Posts by DrXym

New charge against alleged WikiLeaker carries death penalty

How to commit suicide

If he has a drinking fountain he can drink himself to death. Suicide by water intoxication.

Library e-books to become too tatty to lend

The optimum outcome?

I agree with Harper Collins assuming they follow it to it's logical conclusion. If they want digital copies to be like a physical book, then fine. Grant me the perpetual right to do ANYTHING I LIKE with my digital book. I should be able to lend the book to someone else for as long as I like, sell it for any price I like to anybody else in the world via any means (ebay, bookstore, jumble sale etc.). I should be able to buy any book in a similar fashion, and I should be able to give the book away to Oxfam or just delete the book and destroy it forever. It's my book.

Not doing those things would ever so slightly stink of hypocrisy by Harper Collins. It would suggest that they only want digital books to be like physical books when it suits them, not anybody else.

I suggest that all the properties of a regular book are achievable in the digital realm with a DRM / escrow service where keys can be transferred between publishers & users for a nominal fee (waived for charities). It's even possible this DRM can be enforced by a P2P database in much the way Bitcoin operates with publishers and owners of books living on the same network and transactions recorded across nodes.

Apple iPad 2 snapped in all its skinny glory

software sim?

That would be interesting

Not scratches

Looks like the protective film most new devices have covering their shiny screens to stop them getting scratched / dusty etc. during production or distribution.

Don't know about that

At first you appear to be correct, but a second glance at the pic suggests the screen has one of those removable screen protectors you get on new kit and usually peel off. So maybe they turned it on with that still in place and it looks slightly crappy / distorted as a result of that.

IT job seekers can't smell spell

3 pages or less

Format of my CV is:

1. Name, address, email, phone nr

2. Short description of my problem solving / thinking skills.

3. Bulleted list of current skills. It's very important to name drop specific skills because agencies will do keyword searches

4. History of companies worked for. More info is supplied for more recent jobs. Old jobs can be relegated to a couple of lines.

5. Other personal stuff, marital status, date of birth etc.

It all fits on 3 pages, 14pt arial despite 20 years of development work. It shouldn't be hard to maintain a CV once you write one. It's best to keep it terse, and well formatted since you can always elaborate in interviews.

Once you have a CV upload it to Monster and the other usual places. Keywords are especially important because the first people to eyeball your CV are likely to be agencies. If you don't turn up in the keyword searches they won't bother ringing you.

Digital TV group sets 3D standard

@AC

I know how it works and I mentioned MVC. For your info, that is an extension to AVC whereby you designate one view (e.g. left eye) as your base image and include deltas to construct the right eye image from the base image. In theory you could have arbitrary number of views although 3D is likely to be stereoscopic for the time being. Such MVC encoding is backwards compatible with existing AVC decoders because they just broadcast the base image and ignore the deltas.

This is the way DVB-3D should have been specified. I expect it didn't happen that way is because Sky kicked up a stink that their precious Sky HD box was lacking a SoC which could do MVC but it could be tweaked to tell a 3D TV through HDMI & EDID to set itself to side by side frame mode.

i.e. side by side framing is Tesco Value 3D and customers and the DVB shouldn't have put up with a solution based on it.

I know the difference

The common denominator for all these crypto schemes is CSA. CSA takes a 64-bit key and uses it to unscramble the content. if you were to brute force the key it wouldn't matter what protection was over the top. The 64-bit key isn't even that since 2 bytes are checksums so it's effectively 48-bits.

I think 48-bits is low enough to consider a brute force attack. Write some OpenCL app which divvies up the keyspace into blocks and farms off the work to kernels. Each kernel would test descramble the content with the key and and run through some sanity tests to see if it was viable. Since the data is MPEG2 in most cases it should be predictable enough to do this.

Maybe it couldn't be done in realtime but depending how often keys were cycled (and if there was any non-random predictability in them) it might be sufficiently quick to decode a content in the space of a day or so which makes it somewhat viable.

Not sure how you arrived at that conclusion

DVB-S / T / C tuners are very cheap to come by. Assuming the 3D channel was broadcast unencrypted you could just decode it like any other channel and play it through any media player capable of handling a SPTS / MPTS.

Of course most pay content is encrypted. It's encrypted usually through DVB-CSA which dictates the cipher and some 3rd party DVB-CSA provider that implements the key recovery / conditional access / DRM part.

You could still capture encrypted content but you'd have to break the crypto. DVB-CSA has been reverse engineered and the key length is quite short. It's possible we're not far from a bruteforce crack that works in realtime though there are more robust versions of DVB-CSA that use longer key lengths.

Frame compatible = easy way out

Anamorphically squashing L+R frames into a single frame means half the horizontal resolution. Perhaps that's the easiest way to shoehorn 3D into existing transport streams but it's hardly a good forward looking solution.

It's half the horizontal resolution and can hardly be efficient from a compression standpoint since there is huge redundancy between left & right eye but both images are fully reproduced in the stream.

I wonder if the DVB chickened out from implementing something like MVC (multi view encoding) under pressure from STB manufacturers like Sky who want to retrofit 3D into their existing offerings rather than push out new hardware.

I'd certainly keep an eye out for any broadcaster who claims a channel 3D *and* HD in the same breath because the ASA might take a dim view of that claim considering it's effectively halving the number of pixels each eye sees.

German 'minister for cut'n'paste' resigns over PhD plagiarism

So what was the extent of his plagiarism

Was it just a few unattributed sources, or a misquoted section, or a whole ripoff of other works? The first few are probably forgivable mistakes in a massive thesis, the latter not so much.

Or fond of Monty Python

Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern schplenden schlitter crasscrenbon fried digger dingle dangle dongle dungle burstein von knacker thrasher apple banger horowitz ticolensic grander knotty spelltinkle grandlich grumblemeyer spelterwasser kurstlich himbleeisen bahnwagen gutenabend bitte ein nürnburger bratwustle gerspurten mitz weimache luber hundsfut gumberaber shönedanker kalbsfleisch mittler aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm

HBGary chief exec resigns over Anon hack

I didn't realise how self-inflicted it all was

Until I read these series of articles that Bruce Schneier linked to

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/02/anonymous_vs_hb.html

I'm surprised his Barr wasn't fired the moment this whole thing came down on the company.

Basically the guy thought he was some super hacker extraordinaire, started on a flawed premise, ignored the advice of other employees, and clumsily poked at the Anonymous ringleaders to the extent that they knew who he was and took him down. I especially like his email exchanges with his programmer who basically told him he was full of shit and nuts to do what he was doing. Naturally he did it anyway.

GM declares Ampera e-car 'production ready'

Looks better

Much better. Not sure I like the style but I wouldn't think it would look out of place vs other saloons.

I think these Volt / Ampera cars are so low slung it completely throws out the proportions of the doors, grille, windows. That might explain the ugly black masking around the window - an attempt to make the window look bigger than it is. The grille is just weird. I wonder if the doors open closer to the ground and what hilarity would follow if you park up against a kerb.

Ugly looking car

I'm glad to see electric / hybrid vehicles becoming more mainstream. What I don't like is how ugly many of them are.

This Ampera really looks like it fell from the top of the ugly tree with a horrible grill and bizarre trim around the windows. Worst part is the chassis which looks like it is sunk about 4 inches lower than a normal vehicle, probably to hold batteries. This low slung look might be great on a smooth roads. What happens when you hit a pothole, drive through a puddle or run over some debris?

I wish EV makers would just produce a nice but ordinary looking car. They don't need some quasi futuristic exterior, just something which could be compared against a regular vehicle and not look weird for it.

Apple vanishes Java from Mac OS X Lion

Java has never been loved on OS X

Sun / Oracle deliver timely updates and fixes to users on Windows / Linux / Solaris. Apple delivers patches & updates sometimes, never or years later.

If Apple are no longer pretending to maintain it, it might be beneficial in the long term. An independent group or Oracle will take over and actually give the thing the respect and attention it needs.

Apple under siege: Antitrust probes and product delays ...

@BigYin

"I am not saying that Apple is a monopoly (their sales are still far too small for that) "

Straight from wikipedia - "In economics, a monopoly (from Greek monos / μονος (alone or single) + polein / πωλειν (to sell)) exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it."

I think that is Apple described right there. They keep changing the terms to favour their products at the expense of competing products.

The way Apple works

Apple only gets a 30% share if users buy a sub through the app store. And to ensure that happens they've banned other direct means that an app could use to sign up a customer. An app might previously have directed the user to sign up through a web page or a dialog box. Now it can't. So Apple has graciously forced apps quite capable of managing subscriptions for themselves to give a 30% chunk to Apple.

They've also obliged subscription apps to ensure the App Store price is as low as any offered elsewhere. So there is no way to jack up the app store price to claw back some of the money lost to Apple.

It's horribly monopolistic and par for the course for a platform where Apple has leveraged its position as platform owner to engage in one unfair practice after another.

London Stock Exchange floored, again

The OS is likely not the issue

I don't know why people think this is an open source vs closed source thing. The transaction software running the new system is closed source. I'd be very surprised if the OS had anything to do with the outage unless it was a broken driver or similar. More likely it's the application software running on top which has keeled over.

Intel: 'PC makers took the light out of Light Peak'

So in other words

It was gimped. I somehow doubt OEMs would actually prefer a slower solution over copper unless the optical was prohibitively expensive, broken or had hit some technical roadblock which delayed it for another year or two.

Intel's roadmap has turned into a bit of a train wreck. Here's hoping Lightpeak appears as originally intended at some point.

The optical version did have power

As originally envisaged there would be a powered cables and unpowered cables. The power would run alongside the optical cable. Not much different to how is would work now I expect except of course the data lines and the powerlines need to be shielded from each other.

Firefox 4 squeezes onto phones

Some retorts

2) It's in beta and stability does need to improve. Comparing it to the default client is reasonable, comparing it to Skyfire which is a remote client is not. Firefox is a full browser engine in your phone, not a dumb proxy to a browser running somewhere else.

3) Currently I see 6 recommended add-ons and at least 15 odd on the website. I expect the number will grow in time. Indeed, one of the major reason to use Firefox as opposed to say Skyfire or the default browsers is you can install add-ons. Add-ons that block ads, change the user agent, reformat pages, fill passwords and so on. Just like with Firefox on the desktop. Indeed many desktop extensions are likely to be retrofitted to the mobile form.

4) Skyfire is a remote client. The client is comparatively dumb compared to a full blown browser because the page is rendered remotely. There is a place for this kind of browser, but you must be aware that it's basically spyware recording everything you do in order to deliver ads and spam to you.

I do consider Firefox work in progress, but tentatively I'd endorse it. It is slow to start, it does still have issues, but it is a full blown browser and does deliver a no-compromises browser engine in a handheld format.

However I think Firefox's main forte will be in Android tablets. It'll benefit from the faster CPUs and screen estate.

Skyfire

Skyfire is similar in concept to Opera Mini. The web page is rendered remotely and munged into a form for displaying on the client device. It means you get fast client and fast rendering. Great for casual browsing.

The downside (a massive downside) is you must register to use their browser and you're telling a Skyfire EVERYTHING you do on the web. If this sounds far fetched, look at their privacy statement - http://www.skyfire.com/about/privacy-and-security

They gather info about the pages you hit, where you came from, where you're going to. Everything. All to deliver you targeted ads, spam you and so forth.

I wouldn't trust a toolbar that did any of those things. Why would I trust a browser to do the same? If I had to use such a browser I'd pick Opera where at least no registration is required and therefore I stood a chance of preserving at least some anonymity.

Works okay in Android

It is a little slow to start up and some of the user interface stuff like the swiping left / right to see buttons takes some getting used but it work quite well. Page rendering & layout is much closer to a normal desktop which is useful on sites which insist on redirecting you to "mobile" versions which are out of date or otherwise broken. Being able to sync bookmarks with a desktop Firefox is useful too but getting the sync code is a pain.

Biggest annoyance for me is it paints the damage area in the same kind of ugly checkerboard effect that the iPad / iPhone does when scrolling large pages. I think the chrome / engine could also benefit from more optimisation to reduce bloat & startup time.

I can't decide if I prefer it over other 3rd party browsers like Opera Mini / 10 yet. The latter is in beta offers a similar experience but crashed a few times for me. Biggest advantage for Opera is the turbo mode. Opera Mini's major advantage is it sidesteps some of the stupid address blocking controls some open wifi networks enforce because requests are actually served off to an Opera server.

Microsoft bricking lesson bodes badly for Elop's Brave New Nokia

10% failure rate is inexcusable

Look, there are obviously reasons for why the update failed. That doesnt excuse them happening though. If there wasn't space to backup files, some kind of "I don't have enough space to proceed" message is required. If the internet connection broke halfway through or the firmware was corrupted, then why wasn't the file signed so it could be checksummed?

It isn't acceptable to brick phones except in the rarest of circumstances. Even there it would make sense to provide a mode for the user to be able to recover from that state without an expensive return.

Makes one assumption

Tthat assumes the recovery bootloader actually does what it's supposed to do. Such a rarely touched feature could easily be DOA with no one noticing or bitrot over time, especially if the firmware format changed, or the signing key, or flash partitions got shifted around during a product's lifetime.

It may even be that even with a recovery mode, that the mode is not visible to the user. Or it may be you're meant to stick a pin in a hole while rebooting to retrigger it. Things that might be non-obvious to a user and require a return to store.

Anyway I suspect Microsoft's problem is the more phones they have, the more headaches they'll have trying to coordinate an update. Are they going to do a big bang update of every phone model, on every network or a rolling barrage based on phones coming out of the QA process. And what does that mean if phones later in QA expose bugs that could affect other phones. Is there going to be a second round of updates.

John le Carré archives to rest at Bodleian Library

Conversion table

Cornish barn = 3 double decker buses, .8 blue whales or .5 of an Oympic size swimming pool. Or put another way if you stacked his books up they would be equivalent to .3 Eiffel towers or approx 1/1200000 way to the moon.

Apple brands Intel 'Light Peak' as Thunderbolt

Hope they learned from the Firewire debacle

Apple called IEEE 1394 "Firewire". Not a bad name but Sony decided to call it i.Link, and Texas Instruments called it Lynx. 3 brand names and one official alpha numeric all talking about the same standard. The situation was further muddied by some devices using one connector style and others using another.

Would it be too much to task that Intel / Apple decided up front on a name with this particular standard? I think I prefer Lightpeak over Thunderbolt. The latter conjures up images of electrocution really.

Apple plots iPad 2 production reduction

Epic PR is not that

Epic PR would be Apple producing a tablet which requires no contract at all. None. Just buy the thing, turn on and you have internet.

It may be that internet is restricted to the app store and other Apple services, partners (and ads) but it would be automatic. Wider internet might also be possible if you bought a day / week / month pass through the store. But how it happens or with which network is completely irrelevant. It just happens. Theoretically it could happen when you roam too but I suspect it won't especially if iPads got sold through phone shops.

This sounds far fetched but it isn't. Kindle does it, and Apple could too. I suspect Sony is angling to do something similar when its NGP turns up. Devices that expect you to fiddle around with data plans and SIMs and roaming charges are suddenly going to look very clunky and old fashioned indeed.

I think the debate will turn that way soon off

I don't have high expectations for the Xoom, but it's the first of many non-Apple tablets this year.

With phones the debate quickly turned from Android vs iPhone to which smart phone was the best. I think the same will happen for tablets.

Cornish pasties awarded protected status

Pork Farms?

I how Pork Farms also do beef.

Memo to iPad mimics: No one wants a $799 knockoff

$50 for 5GB

How do they keep their prices so low and still make a profit?

HTC 7 Pro WinPho 7 smartphone

Expansion cards

I can understand why MS have fobbed off this issue. If you let phones have expansion cards you have to deal with users inserting / removing them at inopportune times which means mounting / unmounting them, firing system events, making your apps cope with weird edge cases. By simply not supporting expansion cards you save yourself a major QA headache.

On top of that is the issue of what do you allow users to put on the cards. Do you let them install apps to the cards? Or DRM'd content? What happens if an app / song is installed onto the card, running and the user removes it etc.? Android 2.2 eventually allowed apps to install their resources on an external card by storing the files inside encrypted loopback devices but it can still get clobbered by users removing cards.

I expect MS will figure it out, but it's another sign that the platform is immature. Of course they might disallow external storage forever and go down the same path of control freakery that Apple is famous for, preventing users from copying any files to or from the phone without using Microsoft's sync software as the conduit and arbiter of what is allowed and what isn't.

Applied desktop virtualisation: Reg readers speak

Not really true at all

There would be nothing to prevent you running a Wayland session remotely. Your remote client would capture mouse / keyboard events and send them over the network to the server. In return it would send back graphics instructions representing the desktop and your remote session would render them. The pipe could be anything, e.g. ssh tunneling.

Fundamentally it wouldn't be far removed from how VNC or NX work right now, except it wouldn't require screen scraping or conflating / discarding X primitives into a more efficient format to do. It would offer choices of how the rendering was achieved - one could imagine a really dumb client would barely any rendering and would receive bitmaps, while a rich client with OpenGL / DirectX would do everything remotely.

That aside, there is nothing to stop someone running X11 over Wayland, just like it happens on OS X, Windows.

Windows Phone update wallops Omnia 7

Haiku

The update turns

your expensive phone

to a simple brick

(yes I modified a well known haiku)

Twitter cuts off two fat client apps

Too easily guessed?

5 characters is enough to enable 62^5 combinations using alpha numeric chars. Nearly a billion combinations. I assume most url shortening services would have measures in place to stop brute force attacks in the space of a tries. e.g. put requesters in a timeout box if they ask for too many urls in too short a space of time or throw some kind of captcha at them.

TweetDeck

I'd hate to see that run afoul of the rules as it's a nice client. But if Twitter's smackdown sends a message to apps and protects users from a double dose of spamverts or spying then that's fine by me.

Debian 6: Have your Debian and eat your Ubuntu too

Debian needs Ubuntu as much as Ubuntu needs Debian

I'd say the arrangement has been win-win. Ubuntu benefits from the package management & stability of Debian. Debian wins from more widespread adoption and use and therefore higher development interest, bug fixes etc.

And of course the user wins from having a highly usable & friendly distribution.

Nokia: free phones for developers

QT could theoretically run on WP7

Perhaps Nokia have negotiated some kind of clause which allows them to run some native QT apps in WP7. Not sure for what, but maybe they have apps they can't realistically port over in a short period of time. QT is a very portable library and does have versions that run on Windows CE so I imagine it could be upgraded to work on WP7.

Of course long term they'll probably have to put their apps in the Silverlight like every other 3rd party provider.

I've figured out how they're going to shift 150m symbian devices now

149.9m through their developer program. And yes of course I've signed up.

E7 spec isn't bad at all

It's getting favourable reviews for its hardware although they're pointing out the obvious about the mouldiness of the OS it's running on.

Hey I like bribes

I'm first to sign up for MS launch events. It means free stuff. I snagged a Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate edition for turning up to the W7 developer launch. Can't say I love Microsoft for their business practices but they sure know how to treat developers.

Florida lag packs prison survival kit up jacksie

Important question

Did it contain a pack of fudge?

Lenovo to press LePad on LeWorld

What's up with the netbook thing

Is that really the thing you dock the tablet with? Looks horribly chunky.

Sony threatens to ban PS3 jailbreakers from network

Sony's perspective

It is blazingly obvious here that Sony is trying stop / deter piracy here. They're not going after some guy who has rooted their PS3 to turn it into an XBMC server or run Linux exclusively. By defintion such people have excluded themselves from PSN and piracy.

What they care about are people running modified XMB firmware in the main to play pirated games. Sony obviously lose money if that were the case. That's the main commercial reason but there are also fairness / user experience reasons too. Anyone who has ever played a multiplayer game with cheats / griefers knows what a pointless and shitty experience it is. Allowing modded boxes onto PSN would allow cheats & griefers free rein and it would ruin the service for everyone else.

So it makes complete sense they're banned from PSN for users and for Sony. As for modders who are completely innocent and buy all their original titles - tough shit really. Don't mod your box, or if you do accept you're never going to get PSN.

What planet are you from

Every online service has terms & conditions. If you abuse those conditions you'll get the boot. Sony are doing nothing more than ensuring only legitimate users get access to PSN. Just as Microsoft do with theirs.

Yet we're all supposed to be up in arms about it why? Because a bunch of pirates can't leech service or cheat / grief legit users? Boo hoo. They made their bed and they can lie in it.

@zanto

"the first part could be true, the second is pure hogwash."

No it isn't. If you have modded firmware you might use it to:

1. Hack save files, player profiles or other things that you are not intended to modify

2. Hack trophies

3. Obtain an unfair advantage in a multiplayer game, e.g. aimbots

4. Hack game servers to DDOS other players, ping flood or otherwise disrupt service

5. Turn a PS3 into a spambot

6. Obtain / unlock content which are not entitled to

7. Spoof other PSN users, or the store

8. Generally disrupt PSN in ways it was not intended to cope with

All of which ruin the experience for honest legitimate players. But you think modders should be able leech off PSN and be able to do all of this and more, for why exactly?

Orange Cash goes live, O2 Money goes to Ireland

Pay by mobile

I cannot think of any good that can come out of precharging a phone with money. It just makes them even more attractive to thieves than they were before.

FOSS maven says $29 'Freedom Box' will kill Facebook

Slow as hell right now?

Freenet has always been slow, even when it was the project du jour a decade ago. Partly that's because it attempts to anonymize access to data by "hopping" requests around from one point in the network to another. And partly because it doesn't even know where the data is to begin with so it has to send off lots of requests until it finds a node with a cached copy.

It is also probably the case that the LESS nodes on the freenet the faster it is. It means less hops to find a node that carries the data because there are less nodes total.

Anyway it's only superficially similar. Freedom box is not "plausible deniability box", or "anonymous box". I assume when you configure a webmail / facebook server to use your box that you enter a unique id like an IP or alias which identifies where your data is and where updates are stored. The server will know who you are to some extent since it will be talking straight to your box through a protocol like https. The box may well use encryption to protect your data in transit and to p2p copies out to friends so in some regards it is similar.

The box is running Linux of course so it could act as a freenet node too of course if it had the memory and storage to do it.

Could work I guess

Apps like Diaspora are making a big deal of the idea of personal privacy, that your content goes into a "pod" that you control absolutely. So I guess this concept ties into that, especially since Moglen is the inspiration behind Diaspora too.

I suppose this box could work pretty much how Facebook / Twitter work now with regards to 3rd party sites / apps. i.e. you manage a list of sites that have access to your data. A new web site that wants your personal data must redirect to a web frontend on your box where you grant / deny the permissions asked for. At some later point you could then revoke the permissions completely. I suppose the box, friends & sites could then use P2P to cache data to speed up actions a bit and sync up over time. I'm not sure how this arrangement would account for services that need to index, cache, or otherwise construct metadata, e.g. a photo web site might want to read meta data from all your pictures into a database table and also make a bunch of thumbnails. I guess there would have to be a permission associated with this need, and the contract between site & content would have to have some legal bite to prevent abuse.

Biggest issue would be in persuading cloud service providers to use it, or producing a rival app that did which was so compelling that the old provider withered away. I think it's too early to say if Diaspora will do that to Facebook, but I wouldn't shed any tears if it did.

As an aside Freedom Box is a pretty stupid name even if it's technically accurate. Time for an obscure comedy reference; I wonder if it accelerates to dangerous speeds or sticks to certain kinds of skin.