* Posts by Peter H. Coffin

231 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2007

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Google brings 2-factor authentication to Gmail

Peter H. Coffin

I doubt...

I don't think it will help the seemingly bigger problem of session hijacking and people just forgetting to log out.

They already have most of this infrastructure already set up since if you *have* given Google your phone numbers, then that becomes a preferred method of delivering a password reset.

Apple's casual Xbox: Apple TV seeded for online gaming

Peter H. Coffin
FAIL

iPad as a gaming controller?

No thank you. I could probably imagine something worse for controlling games with, but it would probably have to have the ergonomics of the original NES controller, weigh at least three kg, and give the holder mild electric shocks.

Photo loss blogger to Flickr: You're f*cking kidding

Peter H. Coffin

Summary of half the comments

1 "Haha, he doesn't have a backup"

2 "You can't read. He does have a backup"

3 "Easy, he restores from his backup"

4 "It's not the photos, it's the metadata."

5 (implict "So he *doesn't* have a backup.")

6 GOTO 1

Executive-level Summary: Online service doesn't care about your data as much as you do. Care for things your own self.

What Executives will actually take away from this point: Online services are inexpensive places to store things!

MozyHome stiffs unlimited users

Peter H. Coffin

Readers should please refer to previous story regarding Flickr Pro account

And remind themselves of precisely how and to what extent these service providers are liable for protecting your data. For most, if there's any guarantee at all, it's limited to the price you've paid for the service.

Next, consider what it's likely to cost under a metered data plan.

Executive take-away summary: online backups are inexpensive!

Mexico demands apology for Top Gear outrage

Peter H. Coffin

benefit?

You seriously think they're catering to an audience that *threw rocks at them* and they've previously granted praise no higher than "Well done, fat man from Kentucky"?

Peter H. Coffin

Tone it down? Why?

They're equal-opportunity instigators with choice words for the skills and habits of the residents of nearly every country in the world. The only countries that they've discussed that they seem to have anything resembling respect for the populations of seem to be Iceland and Finland. They've even insulted Lichtenstein and they probably spent all of an hour there. I mean, who the hell *bothers* to insult Lichtenstein unless there's a particular unilateral agendum to do so?

iTunes gifting scam plunges Reg reader into the red

Peter H. Coffin

What's the point?

How much is a £25 iTunes card worth to the average schoolboy? £10? £15?

Watson beats humans in Jeopardy! dry run

Peter H. Coffin

Re: How is it given the answers?

The article does specifically mention "listen to the statement", so that kind of implies Voice Recog.

Microsoft sends Windows 7 SP1 to OEMs

Peter H. Coffin

Make that two

There's still an assortment of idiocies and "where'd they put it" with regard to setup and configuration, but the actual use of the OS has been decidedly not-crap, especially for a point-zero release. I can count the number of reboots needed in the past to resolve brokenness on one hand.

And it still runs Diablo properly.

Nintendo disappoints over 3DS battery life

Peter H. Coffin

3D damage

The problem stems from that the brain's perception of actual distance (and thus proper perception of depth) includes not only parallax (the difference between the two eyeballs' images) but also how the muscles focusing the eye's lens are working. And eye focus while using the device are always focused on the screen at the distance that the screen is, which does NOT necessarily match how the real world is... That training happens at a young age.

Ford cars get draconian parental controls

Peter H. Coffin

Yes, Traction control permanently on

Living as I do in parts of North America that get snow reliably *every year* for 4-5 months at a time, I can assure you, without question, that there is no slippery condition under which TC hinders the ease of properly-controlled driving. Yes, TC will foul up shaving the last tenth of a second off your lap time. Yes, TC will encourage a soft complacency about how well that particular car handles. Yes, it will make Jeremy Clarkson snigger behind his hand at you. Yes, TC will make driving in snow significantly more boring. But it will make it easier and safer to drive in slippery conditions by *always* being attentive and alert to wheelslip when a human (particularly a teen-aged one) will not.

You, as a grown adult and the owner of the car, need never worry about it and can leave the TC off if you like. You're a fool to do so in snow, but that's your problem.

Speed-cam stats to be published, indicates gov

Peter H. Coffin
Gates Horns

Exactly.

The speed camera that has nearly completely halted speeding within its view might be said to be very successful indeed, achieving the stated goal of reducing speeds to the legal limit.

And taking it away might obviate that success in days.

World+Dog says 'no thanks' to 3D TV

Peter H. Coffin

Timing is everything

I am vastly amused that this article comes out less than a week after I purchased a 3D television. What made the difference? Being able to buy the thing for a semi-reasonable price *with all the necessary accessories thrown into the package*, instead of having to pay X for television, plus 15% of X each for two sets of glasses, plus 5% of X each for two 3D movies, plus 10% of X for a 3D video game. The only missing piece was something I already had: a clunky 1st-gen PS3.

The moral of the tale? Sales Lesson #3: make it easy to for people to buy stuff.

IBM super cleared for trivia showdown with humanity

Peter H. Coffin

Huzzah!

There will finally be an adequate replacement for the typical level-1 hell desk minion then... Or perhaps all of them.

Apple patents glasses-free, multi-viewer 3D

Peter H. Coffin

In a word....

Yes.

The fact that I can't see it working (even poorly) with this decade's technology for more than a handful of folks under near-ideal conditions and using a whole rack of processing power to do so means that the most you're likely to ever see is one demo rig in a children's science museum in California, someday.

Meanwhile, I'm going to put out here, for all the world to see, the simple plan of twist-polarization CONTACT LENSES for both corrective and non-corrective use. Since somehow the world has gotten the idea that glasses are such a TERRIBLE BURDEN, this eliminates the glasses, and should be compatible with the RealD systems already in use in many theaters.

Xbox modder can't claim fair use, says judge

Peter H. Coffin

Ahem

The penultimate sentence is why Fair Use doesn't apply. He was selling the modded Xboxes, which puts the modification itself far outside the bounds of educational

Exposed: leaked body scans published online

Peter H. Coffin

I'm not sure this proves anything at all....

since this is different machines, used under different protocols, with different promises.

Rethinking the iPhone

Peter H. Coffin

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

If you think that price is horrible, try Canada sometime. CA$100 per month gets 500 minutes and 3GB of data. On a 3 year contract. And most Droid-based phones still cost $100 on that contract.

Q: Why pay for DNS?

Peter H. Coffin

I'm a little unsure

why precisely signing up with this firm is any better than correctly configuring one's own damned DNS. Especially since I'm sure there's buried in the fine print of the contract that they are NOT liable for incidental or consequential damages of cache poisoning, which they can't stop from happening to at least small chunks of network at a time. Even if it were the case, the LAST THING that would be helpful would be to create a circumstance where there's a one-stop shop, centralized point of attack that DNS poisoners would maximally benefit from poisoning. That is, if they can poison the lookups fetching addresses of MegaloDNS servers, they can hang onto the ENTIRE representation of the internet instead of to specific domains, much longer, and with even LESS chance of users noticing. Centralizing the point of failure is seldom the right answer to these kind of problems.

Ballerina canned for flashing her assets

Peter H. Coffin
IT Angle

The obvious IT angle...

Seems to be that as of about noon UTC, their webserver responds only to complain about a misconfiguration... I guess we broke 'em.

MySQL price hikes reveal depth of Oracle's wallet love

Peter H. Coffin

It's not just you...

I was expecting to see a reference to the Oracle Bank and an offer to "Transfer The Left Over Funds ($ 15.5 Million) Of One Of My Banks Clients Who Died In A Plane Crash".

Tesla Motors: Our cars don't burst into flame, but our emails do

Peter H. Coffin
Megaphone

The alarmist is PR.

Sadly, this seems to indicate that we (El Reg and its readers) do, in fact, know more about Tesla and its products that Tesla's PR folks know about El Reg. Tongue-sprains from having it so firms thrust into cheek is an essential hallmark of Register reporting, and it'd be clear even to a PR rep had she bothered to read even a half-dozen other articles, and it would have been obvious that this is going to do "the brand" absolutely no damage whatsoever. After reading the original article, my raging nerd-lust for the car did not diminish one iota. And why should it? Tesla offers a unique product and as such the ownership of one is going to be at least a small part adventure. Fixable issues with design that can cause problems (even if rare) are part of what makes it adventurous. If that scares you instead of makes you think "I should probably get that looked into sometime", Volvo will happily sell you a car.

Verizon to refund $30-$90m in 'mystery fees'

Peter H. Coffin

Ah, but see...

The services WERE delivered, and at the contracted rate. The problem is that the services were not explicitly *requested* but were instead invoked as an unintended consequence of a user's action, without explicit notice of the consequential charge.

As for why this is the FCC and not another agency, it does come down to that "Communications" aspect. FCC handles communications, SEC handles financials (mostly), FAA handles most things to do with airplanes even if it's how an airline handles things on the ground, FDA hands stuff wot is food or drugs, etc. FTC handles just what's left because they do not have the resources to cover specialized areas of knowledge.

Las Vegas death ray roasts hotel guests

Peter H. Coffin

The even more obvious solution

and entirely keeping within the Las Vegas model for solving problems is to not only mark the pavement, but then to also *charge people* to go into the focal space: "ULTRA TANNING AREA $10 for 10 minutes (Tan at your own risk)". The revenues will make up for the cost of moving the cordoned-off areas around.

Mozilla Labs dreams of projected keyboard phone

Peter H. Coffin

An experiment?

How long has ThinkGeek been selling these? Five years? Ten?

No one needs Blu-ray, says Microsoft exec

Peter H. Coffin
WTF?

in 10 years

Australia will have 100Mbs fiber to every home, but still have a 5GB monthly download cap....

Custom superchippery pulls 3D from 2D images like humans

Peter H. Coffin

The difference being...

That a self-driving car could easily have other sense than just binocular vision to play with, such as laser range-finding and RADAR. Further, the binocular vision can have a MUCH larger inter-axial distance than the Mk I eyeballs do. We get 62mm more or less, while a self driving car could easily have four "eyes", with clusters of two checking close clearances, and the binocular image between the two clusters serving as a much longer base for measuring parallax.

The real issue is that all of those solutions involve making it easy with hardware, and that means buying actual bits of things, which costs money. For cars, where one would expect there to be millions of the things, anything you can do in software to save buying hardware returns the savings milllions-fold. This isn't about doing these things *at all*, its about doing them for 50% less hardware and saving pots of money on the manufacturing side.

But that sounds much less impressive headlines: "Boffins save car manufacturers lots of money in the future" doesn't have the same punch.

Road test: putting the iPad to work

Peter H. Coffin
Unhappy

curser[sic] keys

The lack of cursor keys wouldn't bother me in the slightest as (again, yes again) already got the method of effective text editing already in the portfolio. But Steve-erino would have to go back and look at the hated and maligned Newton to see how to make text editing with the virtual keyboard easy and fast...

Parents back legal ban of violent vidgames sales to kids

Peter H. Coffin

What's the difference between voluntary and compulsory?

Simple: with the an industry-wide voluntary ratings system and corresponding voluntary policies on the part of the retailers, then the simple fact that if someone screws up and sells a game to a kid with a fake ID, then no one gets fined, no one goes to court, no one gets sued, and no one wins an election "cracking down on crime" by harassing merchants. Free speech never enters into the discussion with regard to a voluntary system either, as there is no *governmental* interference. However, the instant the government, which *can* fine and send people to jail steps in, it's a whole different set of conditions and there's a whole different set of laws governing whether or not it's permitted in the first place. Even if the stated goal is exactly the same.

Cinema chain bans laptops, tablets

Peter H. Coffin

I can't believe

You've never seen a classic coat-and-hat check in action? It's simple, really. One walks up to a little room, where an appealing young woman accepts your property and gives you a numbered token (like a browser cookie, but real) and stores your item in a place corresponding to the number thereon. As you leave, you surrender your token to the PYT, she returns your items, you put a coin into hand in appreciation of her cheerful assistance and be on your way. It classes up the joint.

Sony updates PS3 system software

Peter H. Coffin

No, they're not.

"Firstly, Sony are only stopping folk doing what they don't want folk doing with hardware Sony have produced. Not too much to ask, I suppose. The PS3 is great for doing what most people want it to do without resorting to circumventing its operation."

No, Sony is stopping people that have potentially-modified consoles and games from connecting to the free multi-player-game-hosting environment because those potentially-modified consoles have potentially-modified games that could confer unfair gameplay to users of those consoles. That's it, that's all there is. There's no issue if you don't care about PSN. Just don't install the update, and your PS3 will continue exactly as it is.

Peter H. Coffin

Banning SPAM

Generally, the illegal part is *sending* the stuff. So yes, ISPs banning any of their UK users from making port 25 connections to anything OTHER THAN the filter-enabled, well-monitored, ISP-authorized smarthosts provided by the ISP for the purposes of forwarding on the email from the ISPs users would be entirely legitimate. And as a mail admin in my CFT, I'd be quite grateful if more than just the UK would do so.

Diesels greener than electric cars, says Swiss gov report

Peter H. Coffin

Re: but

Typical replacement interval for the battery packs seems to be on the order of every 50 000 miles. And you can expect that to be some several thousand UKP to do. Estimates waved around for US models have been on the order of $5000-8000. Amusingly, this is roughly the premium for hybrid/electrics over chemically-powered vehicles in the base price for similar vehicles.

Cleveland residents get RFID-equipped recycling

Peter H. Coffin

Spelling Lesson

"break even" "I have no idea", etc.

Next topic: Maths

A cost of $30 per tonne compared to a revenue of $26 per tonne is a difference of $56 per tonne, not $4.

Final subject: Logic

Householders are being monitored that they put the bin out once in a while. If the city wants to spend the time and money to empty three bottles out of a bin that might take a month to actually fill, that's their lookout.

Buxom buttocks bolster Beemer bonnet

Peter H. Coffin
Troll

"NSFW" outdated

It is time to retire the whole concept of "NSFW" tags. It was originally adopted because people often had internet access while in their employer's offices but not at home. The situation has now reversed, with more people likely to have routine and customary internet access at home than at their place of work. We're now in a circumstance where the rules can be much simpler: if the site you're visiting is related to doing your work, there should be no one that can legitimately criticize the content. If the site is NOT related to doing your work, then visit it FROM HOME, and you deserve whatever you see. There is no such thing as "job-related but inappropriate" content that needs must be hidden from coworkers.

Attack reads smudges to retrieve Android password patterns

Peter H. Coffin

Randomize layout?

Nope, can't be done for a path-tracing input method, as it's possible (even likely) that the randomization would put on the next item in the sequence in a non-adjacent position.

Private lessons

Peter H. Coffin
Big Brother

From ad admin standpoint....

The most useful and vital thing one can do to secure the PC and network as a whole is to keep users from dodgy websites. Yes, there are legitimate and business-appropriate sites that can become (temporarily) vectors for malware but they are few, they are quickly rectified, and the sites are generally run by people that take an interest in seeing that it does NOT happen.

So the question becomes "How do I keep the users on the straight and narrow?" Look them in the eye and say "It's *my* network. The pictures of puppies from your cousin and the eee-lec-tron-ick greeting cards will still be in your web mail when you get home. Wait until then. I know every website you visit on your work machine, right down to what kind of adverts it has on it. If something bad comes in because of what you've done, I will know, I will be able to prove it to your management, and I will not hesitate to hang you out to dry." Combining this with a snapshot log from the user's traffic is particularly effective. It's far more effective than some abstract policy sopping up milk with a "work computers are for work purposes only" that provide no sense of personal accountability to God, root, or anyone else.

Apathy kills Google's new-age Wave

Peter H. Coffin
Thumb Down

Win/Fail?

I can't wait to hear the verdict on Buzz..

Apple fanbois not as data hungry as Big Phone says

Peter H. Coffin

Very Berry, quite contrary...

Google Sync updating my *calendar* eats 5 MB a month. I can't imagine that the amount of use I put on this thing could be under 2-3 GB per month.

3D films fall flat

Peter H. Coffin

Money IS a factor...

That surcharge for 3D (50% more, commonly, where I live) is a huge problem. It puts the price of two tickets up to the cost of *buying* the thing when it comes out on BluRay a few months after release. To an extent, the cost of providing the glasses does justify the expense, but no moviehouse I've seen has pricing that would account for that one has seen a previous 3D film and may not NEED to purchase yet another pair.

Blizzard exposes real names on WoW forums

Peter H. Coffin

Opposing the government? On video game forums?

Context! Context is important! Jumping immediately to assumptions of tyranny and insurgency when discussing video games forums is likely to get you the same kind of response as actually talking about such on video game forums: that the poster of such is a whiny girl, with no reflexes and less savvy, and a loose but abrasive moral character (not to mention having several body parts in the same conditions).

Peter H. Coffin

Facebook's Gaffes

... did not come around as a result of attempting to be open and clear about people's identities, but rather being WRONG about what their own settings were doing, changing what those settings are without notice or analysis of the cascaded effects, and the complete shock to users that something input into a website might actually ever come back out. I doubt that there would have been anywhere near the controversy were there the simple agreement upfront of "You have no privacy here. Don't type anything you don't want known by everyone, indexed by anything, forever. If you don't like it, use some other service."

Microsoft goes AC/DC with Instaload battery tech

Peter H. Coffin
Joke

Both contacts at the same end...

sounds like a short path to a hot time to me... Current batteries can be tossed loose into a drawer and be generally expected to not land in a way that puts both terminals in contact with the same bit of metal. I'm not sure how these are going to manage that. (I'm sure that tossing out even a "spent" 9-volt has has started fires in trashbins more than once already...)

Popular apps don't bother with Windows defences

Peter H. Coffin
Terminator

Increased workload?

I'm not sure why they would be. Based on NON-MS implementations of things that do the same thing, the workload consists of roughly "Find 'mem_allocate(', replace with 'secure_mem_allocate('" and "Find 'load_lib(', replace with 'sec_load_lib('". Unless Microsoft picked some amazingly bass-ackward method of implementing these things...

Of course, the really bastard way to do this would simply be to replace the things in the OS at the API level, and solve THIS problem for all time. Plus or minus a little consequential damage, admittedly...

Airline passenger videos Atlanta maggot horror

Peter H. Coffin
Boffin

Living flesh?

Hardly. They've got such a disposition to necrotic tissue that they're used to clean up gangrene because they WON'T burrow into living flesh. Oogie they may be, but they're very far down on the "harmful" scale of things involving air travel.

Seagate's 3TB external drive

Peter H. Coffin

A bit odd

... perhaps, but if there's something slightly odd about this run of drive mechanisms, providing in an enclosure can distract from a multitude of sins. If the drive runs very hot, they can thermally bind the drive to the case and use it for cooling. If the thing is very sensitive to power wiggles, they can bung a big fat filter into the power supply for the case. If it spits out a little more RF than is really acceptable in an open computer case, the enclosure can be shielding. If it's a little susceptible to cosmic rays, they can make the case out of lead and Superman's old underwear.

Peter H. Coffin

Re: An actual reason to upgrade to Windows 7.

It's not a matter of "if", it's a matter of "when". And it seems like "when" is probably "by Christmas" now...

Romford coppers try to stopper young snapper

Peter H. Coffin

If you don't like the money costs..

If you'd rather not having police departments paying out money to the citizens they harass, isn't the obvious solution for you to be instead put out with A) the police officers that are causing these problems, and B) the supervision of those officers that are allowing it to happen? THAT solution is free...

Big Blue sues exec for joining Oracle

Peter H. Coffin

There's a CV point for a young executive...

"In 2010, I was sued by former employer for being unable to follow contractual obligations that, in my chosen field and managerial level, are routine and customary. Regardless of the outcome of the case, I put my interests ahead of my employer's and I will be a barnacle on the organization in future positions, though perhaps a productive one."

Diary of a somebody - life in iPhone 4 land

Peter H. Coffin

Re: Patent that

I thought Sony had prior art on the technique....

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