Posts by Oh Homer

Re: Poor Apple

My heart really bleeds for this unscrupulous, litigious, 485.89 billion dollar, overpriced-toy maker.

How dare that nasty man force them to conduct business ethically?

Clearly he must be stopped, so that Apple can resume racketeering "business" as usual.

Re: PS

"no one outside this country gives a shit that we split ourselves into four and why should they?"

Because I am not "English".

Calling everyone in the UK "English" is like calling Canadians "American".

Re: Free clones

It's simply a "because I can" proposition. Clones only exist in the first place because somebody, somewhere wanted to fork them, and people now want to use them. Expecting them to merge is like expecting people not to have unique preferences and the freedom to indulge them.

I once considered forking Fedora myself, for example, mainly due to the fact that they dropped support for my hardware (rebased from i386 to i686). I ended up using Gentoo instead, which solved that problem and a whole lot more I hadn't even considered up to that point.

Re: 4K Streaming?

Same here. I can barely manage 480p streaming on YouTube, never mind 4K.

Plus it only seems like five minutes ago I bought an HD telly, so I probably won't be in the market for a replacement for another couple of decades, if my last one is any indication. In fact I still have a Sharp B&W portable somewhere, circa late 70s, with a "Solid State" symbol next to the rotary tuner. Yes, it still works.

Maybe if we weren't stuck in the middle of The Great Depression 2.0 (are we allowed to call it that yet, or do we have to keep calling it "austerity"?) I might consider pissing away all the money I don't have on Hollywood fads like 3D, 4K or whatever other bullshit they come up with to convince us to pay again for all the films we already own, and it'll take a hell of a lot more than stupidly high resolutions to convince me to buy any of the new garbage that passes for entertainment in Hollywood these days. Maybe if they tried making something with an actual plot I might be more interested, or (God forbid) a film targeted at intelligent non-American adults instead of gormless American teenagers, preferably one that isn't yet another fucking comic-book adaptation.

Excited about 4K? I've been more excited waiting for a bus.

Still missing

Not exactly state of the art, but I sadly miss my long-lost, self-assembly, Sinclair Radionic calculator, circa 1978.

At least I still have my beloved HP48GX.

Re: "The average member of the public"

Anecdotal evidence and personal biases to one side, the metric that genuinely reflects what the public wants is sales figures, and judging by those it's clear that the average member of the public wants small, quiet, mobile, consumer-oriented devices, not anything exclusively tethered to the desktop, especially when their mobile alternatives can also be tethered to the desktop, rendering the consumer-oriented features of actual desktops redundant (e.g. media playback).

Although there's still a significant enough proportion of the general public engaged in content creation and the gaming FPS arms-race to keep the desktop on life support for a few more years, until mobile devices become powerful enough to be genuine desktop replacements.

Personally I don't see any reason not to aim for a single device that can do it all and fit in one's pocket.

Re: "Linux UI"

The assumption that an X server is unsuitable for an Android device, presumable based on the small screen size, ignores the obvious fact that said devices can be connected to rather large HD displays ... as mine is right now.

Re: Because we can

Because their corporate overlords tell them too.

Spying to defeat fascism is one thing, but spying to advance commercial interests is quite another, exactly the opposite in fact, and this farcical War on Terriers® is little more than gang warfare between those commercial interests and OPEC.

Granted, I'm sure Christian fundamentalism plays a role too, along with an overinflated sense of "exceptionalism".

Re: More research required

To get FIPS support you need to either use a prebuilt "FIPS capable" version of OpenSSL, which few distros provide, or build it yourself, so the problem is largely moot.

The only prebuilt version I could find with FIPS support is openssl-0.9.8e-22.el5_8.3, which is specifically certified by NIST. An examination of the sources reveals no fips_drbg_ec.c patch at all, much less the patch in question ("t = s;"), and indeed that file is completely missing.

The same goes for Fedora, CentOS, Debian and Gentoo. I gave up checking after that.

It seems you have to go to some effort to let the NSA spy on you in this manner, and by all indications no one has yet done so.

Re: Oh really?

Yes, in my case it was a tagged email alias I'd used to sign up to Interflora, to which I suddenly started receiving "offers" from, amongst others, "The Book Club of Britain".

When challenged, Interflora's typically inept tier one'ers just dismissed it as a problem at my end ... until I got the ICO involved, then suddenly I had their undivided attention, and the problem was ultimately escalated to some regional manager.

It turned out they were using a professional spammer marketeer called CheetahMail (subsequently assimilated by Experian), which had "accidentally shared" my Interflora address, along with those of about another ten million people, with various parties they ought not to have. Being an American company, CheetahMail didn't seem to understand what all the fuss was about, given that America had (and clearly still has) absolutely no concept of data protection whatsoever (the safe harbor provisions didn't come into effect until years later, and even so are highly dubious at best, for various reasons).

In fact I made that point to the aforementioned regional manager, and suggested that maybe they shouldn't be handing British citizen's private data over to furriners not subject to our data protection laws. He appologised and made some vague assurance that Interflora would be "reviewing its relationship" with the spammer marketeer in question. It didn't matter. I ditched the alias and with it my "relationship" with Interflora.

Fool me once...

Writing for Cryptome too

Bruce also seems to have been responsible for Cryptome's recent Full Disclosure leak, ostensibly authored by "The Adversaries", which is almost entirely about BT, its HomeHub routers and its cosy relationship with GCHQ/NSA.

Having read it, I can now see why his position at BT was untenable. Even if he didn't write that document, he must surely have contributed the highly detailed information upon which it's based. My guess would be that BT and its cohorts are spitting blood.

The proposed solution comprises various security hardening techniques, including never, ever using BT-supplied hardware, using open firmware like OpenWRT, and something that I hadn't heard of before called Tcpcrypt.

Re: These pirates are thieves, not 'leftists'

Copyright law says otherwise. Indeed there is no copyright legislation anywhere in the world that defines copyright infringement as "theft".

In the words of Justice Guy Newey:

'The fruits of an infringement of copyright cannot, as it seems to me, be equated with the stolen coins. While the owner of the coins will have lost title to the coins at law, the copyright owner will have retained title throughout both in equity and at law,” the Judge wrote.

“A copyright infringer is more akin to a trespasser rather than to the thief of the coins. That leads to the next point: that a landowner has no proprietary claim to the fruits of a trespass,” he added.'

Which is just a fancy way of saying copying is not theft.

"Stealing" requires that you be deprived of the article being stolen, but how exactly does a copy deprive you of the original article, which is clearly still in your possession?

The only thing you might claim to have "lost" is a sale, and even that claim is highly speculative, since you have no way of knowing for a fact that the person who copied your "IP" had either the means or the will to actually pay for it. In the event that he didn't then, even if he hadn't copied it, no sale would have transpired anyway, and since you haven't lost the material that was copied then nothing has actually been lost, either in terms of your existing property or even in terms of a sale. Indeed, even if he did have the means and the will to pay for it, the fact that he chose to copy it instead is still not theft under the law, it's basically a form of trespass.

This is no more "theft" than window shopping. Do shopkeepers belligerently chase after people who look but don't buy, and threaten them with prosecution for "stealing a lost sale"? How about if those window shoppers subsequently buy that same article from someone else, or make it themselves, essentially "copying it"? Would the shopkeeper have a claim then? Which shopkeeper has ever done such a thing, or even contemplated it?

It's ridiculous.

This is the fundamental flaw in the highly opportunistic "IP" business model, which amounts to a sort of unsolicited public recital accompanied by demands for payment, and subsequently all kinds of threats and hysteria if that payment is not forthcoming, a bit like if Al Capone had been a street performer.

Re: @Oh Homer...Total lack of any actual numbers noted

Except in this analogy the metaphorical Ferrari is regularly outsold by the Lamborghini, not just Kias and Hyundais.

And actually I find the comparison between Ferrari and the iPhone laughable. It's more like an Edsel resprayed to look like a Ferrari.

But even that isn't the most significant point, which is that this dubious, unsubstantiated "analysis" has clearly been cherry-picked (if not fabricated outright) to favour Apple, even though the reality, as it pertains to the vast majority of people, is very, very different. None of those people really care who manufactures their phone, they only care that it runs Android, much as most PC users don't care who makes their PC, they only care that it runs Windows (or in my case GNU/Linux).

The analysis itself is sophistry, which is why it requires some disentanglement and counter-propaganda that you might easily mistake for sophistry.

Re: "the I-phone was invented"?

I think you mean smartphone, which was actually invented by IBM in 1992. Multi-touch technology was invented by the University of Toronto's Input Research Group in 1982. This was all many years before Fentem came along.

Ultimately the iPhone was just a product development, not an "invention", and not even unique. Indeed it was beaten to the market by the LG Prada several months earlier.

It should also be noted that at least one half of the most significant technology that made the iPhone possible was government funded (multi-touch for a start), and in reality all of it, depending on how far back into the history of telecommunications you want to look.

Re: "Most users just want a cheap phone"

Really? Then please explain why the most popular Android phone is also one of the most expensive?

Re: "[explaining is] unwise from a legal standpoint"

Curious. I wonder which law that might be?

Has Simtec become the victim of a patent troll?

Thankfully I bought my Entropy Key years ago.

Re: "Who the hell are these bureaucrats"

They're the one's protecting competition, and thus consumers, from corporate tyrants like Microsoft.

Re: cars are not computers

Actually it makes perfect sense that Microsoft would replace someone who merely has the demeanour of a car salesman with one who's actually qualified.

I just hope they don't start actually making cars, because that could get nasty.

Re: "qualified to judge"

Well you'll have to excuse me if I remain unimpressed by the qualifications of those stupid enough to conclude that such trivialities as "bouncing" and "rounded rectangles" should seriously be considered as modern day "inventions".

Re: Clasps cap to chest.

Yes, but Microsoft can only make money on "volume licenses" if OEMs actually buy them, and the only reason OEMs would do that is if people buy PCs, which is less and less the case.

Both HP and Dell are in serious trouble, and most of what's left of the PC market seems to have been consolidated into just one Chinese vendor: Lenovo.The market has shrunk drastically, so either OEMs buy a much lower volume of licenses, squeezing Microsoft out of the market, or Microsoft forces those OEMs to buy licenses for PCs they'll never sell, squeezing them out of the market. And as you noted, without OEMs, Microsoft basically has no customers.

Either way, both Microsoft's and Intel's market will eventually disappear. It's already fading rapidly.

If PC sales keep plummeting, I don't see any other possibility, unless the government decides its pet monopolists are Too American to Fail, and bails them out with taxpayers' money, but even that is futile in the long run. The people have spoken: they just don't want PCs any more, and they certainly don't want that joke called Tiles® (or whatever Microsoft is calling it this week), so any measures designed to force them to buy something they don't want is not only pointless but actually sinister.

Expecting this to all just blow over is extremely naive. It's not going to get better, it's going to get worse, unless the PC industry can produce some earth-shattering innovation that magically draws back all its lost customers, which I really can't see happening any time soon. Those former customers already have the one and only "innovation" they really care about: it's sitting in their pocket, it uses neither Intel's processors nor Microsoft's operating systems, and it probably never will.

Game over.

Re: "more pirates are going to prison"

A few down, seven billion to go.

Does the MAFIAA® seriously believe it can stop everyone? And yes, I mean everyone, including hypocrites like you, has at some point violated copyright law. Why? Because it's an immoral and indeed ambivalent law, that criminalises copying and sharing on the one hand, but permits and enforces the monopolisation of derivative works (which would be all of them) on the other.

The "logic" that distinguishes a "pirate" from a legally-sanctioned plagiarist seems to be based purely on the size of one's bank account, and thus one's ability to pay expensive liars lawyers, not on the basis of whether or not anything has actually been "copied" per se, because it's always copied, one way or another. It's simply not possible to "create" anything without at least some degree of "copying".

Copyright is clearly wrong, it doesn't make any sense, and that's why nobody outside the criminal "IP" cartel gives a flying fuck about it.

Re: "Patent protection expires"

Good. That's just as it should be. In fact it needs to expire much sooner or, better yet, be completely abolished.

The practical difficulties associated with monopolising something that is, to at least some extent, derivative work, and thus blatantly plagiarised and stolen from other people, is likely to engender about as much sympathy as a bank robber bemoaning the fact that it's difficult to rob banks without a shotgun.