Posts by Martin McNulty

Avira anti-virus labels itself as spyware

What?

An antivirus story without a quotation from Mr Cluley?

Oracle re-commits to ODF after OpenOffice divorce

Committed to ODF?

So that's why they stopped offering the ODF plugin for Office for free and started charging $50 a time for it? (Or $90 with a minimum order of 100 licenses for the 'Enterprise' edition).

Great support for interoperability there, guys.

http://technofriends.in/2010/04/21/odf-plugin-for-microsoft-office-is-no-more-free-priced-at-90/

Microsoft's Cambridge boffins to up sticks in 2012

Yes, but...

Possibly, but the currently building is literally next door to the University's Computer Science department. "Private science park", you say?

Google delivers Java 'convenience' APIs

Isn't this what...

Commons collections gives you?

http://commons.apache.org/collections/

Beeb censors Fairytale of New York

@Nick

The BBC never play the 'faggot' line from Dire Straits' Walk of Life - in fact they drop the whole verse. That one's been pissing me off for years!

Another day, another iPhone rumour

Opinion?

You seem to state the contents of this article as fact, but without quoting or referencing so much as one source. (Not even a made-up 'high-level' or 'closely involved' one...). Sounds plausible enough, but also fairly spurious if it's simply a guess. Is this just your opinion or is there some evidence in there somewhere?

Phishing attack evades bank's two-factor authentication

re: single IP

"if the IP changes then it could be due to the session being hi-jacked" - the problem here is that in a man-in-the-middle attack, the session is hi-jacked from the beginning. The software installed on the user's machine redirects them to the hackers' website, so they never connect directly to the bank's. This means that the only IP the bank ever sees belongs to the hackers, and is consistent throughout the session. i.e. from the bank's point of view, the IP doesn't change, so this technique is useless against this form of attack. "Think".

Europe wants to civilise US terror war

Whoa there!

Anonymous writes: "It leaves the impression the writer agrees with bin Laden and company".

Quite simply, no it doesn't.

I have some sympathy for the views in that comment, but I think you're sailing dangerously close to "you're either with us or against us"-type waters...

'Unbreakable'? Software? Harr!

Allegedly...

It's already being done. There's a company called Praxis High Integrity Systems (http://www.praxis-his.com/) who (I'm told - no, I don't work for them!) create software which needs to be completely reliable (think air-traffic control systems) by applying the kinds of theoretical techniques taught in formal programming courses but rarely applied in the real world due to the extra work involved.

As far as I remember, they use a language called SPARK-ADA which is a subset of ADA, but with annotations for pre and post conditions on various blocks of code. There's then a tool which checks that the code ensures the post-condition holds if the pre-condition held when the code was run, etc.

Rather them than me, but still, nice to know someone's trying!