Posts by Gleb

Google now a serious rival to Microsoft in cloud email

Oy, Google is way eviler than Apple. Why they control the flow of information! Apple only controls the flow of money - the precious - "look, shiny!" demographic, previously devoid of life goals and who can now adhere to the mac lifestyle.

Think of it this way. You can ignore an Apple product, but what other search provider are you going to turn to? Bing? Please. Same with facebook. If you don't like it don't use it. I don't. Haven't been invited to a party in about 3 years, but I still have my dignity!...

Oh, and don't tell me you still think Microsoft is evil. I'm always amazed how much cool stuff they churn out on those PDCs and BUILDs and what have you. Really cool, like lambda-unwinding-awaits and... okay, this Build was a mild let down... but that doesn't make them evil. Also it's kind of nice that everyone just uses Office and people believe they are hot stuff just because they had a crack at VBA. Hurray for conformity!

In fact the real evil - horns and pitchfork - company on that list is Oracle. Oy, they lock in just about every other company on the planet, and their databases don't even have IDENTITY properties. What's up with that? Horrible service, insane prices. Suing everyone.

Microsoft bans all plugins from touchable IE10

RIP Silverlight - WPF/E - We hardly knew ye

Silverlight will be abandoned to third-class citizenship dispite the whole - "Don't worry" approach microsoft is taking. This is only too apparent from how it's been treated in the Build.

Microsoft previews new Visual Studio, .NET

It seems that Async CTP made it to .NET 4.5. I wonder if they'll step C# to 5.0 while the remaining 0.5 of the .NET catches up. And before you scream that numbers aren't important - consider this - Most of .NET is currently at 4.0. That's everything from framework, language versions, to blends, wpfs, silverlights, et al. That's just so neat.

Apple's iCloud runs on Microsoft and Amazon services

Oy, Wait a minute

I seem to recall when this whole iCloud iThing iStarted there was an apple data-center abrewing also. Now, either that data-center is no where up to capacity, granted, or it got sacked or what. Where's my thorough reporting?

Judge kneecaps Oracle's $1.3bn triumph over SAP

Yeey

I read your entire post in the voice of Napoleon Dynamite. Made so much sense.

Mystery railway buys 80 terabytes of Flash

letters and/or digits

The array itself is plenty redundant/unlikely to corrupt. Buying two arrays is just for show - "What if our Northbrook station blows up", etc. Or power outages.

eBay biz millionaires proliferate as high street suffers

Letters and or digits

Well, technically yes. See, you bought the "tat" for almost a million pounds, which kinda implies you already have it.

I do get your point though, but as someone already put it - hey, if it's not about millions then why are we even reading this?

Here lies /^v.+b$/i

I will go out with style: Geordie

The only programming language suitable to put on your tombstone is GEORDIE, or as is more commonly known in the ultra-geeky community - Gulping Excessively Often Ruins Decent Indian Edibles.

<begin tombstone>

If ya ganna smork ya tab in ear,

ah'll belt ya from ear to Geeatsheed, mun

</aye enough>

Sneaky tracking code (finally) purged from Microsoft sites

Re: Disrupting ETags

ETag is just a number in the HTTP Request/Response spiel. Server sets it so that we echo the same number back when we try to download same content, presumably so that if we download a high-resolution picture of a woman with a giant hat, next time we visit the same woman we could ask the server if the content has changed. I say my ETag, server says 304 - Same giant hat. Then I know I can just trust my cache, else I download the new image. Think of this as a receipt for the resource you already downloaded.

But this number may as well be a dud. This dud ETag has nothing to do with the resource in question (typically it's a hash of the resource or a timestamp), and is just a way for the server to ID me. So when I bring this receipt back to the server, it knows that I've visited before. Somewhere this number has been stored, along with whatever cookies they want to give me. The number in the ETag is receipt for the cookies I checked out previously!

Now the server checks my cookies, and finds that I have deleted them. If so, they just reassign the cookies that I have deleted that were associated with this ETag.

We could just ignore/strip Response ETags to get rid of this bug/feature. Since it's part of HTML 1.1 standard, it's unlikely to be removed from compliant browsers, no matter how fast your internets have become.

The question is...

Do ETag caching and Flash cookies bypass porn-mode protection on chrome/IE/whathaveyou? I wouldn't be surprised if they did, and someone somewhere is sniggering at my giant hat fetish.

Meanwhile, note that ETag caching as tracking is not going to go away any time soon. What these researches do is the following:

Send HTTP Request without ETag. Get HTTP Response with an ETag and some cookies. Delete cookies. Send HTTP Request with ETag. Get HTTP Response with cookies, which are same as before (Coincidentally this is what they are calling "cookie respawn", which somehow suggests that they are brought back to life, while in fact they are just being reset by server to same values). <= Proof of tracking.

Meanwhile, the next-gen ETagger (NGE) could be a little more sneaky. Let's suppose that the cookie contains a unique identifier, which is typically just a large number. By using miracles of mathematics NGE could mangle this identifier each time it's not being verified by a cookie.

Send HTTP Request without anything. Get HTTP Response with ETag, cookies, etc. Delete cookies. Send new HTTP Request with ETag. The server receives a cookieless request which still has an ETag. The server then sends out a new cookie with the uid that can be randomly transformed back into the original uid. The researches now receives a HTTP Response with a new cookie. He or she is now convinced she's not being tracked.

The transformation function need not be very complicated to be sufficiently advanced to bypass visual inspection. Of the top of my head [f(int uid, int seed) -> string] could be [seed + delimeter + md5(uid) xor seed]. At inspection it seems trivial to recover the uid, but you'd have to know the function definition to do so. Oh and of course you can construct much more advanced schemes, that are very hard to break even if you know what you are looking for.

So, welcome to trackable internets!

Amazon deploys true-blue US gov cloud for secret arms data

Security loop

Amazon GovCloud - where goverments take turns at breaking each others secret messages. It's a great idea, especially at war-time.

Angry S Koreans mass-sue Apple over iPhone tracking

Apple patents aren't that specific.

If Apple wanted to protect their IP in the manner you describe, they'd patent South Korea instead. Oh, who am I kidding - they'd patent them both.

Curved light drives boffin one-upmanship

Like a record, baby

Better get creative quick on how this thing might destroy us all™. Think of it this way -

1. Lets put a lot of bendy light in a field someplace.

2. Since it's bendy it's bound to go in a circle.

3. ???

4. No more need for long exposure flashlight photography!

Also, scientist... get real! You aren't doing this for applications, you just want something cool to play with.

Also, where's the Dr. Stragelove icon?

IE, Windows server bugs likely to be exploited soon

Bring on your Microsoft battle rams!

I for one, welcome the supreme security of my windows server r2 workstations. Okay, I admit it's kind of unnerving that DNS resolutions could lead to remote code execution. Then again, whenever I write c++ code, it works right about half the time, one more rewrite/review gives you 75%, one more gives you 87.5, and so on. By the time you do 10 rewrites you got it up to 99.9% correct. Which is good enough for most people.

As of late I've been admiring some of Microsofts more successful recent ventures. Granted COM, DOS and most of the windii (plural of windows!) have been a little shaky, but some of the stuff that comes out of their thinktanks is pretty amazing. As a developer, there's no better source of tools and reference material than MSDN, and who-am-i-to-judge-the-cloud, but Azure delivers exactly what I expect of application oriented future.

I guess what i'm saying is that goo' ol' let's bash Microsoft head in, because they force sysadmins to support Office, Windows and Ignorant Users is a bit too simplistic.

Apple sued over Mac OS X 'quick boot'

Pattent Trolling - Trolling Patent

I'm filing a trolling patent for patent trolling outrage, and I'm going to sue the lot of you!

Apple MacBook Air 13in Core i5 laptop

Re: Twice as Fast

... This was never intended to be taken as a factual statement.

Re: Good hardware

I got me mom an apple lappy about 5 years ago, back before the whole unibody craze. If anything, these laptops hold well - can you imagine that nothing broke for the last 5 years? And she uses it almost every day for skype, email and interwebs.

Amateur claims crack of final Zodiac Killer cipher

Well spotted

Wow, I can't believe media is having a field day with this. Cool job. Just add a screenshot to integersequences database showing that this pattern is at least not known.

logic fail

If choose to interpret everything you post as nonsense, does it make everything you post nonsense? By your admission...

iPhone plunges 13,500 ft from skydiver's pocket - and lives

This is only so true

The one time I decide to wear a posh jacket and jump a few fences - well, that's when my iPhone 4, too decides it knows a shorter route down. That day I managed to crack the back on three separate occasions. I was about to mail his Holiness, about how it's his personal fault that iphones and top pockets don't work well together. But I decided to chug that up to good old user-error.

Microsoft loses Supreme patent fight over Word

How predictible

I came to the comments section to see people debate if i4i had a real case or not, but it's same-old Microsoft bashing without context. Additionally I object to Microsoft being seen as an irreducible entity - some of the world's smartest people work there, so I think they might have enough in-house innovation to go around. That said, maybe they did steal this genius i4i invention, as is certainly apparent from the tone of this discussion, but it's argued as "obvious", and to me it isn't.

New graphics engine imperils users of Firefox and Chrome

Missing some dates...

When was this exactly? In the "everything is open" 90s? The flash-heavy 00s? The security through obscurity and "password"-password 80s?

UK is fifth free-est nation on the internet

Estonia =\= free

Did you know that most if not all online casinos are blocked in Estonia? That includes pokerstars. I cant believe that such prohibition laws are outweight by greater injustice in blightey. Confuzeorama.

BA jihadist relied on Jesus-era encryption

Gee, leo

Thank you so much for being so enthusiastic about helping terrorists to hide their secrets. If only they had YOU as their IT guy, all those infidels would have been dead by now. :)

Steve Jobs in iPhone bitchslap to creationists, Tea Party

tittle tittttle

I'm very disappointed with the reg for publishing non-stories like these. I would use much harsher language, but since about 1 in 10 posts actually get through... Let me just say that some insects shouldn't be allowed in a serious news organization, or a humorous news organization or a news organization or any organization for that matter, because these insects suck the fun of out of it and leave a shallow feeling of fun-less emptiness...

Yahoo! economist rebuilds ad empire with 'Magic Formula'

Irreducible Complexity

I can just imagine the dramatic monologue that created this contraption:

"We have a scheduling problem. It's really hard *sadeface*. NP-hard. What ever are we going to do? Let's invent a magic formula which greedily prioritizes clients we value most, and hope that everyone else doesn't notice. Also let's publish a meaningless formula everywhere and define absolutely nothing about it. *happyface*"

*facepalm*

Google tests 'streaming' search engine

Zomg

Dont you lot think it will wait 2 std from average length between keystrokes before searching for any inappropriate subset of analytics? Well, unless you take a breather to smirk each time yourself that is.

Debian fixes serious crypto bug

Crying wolf

The media wants sensations. This is one of those times. Consider a headline "A cryptographic service has a flaw!". It implies that the flaw is serious enough to consider newsworthy, but never mentions the exploitability of the said flaw; which in this case is practically non-existant.

Next Ubuntu LTS in 2010, unless Linuxes synchronize

@Nexox Enigma

While I'm not sure about the method, it seems like the bigguest problem linux has is that there's a constant reinvention of the bicycle. Most distros rewrite the glue that holds the applications together for no apparent reason, instead of collaborating on one front. I think that it's a good idea to synchronize in a greedy sense - if it works, it would yield a lot of end-user benefit, because the dev time can be spent on improvement instead. However, ultimately I must agree - linux is the kind of hacker os, where personal preference is the only thing that matters. Limiting that could even scare seome devs off.

Fedora 9 - an OS that even the Linux challenged can love

@Steven Hunter

Well, or, have **your** os at work. I'm sure the admins won't mind. :)

Converting Groovy to Ruby

Python

Ye, and here's the same in python:

def subn(n, list):

if not n : return [[]]

if not list : return []

remainder = list[1:]

return [it+[list[0]] for it in subn(n-1, remainder)] + subn(n, remainder)

4 lines, cleaner synthax. Ruby can suck it. :)

Whitehats tackle The Great Botnet Dilemma

Down the drain

Don't remove the infection, just down the machine all together. No moral greys, but queue some satisfaction. And should someone **die** as a result of this, then it's their problem. This is war, dammit.

YouTube divorce rant vid wows the crowd

Not as bad as it looks.

While many people would react violently to the ineffable moral grey; you don't really seem to consider the individual. The flamboyance is appealing to some, even though personally I would rather marry a bucket.

Besides, it's not like the evil mr Smith isn't trying to divorse her now. Maybe her marbles once were all in the right place - far away from mysticue of cards and youtube.

I would bet an afformentioned pot of gold, that she's not only tipsy in this video, but have been self-medicating for a while. It's almost painful to watch her struggle to remain her former self by attempting to insult her husband's sexually private endevours.

But pray tell, is youtube the only it angle? Because then you should see that one cute kitten...

World Bank chief: Ethanol cars run on human misery

Mute point

The actual complaint, as far as I can understand is the following - "Don't do biodiesel, developed nations, because then you can't give away food you weren't going to use."

Since when is charitable government self-evident truth? I don't think that saving the environment (ethanol might not be actual saving, heck, it might pollute more, but for the purpose of the argument I'm assuming it's eco-friendlier than burning crude) for everyone is a worse goal than helping nations that by no means can help themselves.

If the charitable ability of the developed nations deminishes for any reason, why is it assumed that these nations are doing something wrong? In fact, the food surplus of EU is a beurocratic joke, and one that will find solution in the ever increasing openenness of the market.

So if we stop overproducing, or use the overproduced crops for something else; then we are all biggots who don't want to help our fellow man in dire need. I guess there is no pleasing some people, then.

Yahoo! to post Google ads on Yahoo!

Real mature, Yahoo.

I've seen more maturity in a kindergarden... I think this might actually turn out good for microsoft, since now they can scream monopoly bloody murder. And it'll hurt Google more than it hurt them in the past, because I never remember microsoft issuing "we are holy, now you know" proclamations.

Wikipedia scores $3m donation

3 million

3 million over 3 years isn't 3 million at all, it's a bit less. But I guess it's good news. I'm a little miffed why wikipedia is in a financial rot, since so many people are constantly donating...

At any rate, I'd love my taxes to go for paying wikipedias bandwidth service and not some second grade kids education, which they can get from wiki for free anyway.

I'm not not serious, I'm just drunk.

Arthur C. Clarke dead at 90

Spooky

Recently it was published somewhere on el Reg, that Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimher's. I read most of the comments on that post, and I distinctively remember one first saying that maybe Arthur C Clarke is next, and then swearing profusely trying to remove the jinx - Something along the lines of whom am I kidding, he'll live forever.

I bet the author of that comment feels a bit silly now. And on the other hand, let's mourne a great innovator, writer and well-to-do chap.

Top security firm: Phorm is adware

Leave Phorm Alone!

How dare you talk about Phorm like that, do you know what she's been through?!

Dear ISP, I am not a target market

This article was rubbish.

It's like arguing that sky is blue. Yes, you are right, but spawning a lyrical child the size of this article isn't a good idea. It clutters the basic idea, that internet is free as in freedom and that ad-highjack wouldn't work with it.

I double dare the ISPs to actually go at it. What would happen? I'll tell you what -

First there would be so many lawsuits that they'd have to hire a mid-size law firm to deal with it all. Then site owners would smart up - why waste bandwidth on people who aren't even able to click the adds? And there would be a lists of ISP IPs and sites wouldn't service them.

So go ahead. God willing this would create more competition among ISPs.

Steve Jobs unveils plans to dominate RIM BlackBerry, Life, the Universe, and Everything

My Ipod Touch.

I bought it to play music. Now I want it to do other things for me. I've had a lot of devices over the years, and now it seems I've found one that I really like. Not going to care what anyone says, or make any silly predictions. But Apple is well on their way to at least outselling RIM in the near future, and if they want to broaden their market a bit - why so much negativity?

People here are saying that no way no how no company would ever move their whatever to iphone. But what if people want it? What if this company is one of those hip companies? Like biotech or parish hilton mags or something. They live for swag and phat loot. I can surely see them adopting at least some of it.

And why is everyone so polarized anyway? Love or hate? Is it so simple? I like the browser, I hate how I can't get big keyboard in email mode. Maybe with SDK it'll open up a bit. Although I'm *NOT* loving how it seems to be very very mac-only at the moment.

Oh, and another thing. When I bought my iPOD Touch I couldn't start it up without iTunes. That's Windows or MAC only,so I actually had to install windows for it. Now, mind you, there are some hacks out there to get music to and fro the device, remotely even - no cables or anything, but there are no tools to initialize it.

Mobo maker builds 'powerless' processor cooling fan

Nono, this is all wrong.

I don't want a pansy little engine that could, I want a monster truck cooling my precious bits! And if it takes more power than the sun outputs in a year? So be it.

Apple unearths Time Capsule

Never owned a mac, but...

The theorem that any backup is better than no-backup is only true, if you don't scale it. However, for the people with the photos and emails and idunnowhats that this gadget targets, this gives a different magnitude of the order of datasecurity, and would serve them well. I wish I had one of those, except maybe I'd think it's wasting space and use it for primary storage anyway.

My backup file is 11mb, and I keep it on the internets.

Most spam comes from just six botnets

I actually have an idea...

If I understand it correctly, then the botnet is operated by a master server somewhere. The master server is invisible, and there might be levels of master...y, I guess. But what must be common for all infected machines, is that they must have an open socket, on a presumably random port. And since there are only 6 or so important botnets, it's theoretically possible to blacklist the IPs by trying to connect to the machines 65k sockets and if you get an answer test if it's a botnet socket. ISPs should do this, but anyone can really.

So. You get an email. You see if the host you got the email from is infected. If it's not, proceed as usual.

Plotholes : 65k pings could be expensive but this might be a destributable cost. The botnets might shut off sockets periodically, but I find it unlikely, as it would limit their response times. There *could* be a scanning authority, basically green/red listing as a service, but who'd do it?

Can *this* be done smarter?

Nvidia to purchase Ageia

On AMD

Why can't AMD develop something in-house, and save a few bucks on integration? When the fantastic number NVIDIA is willing to shell out appears, you'll know what I mean. Besides, the laws of physics simulated are well-known, and it's hardly anyone's IP.

Microhoo! marriage hits Google salaries hard

@Errrr

I managed two lines before dozing off. After I woke up my coffee was cold...

Pirate Bay slapped with copyright charges

Yeah, but yarr or no yarr

For what it's worth the solution is on everyone's tongue - subscription services. And hopefully, we'll be able to get something like that sooner rather than later.

People all over the word engage in a form of social disobedience - we refuse to acknowledge the laws that weren't made by us and serve only to restrict our freedom and rights. The copyright issue is one of the bigger issues of the modern age. Patenting resources that aren't innumerable, such as DNA strings in soy seeds and the ways you can make a taco sign spin, will conceivably pose a lot of problems in the years to come. Whilst right now there still exists a vast domain of property the big corporations haven't had time to patent, in the future we might not be so lucky.

In conclusion, our motivation to get free Housewives episodes is rooted in greed, but we are willing to pay for the content at a reasonable price. The content duplication costs next to nothing, and so we feel our demands are justified. Hopefully we'll win, and our victory will be precedent for a general debate on the copyright issues.

Software pirates put sizeable dent in UK economy

The Wise Rabbit Says

What's wrong with you people saying the same lines over and over? Some original thought please. Here's my take:

Someone has already mentioned licenses being somewhat of a gray area when considering code execution methods (multi processor/core/thread) - But what if you pirate something, but you are unintentionally covered anyway? For example most PCs made by an OEM come with a windows license, and many students are covered by tricks such as MSDNAA.

On the other hand, I do agree with the "free advertising", but find it in very bad taste that most software makers don't offer a free development/non-profit/student license. As someone has mentioned, wouldn't Autocad, Matlab, Mathematica and friends win a lot of hearts and minds by offering people a free chance to use their products? I guess the argument people make that it's not a valid business model.

In the end, I'm against piracy - because it feels like saying "I like your product, but not you personally". And you can do slightly more than everything using OSS anyway.

PS. I would promise to do something really embarrasing on national television if BSA presented any kind of proof...

Swearing at work 'good for business'

Yessers

This response is the only one without profanity in it. Hurray for maturety! I'll get my coat..

RIAA hits paydirt: wins first music-sharing jury trial

@Andrew Orlowski

First of all I think it's very cowardly of you to disable comments on those "pirates be damned" articles/blog updates/ramblings of a fool. But in a sense, you are admitting that you know that your opinion is unpopular; and since this is a question of policy and politics; you are, therefore, wrong.

On a lighter note I'm happy to live in Europe, whose laws are there to protect the common denominator between people - our basic rights and freedoms, istead of bending over to the corporate greed. So screw america, and their RIAA. Long live piratebay. =)

Australia to get 1,000 megawatt wind farm

Uranium

As far as I remember, uranium is currently a scarse commodity with little prospect in the forseeable 10-20 year period. I think that investing into wind energy is a good idea in general, but some other ideas out there seem even more interesting. For example tidal energy seems to be, theoretically, much cheaper. While the scientific community still ponders the question of the most effective design, I say - build a few already, it's not like we are running out of sea.

In the end, the key to emerging power demands; and as many already have pointed out - practically all enviromental conserns (fresh water for one),is a buckload of energy. Where do we get it? Why fusion, of course. It remains a mystery to me, why governments aren't spending the bigger parts of their research budgets to develop a great fusion solution...