Posts by Ru

Boffin seeks US Blu-ray, mobile phone import ban

Patent trolls?

Given that the patent seems quite sensible and widely licensed useful technique, it doesn't seem like quite the same sort of frivolous business method or software algorithm problem that pops up so often. It seems a little unfair to cast aspersions at the person who filed it, and assume they're just the same as 'patent holding companies' and other parasites.

Whilst I doubt the professor is quite the sort of 'little guy inventor' whom the patent system is supposed to protect, this is a perfectly good example of the patent system doing the job it is supposed to do.

Dutch MP releases anti-Islam movie

Re: Blaming religion for violence is the same as blaming computer games.

When I hear of the fanatical followers of the FPS circle strafing their enemies, then perhaps I might agree.

Its not often you get to see fiction or other enterainment media rousing up a violent mob of its supporters, only its opponents.

US state outlaws RFID data theft

Continued...

>If I take an RFID card from work or the grocery store, I should have the sense to know it is unprotected and unsafe, so I don't get surprised when the bad guys pick up all my data from it.

Should you? Should everyone know? Is there going to be mass education about the potential security and privacy concerns of RFID tags? Doubtful.

There seems to be an ever increasing trend towards enforcing lax security with hefty legal threats. Its a nice way to protect your assets without having to invest in more rigorous product development. Crack my ROT13 will you? Eat DMCA!

Because making it illegal will stop criminals doing it!

No, wait a minute, what are criminals again?

Denmark signs up for wind powered electric car switch

Dong Energy?

Truly, a inspired company name. Better even than 'Smeg'

MPAA copyright punch up knocks out TorrentSpy

Re: NEVER PAY FOR ANY MOVIE EVER

...because that'll show em! And the people who create those movies!

See also, the 'freetards' discussion elsewhere on the web.

Sure, not everything shared, torrented or otherwise distrubed via P2P networks is illegal, but the sad fact is that most of it will be. Sure, the MPAA and similar organisations are money-grabbing parasites, dinosaurs on the verge of extinction, etc etc and the current content distribution and revenue collection methods won't last.

But stealing and stealing and stealing until you get your own way isn't going to work at all. I rather suspect what you'll end up with will be a bunch of locked down media players (xbox, ipod, whatever the sky recorders are) attached to private distribution networks because it is the only model that is going to provide enough control and revenue for the distributors.

Forget your PC... no-one is going to want to have to work with such an easily exploitable platform in the long term, infested as it is with highly capable hackers and millions of freeloaders.

Hutton: UK must become world No 1 in nuclear power

Not much innovation in the land of nuclear power

Too bad pebble bed projects seem to have vanished, at least from the western world, and fusion funding seems to rank only a little higher on the government's list of priorities than astronomy... it does seem that nuclear power is the only real way to go in the short term.

Its certainly nice of greenpeace to complain, given the general opposition to onshore windfarms, the expense of offfshore windfarms, and the apparent inability orf anyone to come up with a tidal power system that won't cause all sorts of problems. I can see big tidal barrage projects being the next generation of environmentally disasterous hydroelectric plans.

AJAX patent threat to giants under the hammer

Oh yay

Another invalid patent from a patent troll.

First thing that springs to mind is 'DNS', but I have no doubt there are a bajillion other protocols out there that these idiots won't have ever heard of.

I continue to be puzzled as to how a system that grants this sort of thing continues.

Cambridge boffins draw map to Free Our Data

Open Street Map

isn't much good for a lot of purposes, and couldn't even conceivably be for quite some time. Outside of larger urban areas, its coverage is poor for anything but larger roads. OS cover tracks and footpaths too for example, and have little things like elevation data which OSM totally lacks.

Stopping government departments charging each other vast sums of money wold be nice too. The post office are particularly bad in this respect. We pay our taxes once to have the data collected, twice to have our local government buy it from central government, and then a third time if we actually want to make direct use of it ourselves...

Australian man killed by suicide robot

Alteration

I think Eddie Izzard first suggested that is wasn't guns that kill people, its the nasty loud noise they make. Especially is you have a dodgy heart.

Teachers cower in face of cyberbullies

"cyber"

If it doesn't involve titanium endoskeletons and multibarreled rotary cannon, it doesn't deserve to be called 'cyberbullying'.

Hooray for stupid headline grabbing marketing words.

Whatever next? "Classroom Terrorism", I'll wager.

On a related note, I do recall a bunch of little angels at the last school I worked at creating a lovely little website filled with poorly spelled vitriol directed at the head teacher. Unfortunately for its creators, and those who commented upon it, all the articles and comments were linked back to their author's windows live profiles handily providing me with a list of names and mugshots of the guilty.

They all learned a valuable lesson about privacy online after that. Version 2 was a private, invite-only BeBo group, a little more of a challenge to sort out.

HTC applies for multi-keypad sliderphone patent

@dervheid

It looks like shit because it is a patent filing. It needs to show what the patent covers and absolutely nothing else. You'll find that a fair number of patent filing diagrams look like shit. No-one wants to give anything unnecessary away.

As for lasting <5minutes in the real world... anything can be engineered to be strong enough given sufficient need. Look at stupid, flimy, fragile connections on tablet pc screens, or fold out and twist camera screens for example. They seem to survive, more or less, and don't have anywhere near the robustness of a decent pair of rails as this design has.

Al-Qaeda seeks geek fanatics for Jihoo!

Quality airbags?

Perhaps you were thinking of the Bulgarian kind?

Google claims 'non-existent' Android beats everything but the Jesus Phone

Malicious code?

Well, don't download code from just anywhere.

You don't need open source to allow exploits. Take a look at windows.

Hacking attacks can turn off heart monitors

Scare story?

More a worrying symptom of so much of modern technology and it's designer's complete disregard for security. Radio networking and comms is only going to get more prevalent, after all.

Sure, it costs 30k now, but give it a couple of years and a few clever people working with software defined radios or even less complex off the shelf kit and suddenly it will be within everyone's reach.

This is infuriating; given the widespread availability of perfectly good encryption techniques there is really no excuse not to be using them. I can only assume that it will take legislation to try and discourage this sort of irresponsible design, and given the general knowledge of security found in so many governments and their agencies I'm not feeling confident.

Anyway, I'm off to the gym.

Microscope-wielding boffins crack Tube smartcard

48 bits?

The Mifare Classic chip that this stuff is based on was released in 94. Not a good start. The UltraLight version used in Oyster cards was released in 2001. This makes it too early to benefit from the friuts of the AES program, but the inherent weakness of short key algorithms in general, and the various recommendations against secret algorithms untested by skilled cryptanalysts are older than that.

Silly people. New techniques aside, the fact that you can brute force one of the cards 'in a few days' (depending on how much cheap, easily available hardware you have to parallelise the process) means that the whole thing is totally and fundamentally flawed.

And thats what happens when you purchase throwaway hardware, designed and built as cheaply as possible.

Notts police seize mobile phone stun gun

18 more potentially lethal?

I'm trying to remember the sort of voltages you can get from a simple van de graaf generator. A bit more than 50kV I'm sure, but hard more 'more potentially lethal'.

I recall seeing things on hackaday and youtube from some guy who ran a few wires from the flash on his mobile phone camera to the end of the phone, allowing it to be used as an ersatz taser that would probably cause more irritation than harm.

But this is really just a load of fuss about technology, isn't it? I have more to worry about some guy sneaking up behind me and whacking me on the back of the head before stealing my wallet, than being attacked with a taser. Or hell, a boken bottle or knife. Cheaper, easier, few thousand years proven track record in theft facilitation, etc.

Wal-Mart stores drop cheap-as-chips Linux PC

Printers, continued...

On the same subject, I've recently had the pleasure of having to install a printer onto my Windows XP laptop. HP thoughtfully provided an enormous amount of useless (genuinely so, not just in comparison to other software of similar purpose), bloated software to help me print, manage and edit photos even after I demanded that it install the absolute bare minimum.

The software added all sorts of extra unnecessary services, update systems and little nagging popup messages. The moment I'd done my printing, it all got removed.

Now to be sure printer support is not as good under *nix as under windows, but if that is the price I have to pay for lean software that does the job I want it to do without the presence of a whole bunch of useless resource-devouring crapplets, I'll gladly do so. Especially as printer support is pretty reasonable, on the whole.

Stroustrup and Sutter: C++ to run and run

@Robert Synnott

I recall reading an interesting little note on the implementation of OpenBSD. As far as writing secure software goes, C is dangerous but simple, whereas C++ is dangerous and complex. Hence the reason that their kernel level code is in C.

Take from that what you will.

Tool makes mincemeat of Windows passwords

BSD

is a bit vague in this context... the various flavours of BSD all have slightly different kernels. I do expect all to be equally vulnerable though, except for openbsd which has no firewire support (due to concerns about DMA security, IIRC)

O2 falls short of 3G target

Re: slow coaches

Far be it from me to make assumptions about differences in geography and population distribution between the UK and Australia, but I rather suspect that these are two rather different situations and it would be a little bit silly to compare the two.

Just out of interest, do you have the same sorts of tortuous legal processes, and armies of anti-mobile-phone-mast campaigners in your part of the world?

Judge accuses hacks of hacking cannibal ruling

@Aitor

Your insurers may have something to say about that. You might not have done the stealing, but your negligence allowed it to happen. By using an insecure communications method, she was negligent.

If she hasn't broken any laws or codes of conduct by doing this sort of thing, then the system is at fault because this sort of silliness should be thoroughly discouraged.

See also: the organisations which lose 20 million customer records by leaving a laptop lying around. It wasn't the laptop user's fault that it wasn't where they'd left it, surely? It's not their fault they weren't more careful, right?

Airline pilot sacked for 777 Top Gun stunt

@Chris C

You may consider that the plane would not have crashed instantly, given that it has wings and forward velocity. Learning about lift is left as an exercise to the reader.

Also, if he had clearance from the tower to do what he did, this implies that what he was doing does not seem to be quite so terminally stupid. I'd like to think that people in air traffic control have some inkling of safety, and would be likely to err on the side of caution.

But yes, doing it without his employer's consent is a bloody stupid thing to do, and being fired is not exactly surprising.

PS...

Million-pound lawsuits for 'emotional distress' are another sort of criminal stupidity. But there's a lot less that can be done about that.

cDc automates Google Hacking

@AC

Ack, I do apologise.

I'll go away and think about the bad thing I did, and come back filled with malice and bile especially for use on closed-source script kiddy tools, released seemingly as a slightly irresponsible publicity stunt rather than a serious application.

In .net's defence...

It isn't an awful platform to develop in (having done Win32 programming before, which was awful beyond belief). The problem is that it facilities massively sloppy code, which can easily eat an order of magnitude more resources more than needed if an uncaring or lazy programmer lets it. And there are no shortage of those.

But yes, something a little smaller and cleaner and portable would have been nice.

Gawker - Texas's supercomputing Ranger

60% more cores but

What of price or power consumption?

I suspect a typical opteron core has a bit more oomph than a typical power core, but if its eating 4x the energy to get there it would seem the better solution might be to nail two big ibm machines together...

Security boffins unveil BitUnlocker

Encrypted filesystem steganography

Given the existence of 'rubber hose cryptanalysis', you'd better hope anyone who might use it upon you is either unaware of the possiblity of 'fake' encrypted partitions, or easily pleased by the goodies you left in the one you've just shown them.

Because if they don't find what they're looking for, maybe they'll just go back to brute forcing *you* in the offchance there might be more keys you're holding back. For the paranoid, consider a law enforcement agency who believes you're hiding something, correctly or otherwise. Especially in today's terrorist and paedophile filled world.

Google encourages 10 teams to rocket to the moon

Git orf moi mooooon!

I wonder if anyone actually has any realistic claim to own bits of the moon. It sounds like a big scam to me, much like the 'name a star!' people. You pays your money, and gets your little certificate but thats all. Not worth the paper it was printed on.

China plans 'deep-sea base project'

Contraversial [sic]

What about gunpowder? The chinese made all sorts of clever things a very long time ago, and yet so many of these technologies were never developed to the extent that European nationed managed.

Artillery and rocketry, anyone?

I'm not about to cast aspersions on the Chinese, but it might be nice if someone could give examples of interesting things they've created in the last 1000 years or so? Or better yet, the last 100?

Wikileaks judge gets Pirate Bay treatment

Military encryption?

Pedant mode on...

Sounds unlikely, to be honest. Anyone got any idae what is inside those little black encryption boxes used to handle top-secret government and military of data? No. The encryption tools, the algorithms they use, and the design process behind them is all classified.

I guess AES could be used on top secret data now, however seeing that everyone+dog has access tothat algorithm it isn't really 'military' in any sense.

Meh.

Ubuntu chief ushers in the age of Intrepid Ibex

Name limit

Well, they won't be running out of names for a good few years yet. And after that, why not just wrap around to AA again? a 13-year naming cycle is hardly going to cause confusion after all.

Alternatively, add an extra word. Angry Adolescent Aardvark, anyone?

Jane Fonda c-word slip shocks US

Publicity stunt

Spleen, I'll point you towards Graham Newton's post up at the top there. The word didn't just 'slip out', it was the title of a part of the play she had worked in, which was the subject of the interview.

Perhaps the network should have reconsidered airing the subject of the 'vagina monologues' at that time in the first place?

LG says laptop batteries safe despite 'billion to one' blast

It's a perfectly good reason

Its a bit like the leading cause of death being a lack of breathing or pulse.

Xbox 360 console failure rate forecast at 16.4%

Full of what?

Looks like someone neglected to add a 'JOKE ALERT' to their posting.

At least they've done a reasonable job dealing with broken consoles under warranty... I don't know about anyone else, but it has made me think twice about getting a second hand xbox, on the assumption that it will burst into flames within minutes of being 'fired' up, and I'll have no option but to go buy a replacement :-/

Email pen concept does away with keyboards

Nominative Determinism

I keep bumping into computery people with strangely apt names. Mr Chown the sysadmin, or the technician with the initials TCP. Mr Png was clearly destined for great things.

New Mexico bets future on promiscuous supercomputer

Cooling in space

Is actually far from easy. No convection, see; you have to radiate all your heat. Consider things like thermos flasks which use a vacuum layer as part of their insulation. Or double glazing, which stops heat loss through convection as well.

And whilst you get lots of solar flux, potentially all the time if you pick the right orbit, solar cells are still big, delicate and not hugely powerful. And then there are the maintenance callout fees...

It would be more useful to build your datacentre into a hydroelectric dam. Lots of power, and cooling on tap.

US Army loads up on Apples for 'better security'

Vireese

I recall a discussion about this some time ago... I'm too lazy to search. Anyway, 'viri' probably means 'men', and 'virii' is just a made up word intended to sound vaguely classical. I have a sneaking suspicion that the plural is in fact 'virus' (plus a - over the u), pronounces 'vi-roos'. Very dull.

OpenBSD was offered a moderately generous amount of cash by the US DOD a few years back, which was then withdrawn after the project leader Theo de Raadt said something disparaging about the war in Iraq. The money was redirected to a Sun project, I suspect.

I believe that it might well be possible for OSX to be more secure than a Windows server... I suspect it has support for potentially useful things like mandatory access control courtesy of the TrustedBSD project. Linux has similar things of course (SELinux, which I believe the NSA had a hand in) as does FreeBSD from which OSX was derived. OpenBSD doesn't support it, and once again Theo has made some colourful comments as to why he disapproves of such things.

But still, OSX seems like a baffling choice. I'd have thought some good, old fashioned UNIX Iron such as Solaris on SPARC would be the way to go, given the significant number of security-assisting features that these sort of architectures have. Solaris seems to have quite a lot going for it, if you have the cash available and sure the US military has no shortage of IT pork barrels to dole out?

It all smells like a rather pointless bit of publicity to me.

IE's Acid trip back to conflict

Chris Thomas and Wars

I can kinda see where you might be coming from, given that standards could so easily drift towards a design-by-comittee compromise that suits no-one.

However, I do disagree on a number of things, including your comments about simplicity. Don't confuse the simple syntax of HTML and CSS with a lack of expressiveness. I certainly wouldn't say that simplicity implies ease of use or swift learning either... using CSS well is not a trivial skill. Nor does a complex syntax imply a more powerful, more useful, or more expressive language.

The other points you make are interesting and valid, but I do not feel that a unilateral decision to implement exciting new things by any developer of a commodity such as a web browser is a good thing for anyone. If every browser is different, suddenly I must choose between doing an order of magnitude more work or alienating a potentially significant) proportion of my client's customers. If the browsers without the shiny new features fall by the wayside, and so I have but one platform to develop for, what is to stop that platform from stagnating?

Hint: all these things have already happened, and absolutely no-one thought they were good developments (beyond perhaps Microsoft shareholders).

Your comments about SVG and Javascript, are interesting... but you may notice that firefox already has good support for SVG embedded in HTML and manipulated by javascript. Why does no-one use it? Because hardly anyone is keen on developing for a single browser. Who is going to make a cross-browser, cross platform SVG renderer, now Adobe is more interested in Flash? So now we are all stuck with flash which is a great inconvenience from my point of view as a *web developer* as opposed to a *web designer*. But the benefits and disadvantages of flash are a whole holy war unto themselves, which I've no interest in getting in to here.

Finally, I shall follow up your 'the web is not a book. get over it' comment with the observation that when people attempt to impose their own design idioms on to users, they often *reduce* the product's usefulness. PDF documents, flash websites.... they all beautifully convey a designer's vision to an end user, but unlike HTML if that design and vision is lacking the user is powerless to do anything about it. Little things like cut'n'paste, or various accessibility issues spring to mind.

Suffice to say, simplicity and standards are generally good things. The complex and the proprietory are often an irritation.

Anyway, I've already rambled too much and too incoherently.

1and1's dedicated servers go titsup

Re: That's what I get for being a nice guy.

> Nah. That's what you get for being pompous enough not to fix it in the first place.

Curiously, there's this thing in which statements from people and organisations are reprinted exactly as they came in most news publications, as opposed to being fixed for spelling, grammar, content, tone, etc. I'm sure there's a good reason for this, but I can't quite seem to think what it is right now...

Boeing trumpets 'relevant battlefield laser' raygun

Focus

For those of you comparing a 1kw laser to a hair dryer, or a bar heater or a toaster or whatever, stop briefly to consider that all the energy of a laser is focused on a very small point. This is why you can blind someone relatively easily with a few hundred milliwatts of laser, and yet I've been to places where there are lightsources producing literally hundreds of watts of power, and suffered no ill effects!

Sun to blame for yin-yang Moon's dark side

re: Tidelocked

If Iapetus is tidelocked to Saturn, debris falling on to it would stick largely to one side (the leading edge, presumably). Assuming all different parts of the moon receive equal sunlight, the debris-coloured side will absorb more heat simply because it is darker. It need not spend any more time facing the sun.

Canadian prof develops drunk-driving sim

Spikes

Thats a lovely plan. If only all accidents were caused by a driver's stupidity. Imagine the hilarity if someone manages to drive into the front of your car!

Genetics boffins on the verge of artificial bacteria

Good old bioethics experts

Its great that they're concerned, and after all it is kinda what they're there for. But They should be pretty ashamed that the only good reason they have for being concerned is that it might have terrorist applications.

Terrorists of any kind are incredibly unlikely to be able to create their own super plagues using this method. They'd have more luck assembling, say, some smallpox virus... but even this requires significant amounts of expertise and equipment. It is about as likely as a terrorist nuclear weapons program.

The only people who can do this sort of thing are governments, and when they do it, it is *warfare* then, surely? Oh no, that sort of nation is a 'terrorist state'.

It is a pretty sorry state of affairs when people have to tick the terrorist box just to get noticed. Won't somebody, please, think of the terrorists?

Sun grabs patent for magneto-hydrodynamic heatsink

Re: The Secret purpouse of Heatsink

Zalman make (or have made) a case where all the heatsinks (processor, graphics, chipset) and linked by heatpipes to the case itself so everything is totally passive. It isn't cheap, and it is hugely fiddly getting everything to link up just so.

It would be more useful to fit dust filters over intakes, but then you'd have to rely on users changing the filters when they clogged up, and I don't think a useful percentage of people would do that either.

Ultimately, computers are a consumable.

Ninja she-devils rob Pennsylvania gas station

She-ninja == Kunoichi

I believe.

London council to use lie detectors to finger benefit cheats

Can we please also lose

All the people complaining about the words used by the reg? Honestly, you've made a bad precedent with mobe and lappy.

Don't let boffin and finger go the same way.

Robot sailboats to race across Atlantic

More solar panel issues?

Why has no-one thought to create a robust, low-power wiper blade capable of cleaning mucky solar panels? Given the hassle this problem causes the martian rovers and the like, you'd think that someone would be looking into the issue...

Boffins unveil sharpest ever stellar snaps

'Boffins'

Please continue using this word.

As regards the article, it seems rather odd that they've only started doing this now. I recall that people have been using webcams to to take hude numbers of images of the sky, and then automatically filter out the fuzzy ones and stack the rest to make a clear, crisp image with even quite cheap equipment. No fancy optics required (do a search for webcam astrophotography if you like).

Unless this image stacking technique isn't anything new at Palomar either, and the article just skipped the bit about the new optic technology?

As US threatens to trash GATS, Antigua responds

IP 'Havens' fund international terrorism, heroin smuggling and paedophilia

This would of course be a splendid reason for the US to send in peace keepers, to bring law, democracy and freedom to this benighted, corrupt little island state.

Aussie gov anti-porn filter 'useless', says teen

Clearly,

What is required here is an additional law, which makes circumventing the filters a crime too. If only they'd had it before he popped up on TV, this sort of thing would never happen, and no-one would ever find out how easy the filters were to crack. I should be a political consultant or something.