Posts by Daggerchild 827 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2013
I once saw someone asked to spec a web quiz that gave a result page after a number of multiple choice questions. The schema of the required database was discussed.
At which point they were stopped because you could do the whole thing in flat HTML, just by using a page for each possible combination. To just reach for the big shinies is a trained reflex these days.
My particular favourite for object submission to forums is tar.gz.uu. Winzip actually understands them if you paste the below into a text file, rename it as such, and double click on it. Who needs dropbox?
BEGIN 644 foo.tar.gz
Mblahblahblah..==
END
Now you can have a new way of socially engineering people to give themselves viruses.
'Freedom', its definition and its usage are the property of America (Incorporated). Any usage of this term in contradiction to, or slanderous of, the Approved Definition are violations of the TTIP agreement and grounds for extradition1 and trial on charge of corporate treason.
This forum does not have the required American Patriotism icon available (Article 2647c, subsection 6).
1) America Incorporated will not be held responsible for the condition of your spine during transport
I keep a compressed GB or seven of /dev/zero around especially for people who get nosey about my online data. It's all in the content-encoding. Doddle to transmit... devil to digest...
Actually, now I'm thinking about it, Rowhammer highlit a particular bitpattern I should perhaps send instead... nosey go sparkypop?
Indeed - the empty car speeding past may be driving itself, or it may more simply have had brake failure on an incline.
The genetic code is hellaweird. e.g. There are probability-changing flags on the DNA spooling reels that govern which 'code' executes. One of them isn't so much "GOTO" as "don't not GOTO".
We're used to pushing a program along, because nothing otherwise happens. It's used to impeding and blocking things too, as there's no such thing for it as 'nothing otherwise happens' - it's a sea of competing chemical reactions.
Interesting. Because I have directly experienced the reverse.
Also, as in the case of the Right-to-be-Forgotten, it doesn't matter if the judgement is nearly always fair, if you can repeatedly appeal, you only need to succeed once for the target to disappear permanently, silently. A 1% chance that can be repeated N times is absolute hacker honey.
And yup, I have directly experienced those reattempts too.
To switch analogy, Oracle sold a generator with a socket, into which people pushed their own plugs. This then brought to life whatever was plugged in. Oracle wrote the specification for the plug. Eclipse manufactures things that have these plugs. Oracle has no objections to people making things that require Oracle products. It has no objection to the plugs Eclipse manufactures.
But, the specification of the socket and the specification of the plug are the same thing. They declare the dimensions and define the result of interacting with the provided interface. The specification for the plug is 11,000 lines long.
Google created a device with the same socket, that generates the same results. You could plug the same products into it, and they would work identically, even though it was implemented with totally different technology. Naturally, Oracle lost their shit.
But, if you are *not* allowed to replicate the connection people have to a provider, then you are not allowed to compete with that provider. You could *only* buy generators from Oracle, you could *only* buy Philips screws from Philips.
Battles exactly like this will already have been fought in the physical realm, so the principles and the law for this situation should already be clear. This is what I'm curious about. How and when are you allowed to *prevent* your product dimensions being adopted as a standard.
Actually, as a point of analogy and rampant curiosity, how *did* the dimensions of the common screw get standardised during the Industrial Revolution?
It allowed competitors to take the external dimensions of someone else's product and reimplement it equivalently so customers didn't need to change anything to be able to use it. There's no way the original manufacturer would have given up a market monopoly willingly, but without it, we'd all have been screwed.
I'm going to need a VM for my phone OSes at this rate. Won't be able to trust any of them.
Watch who sidles up to you if you suggest severing the proprietary path up through the airwaves, through the nothing-to-see-here radio chips, through the buggy half-baked drivers and into the horcrux everyone now stores their soul in.
Anyone can make an OS. Very, very few can make a secure OS. Nobody can make a secure OS *quickly*. Don't believe anyone who hasn't bled in battle.
Problem: Pre-moderated topic. Posted. Approved. Today: retroactively rejected.
Reason: I named He Who Must Not Be Named. I said he said a thing, which has obviously been disputed.
Problem: He did in fact say the thing I said he said: 2194379
This isn't the first time either. I need to ask: Should I simply not name Him in his place of power?
That's not the public growling - that's the wolves, hounds and vultures. The amount of shares you own has nothing to do with democracy or freedom - it's to do with how rich you are. Whatever you think you own, whatever control you think you'd get, pales compared to them.
Yeah, let's give the US moneymen control of Google. Actually, no, let's not.
"The government was criticised for striking a voluntary tax deal with Google earlier this year, which effectively shut down HMRC's attempts to retrieve back taxes over 11 years"
The other thing that shut down the tax clawback was the law. Let's not mention that bit.
Seriously, Google are a company that specialise in optimising data algorithms - versus tax laws so buggy that the Government itself needs an AI-like 'expert system' to try and parse and resolve its internal inconsistencies.
Google could have made a total mockery out of it like Amazon and Starbucks do. Hell, Google do actual R&D so the Government could have ended up paying *them*.
Really, I only want a smartwatch to surreptitiously signal me, and allow me to tell at a glance whether or not it's something I need to pull my phone out for. Tiny, low latency data bursts. Anything with battery-draining delusions of grandeur misunderstands the small difference between a wrist and a pocket.
Now, if you took that Google modular phone, and turned it into a modular bangle, you may have something to argue the toss with.
I'm still waiting for the wristband that can tell the extension of your fingers/vibration/impact from ultrasonic analysis of your tendons so it could allow you to touchtype on anything.
That makes me profoundly sad. So, detachment and ultimately corporate leprosy is built into the system. "Neurons, you're meant to be in the brain! Get back here!"
How come the science of system management advances in operating systems, but goes continues to go absolutely nowhere in business.
The car that was hacked from the Internet, gave them access to the brakes. The CAN bus can be physically accessed through today's 'featureful' wing mirrors.
No, Android really cannot make it worse. It can in fact make it better, and it probably will, despite your ghost stories. Now excuse me while I proxy your radio keyfob, or maybe just jam it.
Just be aware that even the most wretched view of Android security compares favourably to the current level of in-car-system security.
i.e. None. Absolutely None.
People have hacked cars with a music CD. And from the open internet, with no physical access. And while parked outside the owner's house, locked, with a fully active car alarm.
It's more to do with the minimap section that appears when you search for a location, and the mini product click grid when you search for a product, because Google is using its *own* map service, and its *own* product comparison service (because using anything else wouldn't actually work..).
People are trying to productise metalayer services that, frankly, nobody does better than Google. Nobody has actually shown you can slip a 3rd party search metalayer into Google without it frying in a nanosecond, but they nonetheless demand either that, or the destruction of Google's results integration.
I can't actually see the user benefiting anywhere. Note Bing et al would not be subject to these laws.
Unfortunately, this is new territory. This isn't a horizontal market barrier, it's a vertical barrier inside an existing horizontal section. The Google results page real-estate is so powerful it's now a legislation battleground.
The product is a merger of data from different sources - the search result and e.g. the map section showing the location it's in.
There isn't enough real estate to show all the competing data provider results, and doing so would give ALL of them data about the user, no matter the quality of the returned result.
This leaves two options: No map section - user results permanently impaired, or, Google include a map section from a user-pre-selected provider. Hands up who thinks that'll fly well? (and anyone who thinks it will, I've been there, so back up your claim)
If anyone knows of any other resolutions, I'm all ears, because I can only see disintegration. Also, this is only a precursor to the *real* coming war: Who gets to supply data to a user's AI search - "Hello Siri, where can I buy this product?". That will be why we can't have nice things.
Squid 3 may have some nice C++ bits, but we could run multiple squid 2's with 50% CPU headroom, where we couldn't run one squid 3 without redlining. Summing everything I found, and everything I did, I could not explain or recover from this massive performance loss.
I don't think you can blame the legacy C here. C++, j'accuse!
I have horrible scars from trying Squid 3. It was a complete rewrite of the working v2 C program in C++, because C++. It continually painted the walls with its bowels and brains until we retreated, completely defeated.
It leaked so much we set a memory ulimit on it. It then had a watchdog around it restarting it. It threw C++ exceptions, and didn't catch them. It threw the *same* exception from *multiple* places without the ability to distinguish them. It crashed, after unwinding the callstack to give you no useful data. It allocated space for ALL of a client's promised POST body content length. It made magical auto-elastic allocating C++ buffer objects, that didn't know how to answer when asked how much data they could accept, so everything passed data around in small sips, which the authors hadn't noticed! Performance went through the floor. CPUs burned. Clients hung waiting for data whose size it had miscounted. Regressions. Regressions everywhere.
I'm sure it's gotten better since, but only a rewrite would fix some of those problems. The cascade of serious bug reports ever since makes me believe it's fundamentally unsalvageable. Paranoia and Performance should have been top of the redesign priority list, but didn't even figure...
And the era of the autonomous attack AI edges closer. 0 day, meet 0 hour.
What tickles me is the thought of an enemy program learning more about what's in our network/hosts in the first few minutes than we learnt in years.
Its knowledge would almost be worth paying good money for...
Yeah, okay, so, while everyone is screaming and frothing about this potential threat, I'll just leave this here:
http://www-05.ibm.com/innovation/uk/watson/watson_in_healthcare.shtml
which was reported here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/18/ibm_watson_in_26bn_grab_to_completely_own_300m_patient_lives_data/
getting a whole 5 comments..
Google are simply making the mistake of going in the front door, while IBM are swallowing entire Heathcare data processors whole, then digesting their data and assimilating their pre-approved data access privileges.
"Is there a way back to a saner past?"
No, basically. We are now in the gravity well of the masses who have moved in this direction because the crystalline shinies we grew in the dim light, low gravity and cool climate are now highly valued.
The entropy is rising and the environment is being terraformed. The ordered structures are cracking under the strain and require rephoenixing, which you can't buy time for. You can prey on them or you can help them, but you can't stop them. You do what all resource generating lifeforms do if you don't want to be consumed and become a part of them. You get the hell away from them.
Me? I want to work on a 'browser' that doesn't believe in a fixed UI, and can't be told how to present data. It knows how the user ingests data, and it decides the appropriate interface and presentation. Yeah, it means your computer will know all about you, all those things you don't want e.g. Google/Facebook/Amazon knowing. But, it will be *your* computer knowing, and that's the crucial difference. And I'm afraid this is the final layer, so we better get there first, because it also makes the ultimate human-mind tracker/hunter/trapper. Why do you think everyone's working on AI atm? I don't plan on ending up as an excrement-smeared VR escapism addict or something out of Steins Gate.
Wait.. ah hell.. they spiked my coffee again didn't they....
I tuned our proxy cache a few years ago. Ground up some numbers. Determined an ideal cache object size was 12k.
How times have ****ing changed.
Almost no point in a proxy cache now. Getting hard to convince websites that proxies are a thing they should not break, and aren't always a Tor user, or a geoIP-dodger, and that yes, HTTP connections for the same user can actually come from different IPs.
And has anyone noticed how sites try and make you need to scroll down after loading to get any of the actual articles/information nowadays? Is that by any chance because they can see you scroll using on-demand image loading of lower images so they can grok the grab strength they got on you?
Something has definitely changed recently. 'Consumer Watchdog' is pretty much one man who hates Google, not some neutral organisation. And they really hate Google, were funded to dig into Google, and have taken out video ads in Times Square to pump expensively crafted fear about Google (depicting Schmidt going after your children), and none of that is in any way deniable.
And recently it became a primary source for The Reg when they understandably weren't before, despite the tune not changing.
But most disturbingly, now if I say things like this, even if I give links showing their origins...
"Right now, Bing only returns two results for rtbf "data processing business", at least for me. And both of them are on the Register"
That implies that before it spidered the Reg article it had NO matching results for BOTH fixed strings, so Bing stripped the quotes and tried again.
Which implies that Bing's results pool is smaller than Google's.
It is important to report any potential negative effects even if the data isn't complete. You can clarify later if necessary. I have lots of rules I have to obey regarding stuff like this.
If you're manipulating data for the public it requires establishing clear priorities and no small measure of responsibility.
Ding Ding! Correct answer.
If you look at the article screenshots, you can see the Google results highlighting the quoted string. In the Bing result, you see single separated words highlighted, meaning Google searched for two rare strings, and Bing etc searched for one rare string, and up to three common ones.
".. and see their market destroyed when a Chinese company starts to offer the now reviewed and repaired product at prices with which they cannot compete"
No, not the product - the service. The techniques you pioneered. The technologies you used. The skills and the arts you developed, all carbon copied, after you graciously did the expensive R&D for them.
After China eats the world's production industry, they will fight with India over the world's services industry. And by fight I mean China will let them have anything they don't want.
AFAIK, most Chinese handsets are Androids that aren't using Google's services, and instead there are multiple equivalent alternative ecosystems of significant size. I don't think Google sees a penny from any of it.
The West could make its own alternatives, but the competitors aren't willing to work together to quilt the large hole Google's services would leave.
"But if he thinks Google will get an easy ride in China, a nation that’s proud of its own technology companies and does what it can to ensure they succeed, we’ll gladly have some of what he’s smoking."
I shall tell you a true story. A specialist tech team goes to China, to apply their tech to a seriously complex problem. They analyse, plan, execute, and instrument. The result works and they leave.
Then they get called back. It's not working. The client is furious and demands it be fixed now or they will not be paid. They return. It's not working because it has been dismantled and reverse engineered, but unfortunately not well enough to replicate and restore it. Amongst angry flat-denials, and under intense scrutiny, they diagnose, repair and replace.
Trees smothered the bushes that sheltered their sapling from grazers. The bushes smothered the grass that protected their soil from erosion. Even the grass didn't start the soil it is standing in.
There never was any mercy. There never was any sanity. Completely succeeding in what they are driven to do guarantees their own extinction. Everything depends on something escaping the encroaching shadow somehow, somewhere, to return, repair and reboot the system after each crash.
And yes, there have been many, many 'successful' self-extinctions. And will be many more.
So Run, you fools..
(because there's never enough shelter..)
O RLY?
If you think the fact that we have sold in excess of 2 million records and have never been paid a penny is pretty unbelievable, well, so do we. And the fact that EMI informed us that not only aren't they going to pay us AT ALL but that we are still 1.4 million dollars in debt to them is even crazier. That the next record we make will be used to pay off that old supposed debt just makes you start wondering what is going on.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080820/0204472040.shtml
"Are you drunk? What are you trying to say?"
Multidimensional metaphor manipulators and analogy algebraists perhaps shouldn't produce petrified projectiles regarding the clarity of analogous manifestations.
Especially when you know full well he can only be talking about DMCA misuse, and you could answer him, but instead chose to do something more.. satisfying.
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