Posts by MarkMac 93 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
Win11 won't run on my desktop (intel core i5-6500, tpm1.2) but WILL run in a hyper-v VM on the same hardware. So clearly, MS have a way either to bypass the TPM2.0 requirement if running in an emulator, or emulate TPM2.0 in software. Presumably therefore all they'll need to do is add a low-level driver that emulates TPM2.0 on older machines....
Umm, so will microsoft guarantee their drivers work properly with every concevable printer model? I think not...
If i allow windows to install the default drivers for my Brother MFD, printouts come out A5 in the centre of an A4 page.
The driver *thinks* its printing properly, previews look normal, paper size correct etc - except it isn't...
When i reinstall the driver from Brother, everything works fine.
Normally, you're re-enrolling your biometrics not creating a new account.
To re-enroll biometrics, you need to prove your identity by some means first. So in principle its not that easy to overwrite someone's biometrics.
Of course, if your other auth methods are compromised then sure, someone can wipe your biometrics from the device and enroll new data.
Thats not unique to biometrics though. If your password is stolen, the perp could change your PIN, contact number for OTPs etc.
All Your Base Are Belong to Them...
On the topic of how biometric IDs work; the op is correct, the detailed information never leaves the device.
It is stored in a one-way hash on the device. That means that even if the device is stolen, the biometric info can't be extracted, only compared to.
Also, its not like on the TV, when they have an actual scan of your fingerprint. That's a very old, insecure tech. Nowadays a capacitative map is created which is then reduced to the key features, and encrypted via a one-way process. Imagine taking an aerial photo of London from an angle, and writing down the coordinates of London Bridge, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and a few more places. A set of numbers which you encrypt and store as your enrollment data. Does that matter? Yes, because even if you could break the one-way hash, you still wouldn't have a photograph of london, just a bunch of coordinates which you can't feed into a scanner.
The zero-notice thing feels like a shakedown. Put devs under pressure, force them to decide on impulse, with no time to plan ahead or think clearly. Its the timeshare sales technique.
Except in this case the people they're shaking down are their actual content creators, the people who drive others to the site, and who generate the ad revenue twitter needs. People whom twitter needs as much as they need it.
So, its commercial suicide.
Many firms have tried this before, mistakenly believing they have a captive market and can charge what they like / ignore customers / change the T&C to suit themselves. Remember QuarkXpress, Blackberry?
Our initial analysis based on had it moving more due north and at 4km/s but the angles were bad on the cameras which were quite close to each other. Once my colleagues found additional data from cameras with diffrerent views we reanalysed it and got more accurate results which led to a re-evaluation of the conclusion. Science at work :)
For the same reason its bad for ordinary businesses to lock up capital in property or furniture. Its not their core competency, and its difficult to be sure how much you will need, for how long, and where. If you're starting a company, do you buy a building, or rent it? The latter of course, because then if it gets too small you can move somewhere bigger, and if income falls you can cut your losses. Cloud brings that same flexibility to computing resources.
As for their core business: in 2005, Amazon essentially invested in a startup. If it had not paid off, they'd have sold or shut it down. Also bear in mind that Amazon the retail giant and AWS the cloud giant are not the same company. They're owned by the same group sure - but Yodel and the Daily Telegraph are have common owners.
IMHO the current model is signficantly better for developers and support. The updates are smaller, less invasive and while things still go wrong, you rarely need to completely reinstall the entire OS from scratch. Its one of the few things MS have learned from the opensource / Linux world where the same strategy has been used for years. I almost never need to know what kernel or even version of Raspian or Ubuntu or Redhat I'm on.
The chief exec is clueless about copyright law. It doesn't matter what you paint it with or where - I'm sure Picasso and Gaugin painted with brushes and paint and stuff. If you created it then you have the copyright. An employer can ask you to give up copyright on material developed on their behalf but it has to be explicit.
All they had to do was ask for specific permission to use the image in any fashion related to the project. The wording they've chosen far exceeds that.
"How will that work? Presumably they'll only know if it's not in the public interest once they've broken the law and acquired the information, by which time it's already too late."
It seems to work pretty well in other countries with similar legislation: newspaper editors are expected to use their brains and work out whether there's a genuine need for the public to know. Watergate springs to mind as a good example; Fergie's toe springs to mind as a bad one.
As for the comments of others - the Govt of the day always has a strong hand, both as to deciding what privacy is and deciding what public interest is. Both can, and have succesfully been, challenged in law. If NotW and co are upset by some ruling they can always appeal. But if the hacks and paparzzi knew they risked jailtime by unjustified spying on people, and the editors knew they faced financial ruin, perhaps there'd be less carp* in the papers..
*yes, I know, its a fish.
The proposers of this idea have only one interest - a commercial one. They don't laws because it costs them money to protect peoples' privacy, and prevents them from monetising the private data they've already gathered. Never mind that these laws exist to protect consumers from rapacious companies and fraudulent use of sensitive information.
He guys, how many of you have read the actual research? D'ya think that just maybe, scientists know how to 'do' stats? Perhaps before claiming they've ignored basic logic, or forgotten to eliminate crims, or whatever, you should read the _actual_ research, not El Reg's hack's intepretation laced with personal opinion and so forth.
You don't see why anyone would be influenced to pay more than their max? You have no experience of real auctions, or of human nature.
I've lost count of how often I've seen newbies bid up on something by auctioneers taking competing bids from thin air or audience plants. People get excited, carried away, decide they really want the goods a lot - and suddenly they're paying more than its worth by a long chalk. A Dealer gives the auctioneer a nod and students buy the crap at high price, while the dealer waits for the good-condition example two lots later.
Ebay is no different. Its bottom line depends on driving up sale prices so they've no interest in keeping out shills and sharks. Even blatant fraud often goes ignored, cf the ban on negative feedback. Why exactly is it forbidden to leave neg fb for a seller who sold fake goods or something without a CE safety mark, and why is it allowed for said seller to leave negative or false feedback about you if you dare complain ? Because eBay's money is made from sellers. Simple as that.
... are hopeless engineers. Visit the Gaudi apartment buildings in Barcelona sometime to see a beautiful /and/ functional building thats still a joy to live in 100 years later.
I quite agree however with the comment about it being pretty shabby that a less-than-50-years-old building made with modern techniques takes more looking after than a 1000 year old castle. But then FLW was an artist, not a practical person.
Unless information is secured by role and by purpose, which I gather it isn't, then security will be impossible. CRB checking is irrelevant - its not done every year, its not spot-checked and anyway it doesn't take account of marital status.
All it will take an authorised person with personal problems. Wasn't there a police officer got done recently for trawling some database for his ex's whereabouts not so long ago? Aren't there cases of teachers in court for alleged child abuse? And thats only the ones who got accused / caught.
So with 300,000+ users its guaranteed that somewhere someone will be an as-yet undetected offender, or desperate for money to pay off debts, or desperate to find their old school buddy's kids for him. And every single day someone will do a screen-print or other hardcopy and leave it lying around somewhere. It'll go home in a briefcase, be left on a desk, be dropped while fumbling for keys, be used to scribble on the back of.
Actually microwave ovens are fairly interference-poor by design. The magnetron dumps the energy into a faraday cage which more or less keeps all the radiation inside (that's the point, otherwise it'd be useless at cooking the food!).
So they are a cause of interference in the Wifi bands - but not as much of a one as other devices.
Er, /one/ of the problems is journos not checking their facts.
The other is wikipedia claiming to be an encyclopedia but allowing itself to be used as a red-top tabloid complete with gossip and rumour.
Encyclopedias contain _facts_. People making stuff up cause its funny, or provocative, or because they like poking sticks in ants-nests is not fact. People writing what they wish had been true or hope happened, is not fact.
When will the "encyclopedists" at Wiki-world realise that humans can't be relied on to relate facts truthfully? Gil Grissom could tell you that everything is filtered through a mask of prejudice, faulty memory, post-event reconstruction and desire to please the audience...
Smaller mailbox (currently we get 10MB), potentially scanned by 3rd party for demographics analysis, using a service well-known for being a spammers heaven, in an offshore jurisdiction with poor DP laws. Great move.
I block all mail from google's servers because virtually all the mail I get from them is phishing and spam using throwaway accounts, and all my real contacts have proper email. I strongly suspect I'm far from alone in this. So virginmedia customers may have some issues.
But maybe we do VM a disservice - maybe in reality they'll be deploying google's technology but using their own hardware.
Somehow I think not.
Fare dodging... gated stations... hmm, lemme see:
Spend millions installing electronic gates which either eat your paper ticket or reject it, and which can be vaulted over anyway.
Or employ someone to check tickets as people go through the entranceway. Hmm.
Which makes more economic sense? How many people can you employ for £270m pa?
Whose bright idea was it to have unmanned stations anyway? Thats the bloody problem. If there was someone to sell tickets so you didn't hvae to rely on a nearly-always-defective ticket machine, and someone to check tickets in and out, and someone on the train to check them too, how could people dodge fares?
Brainwave: employ people, reduce unemployment, save money, provide human contact. etc.
Pointless and unenforceable for now - almost no home router is capable of retaining logs for even a few weeks, so the technical issues would make the law unusable.
Unless of course its a covert attempt by the router-makers to get everyone to spend $$$ upgrading, or by the mainstream muni-wifi providers to corner the hotspot market by making it too hard for small-scale providers to set up shop.
Whoa there boy - the quote in question is from hte Charity Commission's website, not the IWF's and the criticism is of the CC, not the IWF. It is however as you say, incorrect to suggest its circular since the Charities Act has a long list of things which count as charitable, see here
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2006/ukpga_20060050_en_2#pt1-l1g1
Noticeably "acting as morality police" isn't listed. Nor in fact is anything to do with child protection. Looking down the list, I would in fact struggle to insert what they do into any category, unless you consider it to be advancement of health or education.
And it doesn't fall into section 4 as its not a recreational activity (boggle boggle).
RW said "I've found information on Wikipedia that you'd be very hard pressed to extract from any conventional library, even the greatest "
Yes, but how do you know its correct? What alternate sources are you comparing against, given that its not in the greatest libraries around? You need to substantiate the material or its worthless.
I'm afraid that if its missing from elsewhere there may be a good reason - like eg its false, inaccurate or biassed. This subject of this article sort of proves the point; anyone can put anything on Wikipedia - and remove anything, accurate or not. So material's presence and apparent rationality merely means it hasn't yet been either vandalised by a zealot or monomaniac, or authenticated by a genuine impartial observer.
Surely this is just mainframe computing all over again. I was paying by the cpu-second for access to research computing facilities 25 years ago.
Or are they planning to sell everyone a 16-core 10Ghz processor with 256GB memory, half a dozen graphics cards and 100TB of diskspace, then throttle it down if all you pay for is browsing? I can see /that/ being as long-lived a security system as, well, CSS. Remembe folks, the hardware will be in geeks' hands.
Doesn't matter if someone is collecting cash, they've got to be handing it to someone. No punk collecting cash is going to do jail-time over his involvement, not if faced with a backpayment of $33M to pay off, and he must be passing it on to someone. of course, the guys behind this could stop operating, break off all contact with middlemen and thus cover their tracks entirely - but they won't, they like money too much.
More to the point, what sort of rubbish vetting do ICANN run, that lets this happen? Phoney names? Book-and-cancel fraud? Don't they do /any/ KYC checks? Heck, and people call Wall Street lax and sloppy.
I'm baffled. Why are they inventing an entire new technology when one already exists? Airlines have done e-ticketing for years using printed forms. What was wrong with that? And phones are stupid places to store tickets (battery life, screen resolution, accidental damage, memory loss etc). What's wrong with simply extending an Oyster-type card? It'd be trivial to buy your ticket online and add it to your Oyster account.
Oh but wait - I forgot. This is the /railway/ industry. Every company has to do its own thing and fight for its own little private standards. I'm surprised they've not started changing the gauge again, just to be different.
"it seems strange that Symbian, and Windows Mobile, users will happily shell out $25 for an application, while iPhone users balk at paying more than a dollar"
Er, not when you've been severely stiffed for the original hardware. Anyone daft enough to by an iPhone will be so paying for it and the contract....
"Following representations from Wikipedia, IWF invoked its Appeals Procedure"
So it turns out there /is/ an appeal process. Cute - they've been keeping that /really/ quiet. Mind you I bet they only accept appeals from the page "owner" which means the very person who has no clue (how often do you visit your own website from an external IP?).
And as for the "image in question is potentially in breach" - guys, either it is or it isn't. If your lawyers can't decide then it isn't. That's how criminal law works remember -innocent till proven guilty. This isn't a civil matter where reasonable doubt can be applied.
Anyway look out for the IWF DDOS wars - report a page, wait till its blocked, appeal it. Repeat in a tight loop till someone's fuses blow or the server melts....
"Some folk think that turning computers on and off causes premature failure."
Yes, that would be those of us who measure MTBF for monitors, HDDs and cheap retail routers. You may not have experienced this but in the last few years I've seen all of these fail due to mechanical stress as a result of heat/cool cycles.
Obtopical: why /don't/ the researchers simply buy right domain and reprogramme the bots to ignore all further attempts to communicate? Or pop up alerts on their host PC? And if they've seen hundreds of thousands of PCs attempting to dial home, why can't they pass the IP addys on to their ISPs to get them dealt with?
Er, you miss the point. Radar detectors cause you to /slow down/ so you are no longer breaking the law - hence they achieve exactly what the speed cams are supposed to do, but don't.
If the whizzinator were similar, it would remove all the drugs from your bloodstream and urine for the duration of the test. Now /that/ really would be a miracle.
Feel free to live on in your fantasy world. Out here in the Real One, the effects of climate change on our environment are now trivially easy to see, and their link to human endeavour is also all too clear. Oh by the way, we know all about climate cycles. The current change doesn't fit the pattern.
@ all the people who complain about the adjustments. Perhaps you should read about why they're made instead of assuming they're fudge-factors as the article's author incorrectly implied. I mean, a little scientific research can't hurt can it - unless you're afraid of what you might find.... :-)
@all the people saying noise pollution fades away... you obviously don't live under the Heathrow flightpath or have any understanding of how busy it is.
My Mother in Law lives in Putney and planes come over her house every sixty seconds from before dawn till after midnight. You can barely hear yourself speak in the garden if the wind is from the west.
As for siting airports in rural areas: please poison all the wildlife first though (fish included), it'll be less of an ecological disaster than destroying their habitat and disrupting their breeding cycles with constant light and noise.
I'm sure all the people claiming it was hilarious would be similarly rolling with laughter if it had been their grannie receiving the call, and their sister who was the subject of Brand's delightful advances. After all its always amusing hearing people brag about their conquests, especially when they claim to have shagged your family.
On second thoughts, they probably /would/ think it was funny - but then they all have a mental age of 12 don't they?
As for the BBC website, I'm unsurprised it collapsed. If I'd phoned a client's answering machine and made similar comments about his or her family I'd have been fired on the spot, and I strongly suspect most normal rational adults take the same view.
Doing 40 outside a school at 3.30pm is stupid, dangerous and should be punished.
Doing 40 at 3.30 _am_ in the same location seems exceptionally unlikely to injure any children.
And how many children are playing on the hard-shoulder of the M25, or on the Swindon ring-road, or on the verge of a country A-road at 2am?
"child protection" is a cod argument, usually designed to force the other party into an emotionally untenable situation. For who can argue against protecting children? But its not about that, its about whether the speed is appropriate for the road and whether cameras are the right way to control it.
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