstra would deny a connection from a competitor, and then magically the line would be suitable when you apply through them. This has been going on forever. The only surprise it that is has taken this long for it to official. Combat Wombat's advice was regularly doled out in the Whirlpool forum.

I cannot express my opinion of Telstra in a family forum such as this.

Charity: Ta for the free Win 8.1, Microsoft – we'll use it to install Win 7

Re: Things are hidden :-(

WTF? WPA2 is trivially crackable? Reference, please.

Oh look, he hasn't got one.

Re: Things are hidden :-(

That's right - MAC address filtering is a pointless waste of time. Use WPA2 and turn off WPS. That is all.

FTTN cabinet survives Kiwi car crash

4WD and drink driving

Hey Matto, you've come here for the cold hard facts. Well, here are some.

My summary: 4WD drivers are pissheads compared to the rest of the population.

The facts:

Where known/tested, 29 per cent of 4WD drivers involved in fatal crashes had a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) greater than 0.05g/100ml. This proportion was higher than for all other types of vehicle operators:

- Twenty-six per cent of motorcycle riders

- Twenty-one per cent passenger car drivers

- Nineteen per cent of light truck drivers, and

- Two per cent of heavy truck drivers

From http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/roads/safety/publications/2002/FWD_Crash.aspx

Hurricane Sandy blows US pirate-pestering plan into 2013

I'm amazed that youngsters find all these new movies actually worth pirating. Still, until there is a reasonable alternative, and outside Netflix in the US, there doesn't seem to be one - not in Aus, not in the UK far as I can tell - the movie industry shouldn't be surprised if people continue to download movies.

Where I live, the local DVD rental store has closed. How on earth people are supposed to watch movies, I'm not sure.

NZ government network leaking data like a sieve

Ministry of Social Development

Is it just me, or does Ministry of Social Development sound like just the sort of name that George Orwell might have come up with?

The perfect CRIME? New HTTPS web hijack attack explained

Theoretical ?

Relies on the attacker sniffing the packets - for example by being in the same coffe shop wi-fi - AND forcing you to visit a site hosting the malware. Proabably restricted to dodgy coffee shops.

Malaysian websites go dark to protest Evidence Act

A real shame

Very surprising news. While in Malaysia in June one big news item was a change to the protest laws from a position where gathering and demonstrations were forbidden unless specifically approved, to a new law allowing them all. The police could require a change of time (& venue? not sure), but not prohibit them. Specific requirements were placed on the police re timescales for this too.

There many other signs of a new and exciting vibe in Malaysia; it has a real feel of going somewhere.

This proposed new law surely is a huge step backwards.

Beer icon, because they have (with Norway) the most expensive ber in the world.

Higgs boson chasers: Now only 1-in-300 MILLION chance we're wrong

One Christmas I posed this question to my pals: what is the chance of picking yourself (or someone picking themselves) in a Secret Santa draw? Our jape was that we would then plant a fancy prize e.g. an Xbox instead of the usual gift.

One friend worked it out that night, on the train home. She was, and is, very bright. Gorgeous too. It's something like 1 over e.

Firefox 14 tabs no longer sneak a peek at users' privates

Tried to use Chrome, but ...

I use the New Tab Homepage add-on for Firefox to show my home page on open of a new tab. My home page is a local file with my favourite links etc.

Tried to emulate this with Chrome, no joy.

With Firefox it takes almost no time to get to a specific site. Chrome is supposed to be fast but the lack of this ability kills it for me. And don't get me started about the lack of decent add-ons.

West Australian WiFi mesh sniffs out bushfires

Bloody brilliant work, lads!

New Euro IP law promises artists torpedoes to sink pirates

Fence sitting

If I were a musician I'd be really cheesed off about having my creation handed around without any benefit back to me.

On the other hand, record labels have done themselves no favours, paying, what percentage of the sale price is it to the musician? 7% from memory?

> Like megaupload?

Good point. Hard to see how Kim Megamoneypants deserves all that cash.

Intel issues dividend, Apple sits on $97.6bn

Capital gains in the US

Again another example of how screwed up is the US tax system. Why are capital gains taxed at a different rate to income? There's no good reason.

They could use the Aussie system

Austrlaia has a working system to avoid the double taxation of dividends. Companies still have a choice of whether their dividends are pre- or post- taxatiion (or any mix thereof). The post-taxation component carries that tax paid to the dividend recipient. It's not that hard.

HP, Microsoft dumped from Dow Jones 'green' list

Sustainability is NOT a crock. It has never meant staying a rut. Where did you pick up that idea?!?

Did you read the criteria that the DJSI uses to assess?

If you think it was the Green movement that got Ethanol usage to the position it is in the USA today - and on the point that diverting all that primary production to vehicle fuel is a bad idea, we are in total agreement - well, it was actually self-serving politicians. Particularly those with base in the corn growing belt, who saw it as an opportunity to lock in extra demand for the corn farmers in their area. Can't blame the Greens for this one.

Higgs Boson hiding place narrows

Higgs Boson found

I have discovered the Higgs Boson particle, but the margins of this web blog are too small to contain the location.

Nokia ‘giving away phones at cost’

Nokia did it to themselves

@ All going to plan then - Nokia's downfall owes nothing to Microsoft. This is entirely their own work. A change of top level management saw some incredibly bad decisions - it's all well documented - and they also got bogged down in bureaucracy.

Such a shame, as their actual phone technology was and is way ahead of the competition. The call quality on all the HTC, Samsung and Apple smartphones I've come across is poor.

Australia online ad spend reaches A$2.65bn

Not surprising

> Australians are watching nearly 1 billion videos online each month

Just a natural upgrade path from our existing propensity to sit watching flies crawl up the wall