Posts by Jeff Deacon

OOXML marks the spot, says research firm

I've heard of Burton's before ...

They make suits don't they?

Google preps Street View Big Mac search

EXIF Info anyone?

And if they start to index the EXIF information in the image (Camera, exposure, date & time taken, etc) we could have a bit of fun here. There are plenty of programs that permit the amendment of such info. So the text in the image says one thing (as found by Google's OCR), and the EXIF says something else.

Could we manage to get Googleplex to have a nervous breakdown? If not, then the time has come to reign the company in.

Firefox spoofing bug raises phishing fears

Why panic?

Lets just go back to HTML 3, no active scripting, whether Java or ActiveX, and certainly no Flash (wasn't that a heavy duty detergent for cleaning the kitchen floors?). In fact just plain words and pictures.

No, I am being serious. I am absolutely pissed off with Web2.0 designers finding ever more inventive ways of making me insecure. In fact, I am thinking of upgrading from Firefox to OffByOne as my principal browser. And if your web site doesn't work? Well tough, there are plenty that do.

No coat to take.

Serious Flash vulns menace at least 10,000 websites

If its not this sort of active content, then its some other sort.

Just as an in passing, I had thought that "vulnerabile" was a deliberate to describe some sort of very unpleasant attack of the lets-all-be-scared-monster.

Seriously, active content has always had problems with people exploiting it for actions that were not intended by the script authors. The whole idea was not thought through as a secure system, it was developed as a that-would-look-great-gee-whizz vision. It may well be technically feasible to do all sorts of things, but is it wise to try?

As an ordinary punter looking at web sites, I am so less than impressed by things that move and do things inside my browser that I routinely turn them all off (Firefox with NoScript, Adblock or Adblock Plus, etc) unless I really cannot manage without. Lets go back to HTML3, no active content, and start all over again. Getting it right this time!

[And please can I have an icon with steam coming out of my ears!]

EU mandates electronic IDs for sheep and goats

Re: Farmers already do enough shovelling

> sheep and goats are raised in fenced off areas, so they don't get lost or end up in strange places

That may be how it works where you farm, but there were quite a lot of hill sheep in the wilder parts of the UK until foot and mouth. Adopt own conspiracy theory to taste, but there are a lot fewer of them now. This rule will make it all but impossible to manage a hill sheep farm any more!

The ink is barely dry on that treacherous traitorous not-a-constitution- not-a-reform- (ah yes) Lisbon treaty, and here we are off again with the unstoppable EU machine at work. When DO we get a chance to vote the super government out? When DO we get a chance to decide whether we actually want anything more than the free trade area that Ted Heath not-promised lied to us about? When DO we get a chance to vote down this latest decision? When DO we get a chance to leave?

I would get my coat if I could, but anywhere worth going to already has the barriers up.

Met plan moves police to out of town megabases

Another nail in the coffin of Great Britain as we knew it

I think The Cube has plenty of good solid points.

The Police Senior Management have completely lost sight of Sir Robert Peel's Principles of Policing, and are indeed behaving much more like an army of occupation. Working once in an office on a London High Street, I spent far too much time looking out of the window, noticing that the police never went anywhere except on Blues and Twos. A move such as described in this article will only reinforce that feeling of estrangement. I also hear calls for the "replacement and modernisation" of Paddington Green police station, the one used for anti-terrorist investigations. What is the betting that all these new out of town bunkers will be fortresses providing solid defence against terrorists and against irate crowds of citizens when they awake to what has been done in their name. No wonder it will be a virtual consultation!

But then it had to come, as part of the "harmonisation" of the legal systems throughout the EU. Britain and Ireland were the only Common Law countries in the EU, the rest relying on derivations of Napoleonic law, in which everything not expressly permitted is forbidden, and where the police are definitely a (paramilitary) force for the government to use to enforce its will on the citizens. I can't remember the scheme, but there is some EU "largesse" for nations with paramilitary police forces. So I have no doubt that the Met Senior Management Team are in fact reorganising themselves in order to benefit from the handouts.

Nominet plots one registry to rule them all

But why invent the wheel all over again?

e164.org (http://www.e164.org/) has been around for ages, doing just this job on a voluntary basis, with worldwide reach for the cogniscienti. All it takes is to choose the right VoIP software or hardware (ie has the facility to do enum lookups) and then get it to do its stuff on every phone call. This plethora of national enum registries is just a nuisance, not a benefit.

Brussels asks Ofcom boss what he's on about

Of course Ofcom is a problem

Any organisation formed by pushing together all sorts of disparate regulatory matters, like Ofcom, would be a problem. How on earth do you balance the differing needs of RF spectrum allocation, stopping the dominance of the incumbent telco, and ensuring that broadcast television programmes meet the necessary standards of taste and decency?

Could our "government in Brussels" do any better? Well, given their proven track record with agriculture, civil and military aviation, satellite GPS, civil liberties, to name but a few, I would venture to suggest that the only improvement they could bring is to spend more money, and to do it less efficiently. Have you noticed recently that whatever the question, the answer is always "more Europe"?

Once we have such an EU regulator, acting as Ofcom's boss, just how easy would it be for Prodi's Italian suggestion to "make blogging easier" to find its way into EU law, and therefore applicable in the UK? As soon as this new (not a constitutional) treaty is signed, all leaders of Member States (eg the UK Prime Minister) will owe their principal allegiance to the EU, and not to the nation state that they lead! It says so in the treaty!

By all means, lets do something about Ofcom - break it up into the previous bodies, and refine them to meet our needs. More Europe is NOT the answer.

Swede with UK betting licence held in Amsterdam for 'breaking' ancient French law

Re: Plus ca change...

Sceptic, I think you have it in one!

Of course the French will continue to feather their own nest at the expense of anyone else they can hoodwink into doing so. Those who think otherwise are fools or Europhiles (not that there is any great difference between those two categories!)

IBM patents making money from patents

Another "I want to patent ..."

I want to patent the standards of inventiveness and the business process that ought to be used by a competent patent office for the examination of patent applications.

Then in the ensuing court case, if the US Patent Office can prove that they haven't breached my patent, we will all know that they are not applying the correct standards and business process.

Surely, the only thing that the grant of a US Patent shows currently is that the examiner wasn't awake enough to spot a problem with the application form. Why oh why did it take a private individual from New Zealand to point out to the USPO that Amazon were pulling a fast one with their "one click" patent? The examiner who granted that application must have been asleep, drunk, or bribed!

Cops pull plugs on TV-links, claim 'facilitation of infringement'

Even if

* Even if the chap is found to be innocent,

* even if, in the cold light of day, charges are not brought,

let us not forget that this man has now had his fingerprints taken and his DNA sampled, and placed on the national databases where criminal records are kept,

and that he will now be a suspect in every crime committed in the UK until he is 100,

even if he has inconveniently died before then!

No-humping 20mph limit for London

Cycles with number plates

For those thinking that this cycling lark gives a free passout from all this automatic monitoring stuff, do remember that "Our Ken" (tm) has already mooted requiring cyclists to be registered, and to display number plates! Sadly, I can't remember for sure, but I guess at a couple of years ago. It'll be back!

Developer to demo 400Mbps powerline Ethernet

Re: I wonder if ...

Of course it will deny the use of its own and all adjacent frequencies for miles around. Designers of digital electronics appear to have no appreciation of EMC (electromagnetic compatibility) at all.

The only thing they seem to know is how to get their signal where they want it. To hell with the damage it does on the way. ADSL or ethernet over a twisted pair is bad enough, but it does at least keep some of the racket in. Mains circuits are wires laid parallel! Excellent transmitting antenna!

Now if I were a conspiracy theorist, I could see an opportunity to stop this unregulated, uncontrolled broadcasting stuff, where the State doesn't know what programmes you are watching! By destroying the usefulness of broadcast and shortwave frequencies, they make it essential to listen or watch using the internet. And guess who is about to require ISPs to keep logs of all the internet connections made by their customers? Good thing I'm not, isn't it!

TV giants lock horns with Microsoft and Google over white space wireless play

Digital Electronics designers don't understand RF

It is quite clear from the way that digital electronics designers have introduced all sorts of RF (Radio Frequency) pollution into everyday use that they have neither the technical skill nor the inclination to resolve. What is often termed "electronic smog" now makes much of the short wave bands unusable in big cities. Previously low power could communicate all round the world.

I seriously hope this project fails ignominiously, but seeing that Microsoft are involved, and the Microsoft always gets what it wants, I will not hold my breath.

UK ID card service mounts birth, marriage, death landgrab

Escape to where?

Jon said <i>"I will leave this country before succumbing to state enforced registration of my biometrics."</i>

From what I can see, though, there won't be too many places to go where the population will not be required to do so.

Europe claims UK botched one third of Data Protection Directive

re: @Simon Painter

Scotsman in Yorkshire, you miss the point that Simon was trying to make. In Westminster, the ruling Scottish Mafia make laws for the English when the very same matters are devolved to the Scottish Parliament, and therefore MPs representing English seats can have no say. Without the Scottish Mafia in the UK Parliament at Westminster, Labour would not have the majority necessary to push through their current legislative program to break up the UK.

Sun turns Microsoft Windows server OEM

And next?

Who is going to open a book on the future of Open Office? I bet the pressure will now be on Sun to cast Open Office adrift. After all, now that Sun have joined Team Microsoft, they won't want to be disloyal, will they?

MS lawyers take out AutoPatcher

Another push in the right direction

When MS insisted on users asking for permission to use the software they had already paid for, I concluded that WIndows XP and later were not for me. Then came the need for WGA "verification" for the downloading of Windows 2000 updates. I refused and had to put my trust in other defences. I am NOT having MS furkle around inside my PCs to see if they like what is there.

Then 6 months ago I stumbled on the Autopatcher team, and have been an ardent fan of their work ever since. But that must be what MS are trying to prevent. Sadly I missed the August updates, but I am now current to July 2007, whereas I was previously only updated to SP4! Thanks for all the hard work, gents.

Now where is that penguin?

Travelocity accidentally books 1,458 trips between US and Cuba

@ paul - Uncle Who?

Neither was Uncle Joe (Stalin) my uncle. Perhaps using "uncle" is a way to avoid calling them godfather?

US wiretap plan will leave door open for spooks and hackers

VoIP Encryption

Phil Zimmermann is working on it. Look for

http://zfoneproject.com/

VoIP services must offer 999, says Ofcom

"Public Confusion" is only an excuse

It won't be long before the EU steps in to mandate that geographical numbers must be registered to a particular location/address (just like Austria for all calls and USA for 911 calls), and another advantage of VoIP is destroyed.

There wouldn't be a conspiracy from the provider(s) of copper wire phone services would there? No, surely not! I can't see OfCom falling for that trick!

Wireless power limit doubled to bridge digital divide

Paranoia paradise!

Even after the increase in power (to 4 watts), the base station will still not have the power of an average mobile phone or walkie-talkie radio!

But let us not allow the facts of the matter to get in the way of a good emotional outburst from the tinfoil hat brigade.

I wonder whether I should expect visitations from the paranoids when they learn that in an adjacent frequency band, I have a licence that permits me to transmit 400 watts!