Posts by flibbertigibbet

Black hole radiation could provide insight into quantum gravity

Bravo again Richard

Yet again you have produced an exemplary piece of science reporting.

What's not in the iPhone 4S ... and why

Re: Bluetooth 4.0 though

> Bluetooth low-power, which I understand is positioning itself as an alternative NFC technology/standard

One of the more bizarre assertions to come from "industry commentators". At bit like some of the claims made in this article, actually.

NFC stands for Near Field Communications. Near, as in under 1cm, usually. As in "you have to be within 1cm of my phone in order to remove $10 from my account". Bluetooth 4.0 still operates at 10m, even the low power versions.

Turnbull storms Paris with NBN’s doom

@scottf007: I think the first guy is wrong

*shrug* What can I say? There will be no law banning competition on the local loop. They are all gone. Look it up yourself if you don't believe me. The proposed bill is online.

@scottf007: One company owning all access, this means one company will set prices with no other companies to compete(I think the first guy is wrong).

Firstly a gentle reminder: this is what we have now. One company, Telstra owns almost all the access. The one exception is the Optus HFC network which is dying a slow agonised death as we speak.

You talk about how wonderful competition is, but ignore the fact no country on the planet have managed to produce a competitive local loop delivery. The reason is plain as the nose on your face: no one in their right mind will roll out multiple cables to your house. It would be like running two water mains, or two selects of electricity poles. Just insane. That short period were we did take a short trip on the other side of sanity lead to the two HFC networks being rolled down the one street, and now the eventual death of one of them.

So local loop competition won't happen. You are demanding the impossible. Forget the fantasy, and just accept the idea that one company will own the sole land line connection to your house. If they are a private company they will charge you as much as they think you can bear. Of course no one can stomach that, so Telstra is regulated and charges whatever the government determines. The NBN will be a government owned company and so in that case the government sets the price. Can you spot the difference? Neither can I.

But there is one difference. Telstra used it local loop monopoly to keep a tight grasp all the rest of the communications infrastructure. Most of the back haul in the country is owned by Telstra. It is by far the biggest mobile operator. When you own the key piece of the puzzle, the local loop, that everyone must connect to it is easy to make it difficult and expensive for competitors. Thus we ended up with a one near monopoly operator who controls all of Australia telecommunications infrastructure.

The NBN will fix that. In return for being allowed to own the natural monopoly, it must stay out of all other areas. So in the long term we should see lots more competition in back haul and retail.

Did you get that - because I think you are missing the big picture. In fact you've got it 180 degrees arse about - just like Turnbull. Here you are saying the NBN will squash all competition, whereas in fact the new regulations separate the industry into multiple segments so there will be more competition.

In fact it is no different to what happened in Electricity. It used to be your local generator owned everything from the power station, to the transmission lines, to the suburban poles, to the meter box in your house, and you paid whatever they said. Then they broke it up. So now you have generators, who bid in a market to sell to retailers, who in turn sell to you. And so you have a choice. In fact everyone has choices and there is competition everywhere where they used to be none. But did you notice there is one area there is no competition? That would be the suburban poles and wires. They are still owned by a monopoly. The government usually. How odd - with the NBN we end up with the same situation in telecommunications.

@scottf007: We are getting bent over.

Maybe we are. But again you are making no sense. You are saying that with the current situation we being ripped off. Fair enough. But now the government proposes to change that situation in a way that might fix it, you are using that argument that we are being ripped off now to oppose it?!? Weird.

NBN ending competition

Turnbull is promoting a fantasy here. He claims, repeatedly that the NBN is a monopoly guaranteed by law. It is complete bs. Even those supposed "anti-cherry picking" provisions were some journalists invention.

The new laws do insist the industry is split into segments - local loop and the rest (retail and back haul), but that's it. Any and every one is free to build a competitor to the NBN, and what's more do so only in the most profitable, densely populated areas (ie, cherry pick). The _only_ restriction is you must be a wholesaler who sells access to every retailer on the same terms. So, you think wireless is going to kill fibre - well then go for it. Maybe put fixed wireless into apartment blocks were you can get 100's of customers per antenna, and undercut the NBN. No one is stopping you.

So unlike the Telstra monopoly of old, competition is allowed. I expect in the back haul business there will be more competition, because unlike Telstra the NBN is banned from providing back haul. Telstra on the the other hand gave itself very preferential access to its own exchanges. If the NBN succeeds, it will be because it can wholesale the sort of local loop product people want cheaper than anyone else can. Most people would call that open slather competition.

It's almost a 180 difference from the picture Turnbull is trying to spin. Yet articles like this one just repeat his claims without question. Maybe your could actually try doing some journalism for a change, putting the claims of our pollies in context rather than just allowing yourself to be treated as a copy & paste megaphone.

New GPL licence touted as saviour of Linux, Android

GPLv3 - a curates egg

Yes the anti patent clauses and all sorts of other things the FSF is noisily pointing to are very nice. In those areas the GPL V3 is much better than GPL V2.

But they neglect to mention it is incompatible with one aspect of modern platforms - the App Store. You can't bring a piece of GPL V3 code near the Android or iOS app stores, even if you had a "press this button to download the source" on them. Without an app store controlling what can and can not run on the phone, the reality is many carriers simply won't allow those phones on their network. Unlike what the clause is aimed at, TiVo, this isn't driven by some attempt to control the customer, it is to shield them from malware. It is the classic case of good intentions causing huge amounts of collateral damage.

There are other licenses out there that as good as the GPL V3 on the patent front, but don't have that problematic anti tivo'ation clause in them. The Eclipse Public License is one. Unfortunately it isn't compatible with the GPL, so the world remains full of compromises.

In the mean time, the FSF saying the GPL V3 is a saviour of modern software eco-systems like Android is a lie. It is not a saviour. It is fundamentally incompatible with them. If you want to release free software that can be used by your average person on them, you must NOT use the GPL V3.

Cheapskate Aussie net-shoppers safe from GST for now

Richard Chirgwin - you're my hero

I get more objective reporting from the daily articles by Richard here then I do from the rest of the internet combined. I know, I know, Richard is just presenting boring facts rather and honest assessment rather than searching for the most titillating angle and speculating about it endlessly. He even has the temerity to include to include links to back up his claims. Since when has any serious money making journalist even done that?

It can't possibly last. I am making a point of enjoying it while it is around.

Turnbull lays out alternative architecture

What am I missing here?

I am having trouble reconciling:

> would be tasked with getting a minimum 12 Mbps to as many Australians as possible, “ideally within twelve months”. This would be followed by a rapid upgrade to 24 Mbps “within forty-eight months”.

with:

> a model which would leave high-density, economically-viable locations served by market competition, unsupported by government

Most people in these economically-viable areas do not have 24 Mbps. Most don't have 12 Mbps. So how are these people going to be upgraded to those speed without support from the government? Presumably if it was economically-viable, it would already have been done.

And how do you propose to force the split up a private company like Telstra? Turnbull blandly asserts that "more valuable to shareholders in the long term". Surely if the shareholders actually believed that it would have been done by now.

There is also the minor issue of this approach of paying the local oligopoly to upgrade the copper why leaving the open having been tried, and failed. I guess its possible that since we have said adois to Saul and Phil, attitudes have changed.

All in all, this seems like putting up something different form what the government is doing that will survive the cursory inspection it will get at election time. Ahh well. I guess it is better than the hopeless plan they floated at the last election, although I am lending it more dignity than it deserves by calling it a plan.

DIDO: snake oil or wireless salvation?

And this is the bit that makes no sense

> Because of this, each wireless user can use “the full data rate of shared spectrum simultaneously with all other users”, and therefore, “Shannon’s law does not apply”.

Either the spectrum isn't literally shared, or Shannon-Hartley theorem does indeed apply. There are a whole pile of tricks you can use to avoid sharing spectrum: create small cells that don't overlap, use highly directional antenna's, use phase array antenna's to create a virtual directional antenna, bump up the signal strength to raise the signal to noise ration, figure out a way to reduce the noise by say running your signal through very thin glass wave guides. If Steve Perlman hasn't invented a new one of these it is snake oil. Given the way the paper is written, I'm betting on snake oil.

Notice that Shannon-Hartley is called a theorem, not a law. That is because isn't one of physics model's validated through repeated observation. It is actually something stronger - a mathematical fact. Saying it is wrong is like saying 1+1=3.

Lithium cells take salt to extend life

LiFePO4?

All well and good, but LiFePO4 last a minimum of 2000 cycles, and a decade, and are shipping now.

To justify their enormous cost batteries have to last decades. The means somewhere around to 10,000 cycle mark. 1,000 just doesn't cut it.

US forced to redesign secret weapon after cyber breach

And the sheep take off

After reading the comments, it stuck me that like a flock of sheep you are all leaping to conclusions. Nowhere in the article does it say the data was extracted using the internet. Nowhere does it say the computers were even connected to the internet.

For all we know, this might be like Stuxnet - computers not attached to the internet were attacked via a USB virus. Or move likely someone trusted simply connected a phone to the corporate LAN, and walked out the door with 30 Gb of state secrets on a micro SD card smaller than a finger nail.

Paris because on a site supposedly dedicated to IT, the comments here are simply sad.

Putting the Square Kilometre Array on a Cloud

Oh, so now we have a ...

From the article: So how do you process, transport, and store this much data?

Finally, a justification for the NBN.

The freakonomics of smut: Does it actually cause rape?

And what's wrong with the utilitarian argument?

I came to pretty much the same conclusions as the article when we have the mandatory filtering debate here in Australia. (We are currently going through the "optional filtering" debate, which roughly translates to the ISP's voluntarily implementing filtering on all their customers (who don't have a choice), because the government is beating them over the head. The government announced during the last couple of weeks when the largest ISP's verbally agreed to come on board. The only problem being now that push has come to shove and the media heat is increasing, the ISP's seem to be realising this move may not popular with their customers and are wavering. We will see.)

Returning to the topic. I see we have one here saying the fact that the publishing of the abuse of child saves several is not sufficient justification for allowing the publishing. I guess they must be one of those anti-vaccination nutters as well. The argument is the same. Vaccination does undeniably kill some kids, in return for saving many more. The anti utilitarian's argue the greater good is no justification if one kid dies.

The interesting thing about pedo photo's is there a 1/2 way house. There aren't many crimes where the perpetrator willingly sells photo's of them committing the deed, for the obvious reason they are creating a picture and money trail that leads straight back to them. But this creates an opportunity, for those who are truly interested in the kids welfare, as opposed to just forcing everybody to conform to their own idea of utopia. Rather than crack down so hard on picture trading you force it to become well neigh invisible, you semi-tolerate it - rather in the same manner music piracy is now semi tolerated. It's still a crime, but if you get caught the primary interest is in having legal access to all your records, so you can follow the money trail to a child abuser.

Now the amazing thing to me was the people in Australia pushing the internet filter, dumb as thick planks they might be, seemed to get this. Towards the twilight of the proposal its primary political proponent actually said rather than begin filtering new child porn sites immediately, they would leave them open for a while so the police could track who was accessing them. It was a tiny, tiny blow for common sense, and a wholly unexpected one.

New malware ferrets out and steals Bitcoins

Ponzi currency schemes

@Mage: Anyone investing at this stage will become a Mark in a Ponzi scheme.

Methinks the Chinese are probably feeling the same way about their US dollar holdings right now.

Well, that about wraps it up for the NBN

Thanks

Thanks for the article Richard. It's nice to have something counterbalancing the spin from Abbott's side, although spin is probably a generous description of probably should be called outright lies. It's disappointing to see them coming from Turnbull.

MeeGo and Mango promise mobile web delights

What they do vs what they say

I'll be convinced Nokia is actually committed to Microsoft once I see reports they are laying off QT devs. So far there has been no sign of it.

Elop strikes me as being entirely capable of saying one thing while always intending to do something entirely different. God knows what the plan actually is, but I'm certain it isn't "go with WP7 and burn all bridges", burning platform memo's notwithstanding.

Bin Laden's porn stash: Too good to be true?

And in related news ...

The only reason we have been able to find for the reporting of "Bin Laden's porn stash: Too good to be true?" isn't factual evidence, a conspiracy theory, or even the repeating of random internet hearsay - its just a pitifully poor effort at generating some web traffic.

Feds indict poker sites, seize domains

There is an app for that

Well a firefox plugin actually. http://mafiaafire.com/

Which only goes to prove the internet routes around damage, although not always in the ways you would expect.

Australia might need the NBN, but the OECD data is meaningless

ta

Thanks for writing this up. I guess I should not be surprised at how easy it is to draw the wrong assumptions from the data, but I am.

Australian senate slaps data retention proposals

@Mike007, worldwide jurisdiction?

"good luck trying to get a (for example) UK company to comply with Australian law"

They might have a bit more luck with this than you think. The loophole they speak of is an Australian company passing data they have collected onto a foreign company, who is then as not nearly as constrained as the Australian company would be. It's a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.

I think it's there because of Australian companies are saying behind closed doors it is simply impossible for them to control what a labourer in India might do. That is bullshit of course, but I imagine it would be a PITA because it would require them to negotiate new contractual arrangements that would probably be more expensive, and it would effect a lot of large business because outsourcing our data processing to foreigners is as common in Australia as it is anywhere in the OECD. That would be those same big businesses who have the money to spend on getting a word or two into the governments ear.

As for the article suggesting it was liberals wanting a cost justification - you've gotta be kidding me. That would be the same liberals who are saying they will pay the polluters to stop polluting, rather than penalise or taxing them for polluting. They are no better economic rationalists that the Republicans in the US - the ones who put the US in its current hole by fighting two wars at the same time, and paying for it by dropping interest rates to 0. It was the green senators who want to wanted to look at the economic arguments, but I doubt they care about the economics either.

Gawd, the older I get, the more I loath politicians.

Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA

Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!

I guess today's headline is par for the course. After seeing Lewis declare"Fukushima is a triumph" on Monday, painting the current crisis as a "Shameful media panic" could almost be considered sober reporting.

Fortunately, I can get real journalism from my local dead tree rag. The Japanese now have got power delivered to the site, as in mega watts of it, and they have used the week to design some custom unmanned vehicles that can get close to the buildings. The combination means they can deliver some 2000 tons of water per hour where it is needed. I am guessing this will finally bring the situation under control. With the spent fuel pools boiling away 37 tons of water per hour, pointing a 4 inch fire hose at a hole in the wall was a best a delaying tactic.

Clearly that didn't worry Lewis. I presume that is because he didn't have a clue what was going on. First he told us the reactors were safe. Then he acknowledged they may have been breached, but assured us a breach isn't serious. Then belatedly he realised the real danger was a spent fuel rod fire. That the only way they had of fighting it for 4 days was a daisy chain of local fire trucks pointing hoses at the building from a distance didn't seem to faze him. If he realised far more than that would be required, he didn't mention it in his "expert" commentary.

Unwarranted media panic indeed, Lewis. If you weren't aware of the emergency response the Japanese engineers were cooking up, and weren't looking on at the developing situation with increasing angst, you were either not paying attention or a fool.

For all that Lewis was probably right. It is likely nobody outside of evacuation zone was ever in much danger. Even if the worst happened a fuel rod fire dumped radioactive waste into the atmosphere, I the Japanese would of moved people out of the harms way. And because clear headed thinking saved the day, no doubt Lewis would still be proclaiming today it as a nuclear triumph.

If Lewis isn't just an industry shill and genuinely believes Fukushima is a triumph that should lead us into building more of the current nuclear plan designs, he is a moron. The current plant designs are barely cost effective now. Because of the huge up front capital costs the primary running cost is interest. To be viable the current designs have to be massive, they have to work continuously as designed for decades, and the cleanup must be as budgeted. Accidents like this blow all those assumptions out of the water. The effect of that extra is to push that primary cost, interest, over the top. So when Obama asked the nuclear industry replace the coal they asked him for $100 billion in loan guarantees, to negate that risk. And that was before this happened. This has even managed to undermine "only nuclear can supply reliable base load". If Japan's current load shedding goes on for a year, no one will believe these massive nuclear plants can reliably supply base load either.

Before nuclear can succeed we need to prove one of those radical new designs. The current one, which requires massive plants that burn only a tiny portion of the fuel and leaving the rest for us to either blow ourselves up with or look after for millennia is a disaster. But we have known that for decades. If Fukushima is a triumph, it is because it has made that point so clear it can't be ignored. Hopefully it will push into funding the development something that is viable, and can replace it.

Fukushima situation as of Wednesday

Reactor number 4

Lie by omission is the best way to do it. That is what Lewis has done, and I see it has only been picked up in the comments at the end.

Oddly, this has reduced some of my worst fears about nuclear power. Supposedly the worst that can happen is a breach of the core, with an ensuing melt down. That appears to be what has happened here, possibly more than once, and not too far from a city holding 20 million people. Yet that those melt downs aren't going to cause major disaster. That's a pretty amazing, probably even worthy of the faint praise Lewis is throwing at them.

What Lewis doesn't mention is reactor number 4. The reactor number 4 was being re-fuelled. The live cores had been removed, and are sitting in the spent rod storage pool. The reactor core melt down Mr Lewis focuses so intently on isn't even a possibility for reaction number 4. But, that isn't a good thing. Those live cores are no longer within those layers of containment.

Even under normal conditions, when there are only spent fuel rods in the pool, the water in storage pool must be constantly circulating in order to prevent overheating - basically the water boiling. If the water boils away the spent rods will overheat and catch fire. There seems to be little doubt now the water is boiling. There is now speculation it may have boiled dry, but I gather no one actually knows because the radiation levels are so high nobody can look. I gather we know some are exposed because that is the only way the hydrogen could be generated. That is the hydrogen that caused the explosion has blown holes in what little containment there was, exposing the entire shebang to the atmosphere.

As others have pointed it is very unlikely spent fuel rods will go critical. But there are live fuel rod's in number 4's pool. So the worst case scenario being painted is the live fuel rods in reactor 4's storage pool will melt, go critical, and resulting nuclear fire will burn/vaporise a fair portion of the atomic zoo of radioactive poisons that lie in the spent fuel rods, allowing them to rain them down onto Tokyo. Is it even possible to evacuate a city of 20 million people?

And is this scenario likely? I only know reactor number 4 is what everyone with a clue is following closely. As Lewis says, the rest is almost a good news story. I'd like to think the doomsday scenario is far fetched. But if it was, I'd expect Lewis to dismiss it, just as he dismissed many of the outcomes that have come to pass in his previous article. Instead he choose to point noisily to all "minor" disasters at the plant, while studiously ignoring the main threat. I wonder if that is because it is to scary too contemplate, or he is just one of those without a clue?

US Trans-Pacific Partnership proposal leaked

Is this a joke?

In my naivety I thought these treaties were the result of sober negotiation between two countries. Instead it looks like every US firm that has bought a senator has been invited to make ambit claim for gouging Australians, and resulting list became their proposed treaty.

Ye gods. It that how all government works within the US?

Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work

So how long has Microsoft got?

Nokia obviously aren't stopping their internal development efforts. They must have had an option to see the QT licences to Digia, yet they didn't. As of QT 4.7.0, released September 2010, QML is a stable API ready for prime time. MeeGo hasn't been canned, Symbian development continues. These aren't the acts of a company that has decided to abandon its burning platforms just yet.

If I were MS, I'd be nervous. How long have they got to pull Nokia out of the shit, I wonder? I'm guessing it will be set by rate of progress of Nokia's "not yet canned" software projects. If WinPhone 7 isn't outselling Symbian in 2 years, my guess is Nokia's next U-Turn will be just as fast as this last one.

I guess it all hinges on whether QML is as good as it appears to be. I am hoping it will be showcased on the N950. They didn't meet their Q4 2010 deadline with the N9, so they have plenty of time to polish it now. If they end up with underlying graphics engine that is a smooth as the N900's, but with a user friendly shell, and a nice QT Declarative SDK we will have something that is incomplete but looks promising. Right now that is about where WinPhone 7 is too. If WinPhone 7 doesn't mature fast things could get real interesting real quickly.

Australian group buying soars

Looks like a email phishing expidtion to me

3 of the 4 named web sites want your email address before showing you the discounts. The 4th has the decency to let you see (but not use) the product they are trying to see before asking for your email address.

It looks to me like Telsyte is a flak machine for hire. El Reg swallowed their bait, and has been duped into spruiking some dubious web sites. Shame on you El Reg.

Aussie advertisers call for more bloat in web ads

Too True

He says: Australia has a great opportunity to start showing the world what we can do.

Too true. We would be well on the way to having this highest installation rates of ad blockers on the planet. We already pay more than more most for our bytes, and they are delivered slow, so that would seem inevitable.

Assange 'threatened to sue' Grauniad over leak of WikiLeak

Journalism at its best

It obviously galling for John Young of Cryptome to watch that upstart Assange do essentially the same thing as he made a speciality of, and then get more recognition in one year than Young has got in decades. But it should not be surprising. Assange is a journalist. He has for years been in the profession of turning information into plaudits and money. Looks like his plan is to turn himself into the Reuters of leaks.

Good for him. I hope he makes a financial success of it. For all John Young's efforts, Cryptome looks like the hobby of a idealist which will disappear when he does. If Assange can prove it is possible to make money out of this we will be watching leaks flow for decades to come, and our democracies will be better off because of it.

The flip side is spats among journalists such as this one aren't uncommon. I recall James Murdock stormed into Guardian's offices not to long ago too. A lot more vitriol flew and he wasn't soothed by coffee and wine. There are livelihoods at stake here, and so of course a few feathers are going to fly occasionally.

So, this story is only more confirmation that Assange thinks like a journalist, behaves like a journalist, and engages in the usual journalistic infighting.