Posts by Regis Terme

Census threatens spies' cover

woosh

(I wish I could add a title)

Apple rolls out two new MacBook Air models

Price not justified

1000$/£850 for the low-end model? No ethernet port?

Flash memory instead of a hard disk probably is the future - but right now I'm getting a less storage for more money. Where's the beef?

Come back Asus eeepc, all is forgiven!

Virgin Media to trial filesharing monitoring system

Signatures, schmigatures.

"There are already huge databases online that have signatures of music which is an excellent way of tagging your music if you don't know the title, artist, etc, just by ripping a CD or analysing an existing MP3. e.g. MusicBrainz."

It's simple. Analyse the music, generate a signature. Compare against a database for a match or near match."

The services that tell iTunes and the like what CD you just inserted work based on the number of tracks on the CD and the duration of those tracks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB) None of this information is available when someone's sharing a single track.

"Similar also to how those services work where you can get your phone to listen to music and it tells you what the track is."

More plausible. They would to assemble enough of the file to get a suitably long segment to analysis. Which I suppose might be possible if the info isn't need in real time.

How do they identify dvix rips of movies?

V isn't very far away.

"(anybody know when "V" will be shown here)"

The trailers that the Sci-Fi channel have been running for the last couple of week say it's coming in 2010. I'm assuming that means very early in 2010 otherwise they wouldn't be showing the trailers already.

How does this work?

Deep Packet Inspection. It looks at the packets rather than just the headers. OK. But what I haven't been able to find is an explanation of how it actually determines what it finds in the packets is (supposedly) illegally shared copyright material.

If I share an mp3 as an mp3 then the packets are going to look like parts of an mp3. If I put the mp3 in a zip file and share it the packets are going to look like parts of a zip file. If I put the mp3 in a tar file and share it the packets are going to look like parts of a zip file. Even if I leave the file as an mp3, the packets will look different depending on how it was encoded.

So how does DPI identify what the packets it looks at are a part of?

Hasbro kills Colonel Mustard in the corporate office with the marketing ploy

No clue

Sounds like another design by committee

http://usedwigs.com/video-stop-sign-designed-by-committee/

BitTorrent tracker Mininova faces legal action

Antipiracy r0fl

These antiprivacy organisations RIA etc. are not better than criminals, this is what they try to do for the living, so pathetic. I bet this organisation builds up from dumb loosers, who failed in life, but they have to do something for living. Still better than eating from the dumpster and sleeping on the streets.

Everything is about money, and until these dumb tossers can make their living from closing torrent sites they will push it hard, just like spammers.

There are spammers who do spam for living, so whats wrong with that? Let's make whatever court crap order about 500.000 EURO, how can normal ppl expect that any private person has this amount to pay it back? They can't they just simply going to jail the person and look for the next vic, to ruin his life.

This is where the humanity goes, with the growing number of population, everyone needs to keep a job, but there are not as much jobs as much people. Some restriction, mass genocide would make the world better, but just don't believe me and suffer, fucking idiots.

Apple buys chip maker

I fail to see an issue

Apple would have little to no difficulty in supporting two or more hardware platforms, even incompatible versions of the same one requiring different binaries. OSX (or rather, the underlying mach level) supports multiple architectures in the same binary, both on the desktop *and* on the iPhone / iPod platform. It's not even difficult for the developer : on my lowly 32 bit PowerPC desktop I can happily build binaries that will run on all four of the curent desktop combinations (32 / 64 bit, intel and PowerPC), and, potentially, any other platform that might be around the corner. All it means is that the build takes a little longer, and produces fatter binaries (pun intended).

Sure, for deployment on "small" hardware this could be a problem, but it would hardly be difficult to set up a process that runs "lipo" (which strips out unused architecture-specific stuff) on newly installed apps when installing on somethng like the iPhone/iPod etc. to keep things easy for the user.

Wikipedia ruled by 'Lord of the Universe'

COI and vested interest

COI actually relates to a core issue with wikipedia. I was formerly a highly active contributor to this site, but I have found that negative aspects of many topics entailing issues of faith or patriotism or simple allegiance are totally uneditable for "civilian" contributors as they are controlled by vested-interest editors who purposely employ their administrative muscle to restrict criticism of such issues of faith. Anyone who has tried to contribute e.g. in the field of Israel-Palestine knows exactly what I am talking about, these articles are tightly controlled by a couple of zionists, and the article is essentially entirely locked down by these revert-monsters. Its also entirely natural for a brainwashed cult fanatic to attempt to control the exact topic plus the global policy on permissions to control such topics in spite of a COI. Aren't there enough editors around? Shouldn't any COI upon statement or discovery lead to the editor becoming immediately ENTIRELY barred from that topic/subject area? I have actually given up and withdrawn from making contributions. I vastly enjoyed the register article for pointing out just one instance of this problem; nonetheless, this is a systemic issue. Theres been a lot of busting parties with vested interests via IP, which led to good press. When in comes to wikipedia-internal vested interests, the same or even higher standards ought to be applied. COI should be a lot stricter. [also posted on the COI-N discussion page]

Mac lambs line up for slaughter

Re: Mr Sampler

Yes, Elk Cloner affected Apple DOS. And how is this significant? There were loads of viruses for "Classic" MacOS, too, probably more per percentage of computer users at the time than for Windows. Those aren't really significant either, as virus writing at the time was targetted completely differently.

As it stands, malware is currently written to further criminal activity - scam mailing, DDOS, you name it. We're talking about creating botnets of thousands or millions of machines.

In that respect, creating an OSX virus would be handy, as there *are* millions of macs out there, and the owners are generally, as has been pointed out, somewhat smug / complacent [delete as appropriate] regarding security. That hasn't happened, which doesn't mean that macs are necessarily impenetrable, but it does show that they aren't the lowest hanging fruit - it's vastly easier to write malware for Windows than OSX.

When you're being chased by a hungry tiger, you don't need to be faster than the tiger, merely faster than the other guy.

Skype hangs up on users

What were you doing?

Breck Lundin wrote:

Guess this is another result of the $billion or so you "invested" adding Skype to the eBay fold...gee, thanks...I think we all need a nice soft pillow to sit on until we heal...

---------------------------

Mate... What were you doing when Skype went out?

San Francisco's proposed Wi-Fi network facing angry mobs

San Francisco's "free" wifi should be free as in freedom

This free Internet service's location and membership data privacy issue is definitely not the same as for other forms of billed services.

Does MUNI know who you are when they move you around the city? Does KFOG make you register to receive their free, ad-supported audio entertainment service? Does the cop who searches you going in to City Hall demand your ID? Does every electrical outlet in every bus stop and airport demand a PIN number before feeding juice to your laptop? Does Google demand that you register before using their free, ad-supported search engine? And who's that drinking from our water fountains, anyway?! And putting trash in our cans? We wouldn't want UNIDENTIFIED HOMELESS people using our public bathrooms, would we?

A city-provided free Internet communications service should be similarly respectful of its users' privacy. It should demand as little information as necessary (in practice: none, just like using your neighbor's WiFi with their permission), and should make as few records as possible. It's not a tracking system; it's not a marketing experiment; it's a communications service for the citizens.

Google and Earthlink networks everywhere else make people log in before their "free" wifi service will work. Try it yourself in Mountain View, where the whole city has service. If you won't get a Google track-me-everywhere account -- the same thing you need for Gmail -- and click to agree legally with a whole pile of self-serving terms of service, then you won't get any service out of the free San Francisco public service network. And that's just 100% wrong.

Logging in to a free service may be right for Google but it's wrong for San Francisco. You should just be able to pick that network and it should work, without accounts, without logins.