Posts by Suricou Raven

Sweet work, fellas: Boffins build high-density battery powered by sugar

Re: Help me out here

Except that calculates the cells as having 0.13V per cell, lead-acids are 2V - more than ten times as much. Should be comparing J/KG, not Ah/KG

Pregnant? Celebrate your proudest moment ... by 3D-printing a copy of the foetus

Re: Smile?

They move. Not with much coordination, but they do move. I expect they pull expressions too. That'll be the 4D part: I expect they take voxel-video over a reasonable period then go through each frame and pick out the most photogenic. Throw away all the ones where it looks like something by H R Giger, and pick the one where it looks like a smiling happy baby.

Politics

If they want sales, they should sent flyers to the anti-abortion campaigners in the US. Little figures like that? They'd buy by the hundreds to send as 'gifts' to their opponents.

MANIC MINERS: Ten Bitcoin generating machines

Re: Re. bitcoin

They brute-force SHA256. That's all they do. That's all they can do. It's how they are wired. Useless for anything else. With some software hackery you might be able to make them brute-force SHA256 in a slightly different manner and use them for password cracking, in the unlikely event you get hold of some unsalted or known-salt SHA256 password hashes, but that's the most you an possibly hope for.

ASICs are designed and built to do one thing only, and do it well.

Boffins hampered by the ampere hanker for a quantum answer

Re: You WHAT?

But R=V/I

Explained: How LSI and Oracle cooked up magical flash-embiggening sauce

2:1?

They lie!

2:1 on what, exactly? The bulk of storage is usually media, which is already compressed. Even office documents are compressed now. The only real-world situation in which you're going to see 2:1 is database backups, and not even for all databases.

Thought sales were in the toilet before? Behold the agony: 2013 was a PC market BLOODBATH

Re: What's the point of upgrading

It's advancing, but not in the way it was. The advancement now is focused on power savings and efficiency, not the ever-increasing speed demands of old. It's also reached the point where even with the windows bloat, a five year old PC is still easily enough for most users. A new PC may be better, but it isn't a must-have upgrade any more.

UK 'copyright czar' Edmund Quilty quits as Blighty's Director of Copyright Enforcement

Re: "get paid for creating and selling their stuff"

I am sympathetic to your plight, and do find your use of copyright to be entirely justified and reasonable. I do have a problem with copyright law, but you are not that problem.

Where I do see a problem is that copyright - in duration, scope and enforcement - has grown out of hand. Further, the 'enforcement' part comes at a social cost.

In duration, of what benefit to society is the ridiculous term? Seventy years for music. Life plus ninety years for individual works. The term in the US is even longer, that term is the de facto standard online to be legally in the clear. Does knowing that your great-grandchildren may still inherit the rights to your books effectively provide an incentive for you to write any more so than a shorter term of perhaps ten to twenty years would? This ridiculous term is counterproductive: Far from encouraging the production of new works of value, it serves only to provide legal barriers that lock much of popular culture away and deprive creators of material they can draw inspiration from and adapt into new forms.

Ideally I should like to see a shortened term, but I cannot envision that happening. There is simply too much money involved, and where there is money to be made there will be lobbying. It was only last year that the term for music was extended from fifty to seventy years as a result of desperate lobbying to retain copyright on a very lucrative decade of musical history. After all, the Beatles might stop writing new music if they lose their copyright protection.

In scope, the big blame to be placed here is upon the Berne convention and the automatic copyright. This is somewhat unfortunate. A well-intended solution to a real problem, but it also exposes everyone to a legal nightmare where every action must be scrutinized to make sure no copyright is inadvertently infringed. We've got the orphan works proposals now as an attempt to solve this, but their solution is legally messy and no less complicated. It has reached the point where infringement is such a common occurrence as to go unnoticed.

But of most concern is enforcement. Copyright infringement is a very, very easy act with modern technology - so easy that a lot of the time, people don't even realise they are doing it. Every school in the country has students swapping USB sticks of music, and a lot of workplaces too. People copy-paste images without a second thought, and google image search is now the world's leading source of clipart. In those who know they are infringing, trying to keep sites down has become a game of whack-a-mole - they appear as fast as they can be closed, often operating from countries where they are legally untouchable. Even without the websites, p2p networks thrive - and there is always sending files to friends via IM or even old-fashioned email. Modern technology makes a mockery of copyright law, and the only way to solve this would be draconian enforcement and, censorship and restricting access to technology. The US DMCA and our own implementation of the EUCD start down this path by banning 'circumvention devices,' but their efforts are pathetically ineffectual - it's only a matter of time until we start seeing calls to mandate ISPs start actively filtering infringing content through packet inspection, or require the blocking of 'illegal' file-sharing protocols. Given the choice between enforceable copyright and an open internet, it's no contest for me: I'd like to see a shorter-term opt-in-limited copyright policy but, if that isn't an option, I'd take no copyright at all over what we have now.

IBM's Watson-as-a-cloud: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's another mainframe

Most obvious? Customer services. Watson makes a decent conversational agent. A little work and it could take over the role of first-line support, quite capable of dealing with the most common customer queries. A little less frustrating than the telephone maze game, and potentially cheaper than hiring a building full of telephone monkeys.

China ALSO building encryption-cracking quantum computer

Re: At least they might publish some of the results

Because much of that symmetrical encryption still depends on asymmetric encryption for authentication purposes. Carrying a physical device with a shared key beforehand isn't always an option.

Human overlord Watson lives in the 'clouds' now, in a $1bn cognition unit. Don't be afraid

Re: Watson is 1/4th the computer it once was.

Assuming the same algorithms. AI, even 'good enough for a first-line at a call center' AI as Watson is intended to be, is very hard. Experts have devoted their career to trying to advance the field. The slowdown you notice probably means they sacrificed some speed in order to improve accuracy of answers.

ALIEN WORLD Beta Pictoris snapped by Earth's Gemini 'scope

Re: expected to discover an exoplanet with life by the end of the decade

It has a spectograph. That analyses atmospheric composition. If there is a lot of life on the planet, and it is running on similar chemical principles to life here, that instrument has a good chance of finding it. Oxygen just doesn't persist in a planetary atmosphere by any known process other than photosynthetic life, so if we find a planet with a significant amount of oxygen we can say with confidence that planet has life - even if we can't be sure it is anything more than single-celled algae analogs.

Circuits so flexible they'd wrap around your hair

Re: You might still look like an idiot

That can be solved with clever optics. A more interesting concern is trying to actually look at anything - the image will move with your eyeball, so as soon as you turn your gaze to part of the image that part will be elsewhere. You'd need some way to actively sense eyeball position and translate the image accordingly, and very quickly too.

ATM hacker Barnaby Jack's death blamed on accidental drug overdose

Commence conspiracy theories.

So, who killed him?

I'm going for the Secret Service. The NSA might be the bogeyman of choice, but lack motive. The SS is charged with protecting important officials, some of whom have or may in future need pacemakers.

Amazon, Hollywood, Samsung: PLEASE get excited about 4K telly

Re: hold 25% of a film.

Pirates generally go for at least 4GB for a 1080p movie, more on a long or particually demanding one, as any smaller makes the artifacts far too visible.

Snowden docs: NSA building encryption-cracking quantum computer

Re: EMP is way overblown

If you've got a nuke, it'd be a lot easier to just blow up a city. No need for an elaborate missile system then: You just slap on a FedEx label for Washington and a time or GPS trigger.

Boffins build sticky-limbed lizard-bots to tend spacecraft

Insufficient limbs

Remake it with eight legs.

Because it would be so cool if the ISS had a swarm of ROBOTIC SPACE SPIDERS.

Skype's Twitter account, blog hacked to spread anti-Microsoft messages

Skype for linux?

Couldn't they draw attention to the linux situation? Skype used to be just as stable and reliable under linux as windows, but since the Microsoft aquisition, just as many predicted, the linux version has turned to crap. It generally works for text, if you don't mind a random freeze from time to time and dropped messages on occasion (which it does warn you of), but try to run audio and you'll be lucky to get five minuts before it crashes. That's if you can get audio at all. I've got Skype on three linux machines running two distros and experience the same problem on them all, and a quick google search tells I am one of many.

Boffins invent LUMINOUS PIGS again, glow-in-dark bacon sarnies presumably imminent

Bah

It's just plain old photoluminescence - the pigs don't glow unless you shine UV light on them. That's been done already for fish. I'll be impressed when they can manage true bioluminescence. There could be a lot of money in the pet market for those, plus sticking it in plants would make a handy form of emergency illumnination. Imagine loading up a lawn with it.

Still a useful research tool though, and practice for more useful gene insertions.

Snowden leak journo leaks next leak: NSA, GCHQ dying to snoop on your gadgets mid-flight

Re: Weapons proliferators

I have to wonder if there's some sort of kill-code embeded in the radar device. Pick up the right 128-bit sequence, jam the instruments.

Snowden to warn Brits on Xmas telly: Your children will NEVER have privacy

Finance has reached a point where it is so heavily abstracted from reality that it's impossible for a non-specialist to have the foggiest idea what is going on. Non-finance experts can just about get the idea of a 'share' - but beyond that, it may as well be magic.

It's no wonder people are looking at gold or bitcoins. A sort of financial nostalgia, for times when money was money, and not actually a representation for something going on in an incomprehensibly complex network of debts.

Re: @chrisp1141

No, you can't choose not to use them. Every 'like' button you see, every twitter icon or... er, whatever google+ uses. They are all little tracking bugs. Even if you've no account with them, you can be confident they still have a profile on you. Even if it is a comparatively sparse one, no more than a list of websites visited.

Re: Kids DON'T WANT privacy

We might be happier if the massive collection of data were being used for law enforcement purposes to benefit everyone. If, upon finding your house broken into and burgled, the police could run a few database queries and announce that the spy systems recorded a suspect phone spent half an hour in the vicinity of your house earlier and detected a laptop querying for an ESSID matching your home network from a new location.

Or even if the police would just use it to more efficiently identify and convict drug dealers. How about if every stolen mobile phone and laptop was met by tracing the device and catching whoever stole it?

But that isn't what we get here. The collected information is classified very highly. Even the existance of it is classified highly. It isn't being used to benefit the people. It's being used for political purposes. The only way this will ever be used to catch criminals is if they happen to offend someone rich or powerful enough to justify breaking out the secret toolbox. Another case of one law for the rich and powerful, another for the commoners.

US Department of Justice details Kim Dotcom evidence

The usual, inflating the crimes.

Dotcom is a shady businessman who, as many businessmen do (Shady and respected), found a way to stay just barely legal while reaping profit. He was relying on a simple enough plan: It's impossible to effectively police copyright on a public file sharing service, so he knew that even if he made every reasonable effort (he did), infringement would still be rampant.

But that's not enough for the DoJ. They want the political points here, and the big political score, so some shady quasi-legal businessman just won't do. Instead they are going for some sort of mega-conspiracy angle - a weird alternate reality where something as simple and commonplace as regional caching becomes a crime, and putting a few terms into google becomes 'online undercover activities.'

Re: Guilty unless proven innocent?

The jury trial always starts with the bickering over selection. Someone I know was selected for jury duty (US, I believe). Not any mega-crime, just a routine case of a dog attack - the defendant was accused of failing to control a dangerous animal, or whatever the state crime is called. Straight away, the prosecution got her and half the jury replaced because they owned dogs, and the prosecution successfully argued this could bias them in favor of the defendant.

Eggheads give two robots vodka and tell them to text each other FOR SCIENCE

Needs more chemicals.

More chemicals to choose from means higher bitrate.

The smell of smouldering insulation can be the code for 'hardware failure: abort communication.'

Parents can hide abortion, contraception advice from kids, thanks to BT's SEX-ED web block

Re: make public its list of sites it blocks

Doesn't test the sites no-one would think to test. A better idea is a browser plugin volunteers could run that reports all blocks.

World+dog: Network level filters block LEGIT sex ed sites. Ofcom: Meh

Re: I Don't Understand

The mutterings on simulate rape so far from MPs and feminist groups suggest that when the term is defined, it'll likely be based around the ability of either party to withdraw consent throughout - ie, if one of them is tied up, it'll be considered rape even if they consent onscreen beforehand to their kinky activities. Basically, everything BDSM will be considered 'simulated rape' and liable to get anyone posessing it locked up for many years.

Google Glass pics will BAFFLE admirers: Nudge nudge, WINK WINK

And in anti-oppressive use...

Think of the potential for documenting any police abuse of power. Those in the US are well-known in some parts for being no better than the criminals, resorting to threats and intimidation to extract fines from innocent people who happen to be unlucky. Dare to question their authority, and they will find a few extra crimes to arrest you for.

Or, more likely, some influential people will just get a law passed making it a crime to film an on-duty police officer. Good luck enforcing it.

No anon pr0n for you: BT's network-level 'smut' filters will catch proxy servers too

Re: No, it really isn't time to give the paranoia a rest.... @Brian Morrison 12:05

What do you propose?

Political involvement? That can work for major issues, where an election is at stake, and when there are enough numbers careing. But in this the vast majority simply don't care, and those who are left don't have the votes or connections to matter. The best we can do is slow them down a bit.

Technological countermeasures? It's possible to invest in filter-resistant technologies. Tor, freenet, retroshare, p2p distribution and communication in general. They can work, for the technologically skilled - the advantage there is with us, it'd be impossible to block them without causing serious inconvenience to everyone. It's still untidy though: While the idea of fighting for your rights may have some romantic appeal, the idea is to win, not get trapped in an unending arms race between government filter operators and investigators vs counter-government circumvention programmers.

Those are really our only options: Probably lose, or technological war. Unless you can think up some super-effective publicity campaign that lets you rally people against the filters without being branded as a bunch of perverts.

Re: "Web filtering is already the default on mobile phones."

Something must be done.

This is something.

Ergo this must be done.

When there is an issue getting a lot of public attention, it is sometimes better for a politician to do something obviously stupid and take the flak for failure than to ignore it and be regarded as disconnected and uncaring. In this particular case though, much of the pressure does appear to have initiated internally. A certain Clair Perry, MP is behind a lot of it.

There is grounds to be paranoid. Pick any oppressive government filter you want and look at how their own government refers to it. Even when the filtering is clearly politically targetted, in every case, the official government line is that the filter's purpose is to protect against indecency. Every time.

Re: Seriously?

"Presumably the hypothetical bloke could just grow a pair and explain the reasoning behind his decision."

You're not married, are you?

Re: To not be self-defeating

What makes you think it's not pointless anyway? If someone is actively trying to subvert the filter, it isn't going to pose much of a problem. Just ask anyone who actually maintains a filter professionally how often they need to revise rules because someone spent half an hour googling synonyms and found a site that slipped through.

NSA alleges 'BIOS plot to destroy PCs'

Re: Sadly Trevor

I imagine they just have a very narrow definition of 'listening.' Probably they only consider it listening if a human has personally given the order to target an individual - if they just hoover up communications through automatic means, that isn't really listening.

Is Google prepping an ARMY of WALKING ROBOTS?

Re: There is nothing evil about the military

Sort of. Remember that the purpose of any military is to beat anyone who may oppose us into a bloody, possibly dead pulp. The best you can really say about them is that there are greater evils in the world - and as the only way to fight violence is with better violence, we have to keep a bit of 'tame evil' of our own to counter it. That doesn't mean what they do is good - it just means that not doing it would be worse.

BT network-level STOCKINGs-n-suspenders KILLER arrives in time for Xmas

Re: 8.8.8.8

Vimes further up already found evidence that the filter will block all UDP-53 traffic to non-BT DNS servers as a countermeasure against that approach.

Re: Filtering

There's a clear sequence: First, block the child porn. No-one ever objects to that one, it's an easy sell to the public, and it gets the filtering systems in place. Then you can progress to blocking sites performing criminal activity. After that comes the porn - start off on the kinky stuff, less backlash, and describing BDSM as 'rape porn' assures support from certain pressure groups. A brief detour for sites deemed harmful to children like suicide advice, then start on the 'hate sites' - start off with the open racism and calls for violence, and gradually loosen the definition until you can start banning anyone who raises concern about the high immigration rate or 'promotes religious hatred' by insulting a religion. A little loosening of libel law to allow anything insulting anyone to be easily struck down by court order, and you have a government-controlled easily-censored internet - at least for those who aren't dedicated enough activists to seek out the technological underground communities.

Re: Ways around censorship

Vimes up above already found evidence suggesting that the filter also blocks all UDP-53 packets precisely to prevent that approach.

Re: The filtering isn't my main issue

I can imagine it coming up in child custody hearings - 'My X is not a fit parent, as he has demonstrated by acting to disable adult content filters on his internet connection knowing that children will be present on the property and may connect through his unfiltered connection..'

Don't worry.

If they can't manage a block on the pirate bay that takes more than thirty seconds to defeat, what hope have they of holding back all the porn on the internet?

Dimmed but not out: Lantern anti-censorship tool blocked in China

Re: Let information be free in china!

TOR was also a US-government-initiated project.

The US government is very big, and often different parts are involved in power struggles or controlled by factions with competing agendas. It's very common to find situations where one agency is either impeding the actions of another by ignoring them, or actively working to oppose them.

I KNOW how to SAVE Microsoft. Give Windows 8 away for FREE – analyst

Re: I wonder what the Pirate Bay stats are

To be shunned by pirates is the ultimate insult. A sign of a product so rubbish, it isn't even worth stealing.

Re: If not free...

That's what they already do with OEMs - if you've a big volume OEM, you can get a substantial discount. If you threaten to start seriously selling linux machines, you'll get it for almost nothing.

One European copyright law-to-rule-them-all? EU launches review

That's not how the law works.

1. Make a trivial action illegal, usually with severe penalties for breaking it.

2. Trust in the police or civil courts to use their judgement and only enforce it against the deserving.

3. When the rampant abuse of the legal process inevitably starts, deny this was your intention and claim naivety.

Re: Harmonisation...

EU or US speak. The EU likes to harmonise a lot of things - measurement systems, mains power voltages, fire extinguisher color codes, emergency service numbers, things like that. But given the political influence of the copyright-driven industries, it's hard to believe there wouldn't be intensive lobbying in the direction of 'harmonising to the strictest.'

Malware+pr0n surge follows police op to kill illicit streaming sites

Re: City of London Police

City of London Police. Not exactly like the regular police. They *are* a private army for corporations. Regular street crime in London is the domain of the Met, the CoLP are mostly concerned with financial crime.

Chinese gamer plays on while BMW burns to the ground

Could it be a fake.

The government of China has effective media control and considers propaganda to be a force for the public good.

If they are trying to deal with a precieve problem of game-obcession, it seems plausible they might seed the media with a few made-up stories on the subject to raise public awareness and concern.

TPP leak: US babies following bathwater down the drain

Re: one use for US-style copyright laws

The 'automatic copyright of everything' thing is in the Berne convention. It was put in to fix some issues with draft works. If you copyright a movie, but then someone discovers you'd been showing the script to people and hadn't written a copyright notice on it, the script could potentially be uncopyrightable. So the convention required that anything set down in a fixed form, even without an explicit notice, would be copyright by default.

Mexican Cobalt-60 robbers are DEAD MEN, say authorities

Re: Radiation Monitoring

X-ray machines generate their radiation by accelerating an electron beam into a target. Whatever the machine was that ended up in that dump, it wasn't x-ray. More likely either a radiotherepy machine or an industrial source. They are used for quality control in metalworking.