Posts by Chronos
418 posts • joined Sunday 21st October 2007 08:46 GMT
Re: Astonishing and nice!
dssf: We might become a rep-Warp civilization in under 200 years, maybe even 100...
Aye, and we may be able to manage being civilised to each other before that, too. Something to look forward to...
Re: In other news...
AC: I was with you until you wrote this. As a non-smoker, I still think back in horror to the time when I could happily be forced to passively smoke someone else's fumes and cough my guts out at any place and time!
I was hoping that would provoke that reply. Sorry to have manipulated you but that nicely leads me into another rant.
There isn't a smoker on the planet who will deny that smoking is harmful. We know it is but once it has hold of you it's very difficult for the head to overrule the body's needs. Until personal vapourisers arrived - e-cigs, if you like. I bought a couple of CE4 eGo kits in January. The second day I just forgot to light up and haven't burnt a strand of tobacco since. This is after trying all the pharmaceuticals and cessation "aids."
You would almost think, given the data about the place on just how much use these NRT products are, that the entire anti-smoking rhetoric is more to be seen to be doing something than actually doing it. After all, smokers die younger and the only people who pay more tax than smokers are motorists. Less pension, more income. What's not to like?
Now look what's happening. I agree you shouldn't have to suffer because of my habits. I agree that smokers' sidestream emissions are harmful to others. I'm sure many other smokers do, too.
What I don't agree with is the removal of choice. It seems Dr. Clive Bates, one of the founders of ASH who were so rabidly anti-smoking that it used to look like a form of zealotry, agrees.
Please note: I haven't stopped using nicotine. I do not intend to stop using nicotine. These things aren't medicine because medicine cures a disease. I'm not ill. I'm enjoying my nicotine just fine thank you very much.
In other news...
A broad coalition of ordinary people today released a report detailing the evils of unenlightened halfwits in ivory towers releasing reports on things of which they have no personal experience.
The report details several harmful behavioural traits these reports cause such as anger, tendency to damage inanimate objects and the overpowering urge to strangle the living shit out of yet another do-gooder incapable of minding their own fucking business.
"MYOFB's" chairperson today said "If we allow these people to continue spouting crap from atop their high horses, time will come when everything down to and including farting in public will attract either heavy taxation or be banned," followed by a loud burst of the trouser trumpet to illustrate his point.
Non-experts welcomed this report with reactions ranging from "About time, too" to "Fuck off, I'm trying to do my bloody shopping here! Sodding surveys..." As we were running away from that bloke, a small group of people standing in the rain outside the pub also gave their opinion on the dangers of unrestrained do-gooding:
"We're smokers. There used to be lots of us but the do-gooders told us we were evil and had to stand outside. Just go take a look inside the pub and you'll find there's nobody in there at all now. This is what they want - to ruin everything even remotely joyful."
Posted in Help-desk hell
Before ADSL
Customer on the 'phone, I'm the build manager for our company which was also a VISP. Being technical, I was also second-level support for the VISP arm.
Customer: Your <expletive> Internet is down again!
Me: I'm showing no outage at present. Do you mind checking a few things for me before I call our datacentre?
Customer: I need my e-mail for my business! I'm losing <expletive> money here!
At this point we launch into a diagnostic session where I find that her modem is connected to the fax line, the modem is responding nicely to AT commands and the PPP setup is correct as far as I can tell. Customer is getting increasingly vehement that our dial-up is mams vertical, although my console says it's fine.
Customer: <long trail of expletives randomly laced with other words that make no sense>
While she's swearing at me, I'm on the other line to BT checking her fax line. BT faults comes back with a very interesting cause. Back to line 1 where she's still expounding on my ancestry, habits and probable fate.
Customer: My business is suffering because of your <expletive> incompetence! You're a <expletive> and I'm going to sue you for loss of earnings!
Me: Have you tried paying the bill for your fax line recently?
Cue tumbleweeds. Sometimes you're the statue, occasionally you're the pigeon.
That'll be...
8K earnings (Beta), then?
Pot...
...meet kettle. Kettle, this is pot. You both seem to absorb all wavelengths of light to a similar degree.
Re: Climate sceptic?
S: BTW, it is possible to do this *and* innoculate your children.
Precisely. I was prioritising, not excluding.
With regard to the comment upthread, yes, my son does question me and my place in this household. It's his right as an individual to do so and disallowing that would be hypocritical in the extreme. What would also be hypocritical would be to allow him to think that power is fair, so quite often I win by default even if I'm wrong. It prepares him for the real world where this sort of thing is the norm.
Climate sceptic?
No, I'm just sceptical, end of. Bullshit is everywhere.The first thing I do when faced with one of these "truths" is follow the money. If it leads to one of the usual suspects, well, what's new there?
The best thing you can do for your kids isn't vaccinate them, it's to teach them to question everything.
Re: Gnome??
X: To be fair, the default Gnome 3 environment is just shi isn't quite right
The phrase you're looking for is "not quite fully in possession of a set of buttocks," a situation endemic in many projects where form trumps function.
Re: Gnome??
SG: I've tried tint2, but can't think of a use for it additional to those two.
OpenDesktop compliant notification area is one of the reasons I use it and, even then, it's in autohide mode. I use Pidgin a lot and having it iconify to the notification area saves desktop space. I could use Openbox's dock, but it's a bit ugly and doesn't play well with Twinview, which I need to allow me to have gschem and a datasheet in front of me at the same time without having to wear out Alt and Tab. It also gives you a twinview screen specific taskbar which C-D doesn't. Also indispensable is Tilda, having got very used to Yakuake on the F10 key when using KDE.
SG: Plus, for some time, I've felt that Gnome developers in particular have lost the plot. Like storing all configuration information in a single binary file. Fine until it gets broken, just like the Windows registry.
Those who will not learn from Windows are doomed to repeat its mistakes. The other problem I've found with all DEs is dependency on a particular ABI, annoying when you use a kernel and userland other than GNU/Linux as I do, which you touched upon with volume management. Solid in KDE takes this one step further into the realms of madness.
The UI should provide just enough to get work done, manage windows, interface with the underlying OS and then stay the hell out of the way. DEs are increasingly forgetting this prime directive.
Re: Gnome??
I've gone even further and ditched anything that professes to be a "Desktop Environment." XFCE and Enlightenment was looked at and dismissed for carrying the same disease. My session now consists of Openbox, Tint2 and Cairo-dock. What did it for me was bloody Akonadi crapping itself every five minutes and the huge swathe of shit I had to recompile every time KDE developers so much as moved their mouses. Yeah, yeah, cclient, delete ~/.local/akonadi (or something), do you want a refund, blah blah blah, not good enough. Losing the flagship e-mail client on every point release was not good publicity. Stop this nonsense forthwith!
On that note, a huge thank you to the developers of Sylpheed and Claws for producing a decent client that works without some awful, flaky RDBMS/SQL backend.
Not so obvious
This is, IMHO, more to do with the ability to insert snooping systems into telco kit rather than the reports going the wrong way. The least of us know how to monitor and block such things. The real issue is that the USians have absolutely no control over ZTE and Huawei and no access to their codebase so back-doors and other such technological internal rogerings will be harder to implement.
Sunshine, you're the enemy they're really concerned about, not the Chinese.
Re: No....
That's like saying the turd that's floating is superior to the ones that sank. As with politics, the only difference is gas.
Ex snail
Not only that but it seems to have gone belly up. For a gastropod, that's disastrous.
The problem:
Three variants of the iPad but only two kidneys. This is not a sustainable business model for iFans.
Again with the Olympricks?
This huge smorgasbord of money making for fat cats on Olympic committees and commercial sponsors ceased to interest me, oh, let's say a day after it was "awarded" to London. It was probably sooner than that but let's give it the benefit of the doubt. It's costing the taxpayer millions and we're going to see very little from it. Worse, it angered me that some poor sod legally and innocently riding his bike got ape-mauled and slung around by the idiots who think that somehow a symbol is more important than civil liberties. We should leave symbols to the symbol minded.
Beer. Too much of that makes you sick, too.
Thanks for the pointer to Disconnect. i missed that one in my usual privacy-enforcing toolbox.
Have an upvote ;-)
Just use ESR
No, not the mad conspiracy/gun bloke, Extended Support Release which, according to the roadmap, is good until V17's release, at which point V17 becomes ESR. Also available in Thunderbird flavour. YKIMS.
Nicely hidden there, Mozilla. We'll always find these things eventually, though.
So much for The Great Repeal
...that we were promised when the coalition took power. Just goes to show you that George Carlin was absolutely right when he said that this shit we do every four or five years to shuffle things around means zip and is just an illusion to make you think you have control. That election shit? Doesn't mean a fucking thing. The real power lies with the lobbyists, corporations and civil servants; those don't change across parliamentary terms.
Re: @AC 09:31
Try not to be an annoying, petty, pedantic little nutsack for the rest of your life, eh? Have a day off. Stalk Stalk is what people have been calling this company since 2008 and the Phorm fiasco.
SWAG: It used to mean screwed without a GUI. Now it seems they're screwed even with one.
MCSE: Must consult someone experienced.
Re: Moral of the story......
DOn't but cheap Chinese shit, no matter how cheap.....
I see your trollface but it's still utter tosh. How is a setuid binary on a ZTE any different to, say, Carrier IQ being present and put there by the network?
Is it 'coz they is Chinese? I thought we were supposed to be above xenophobia these days...
This is why those of us who care about our prvacy root our phones: Without root, these suid shenanigans have a free hand. With root, a remount rw and a chmod/rm cures the problem without having to wait for the fix.
Brick?
No, it's bloody not bricked. Windows is not firmware. If it somehow overwrote the code on the motherboard's EEPROM, then it would be bricked. Until such time, it's a corrupt OS, i.e. soft and sod-all to do with hard or firm.
Re: Google Calling the Kettle Black
it is just not possible on Android to choose any search engine other than Google. Nor is it possible to turn off cookies and take other privacy measures that are possible with (say) Firefox on the desktop.
Say what? My default search is Duck Duck Go SSL no-javascript. My default browser is Zirco. My preferences have it dump history and cookies on close.
Oh, and my ROM is CM7.
PEBTSAC [1], perhaps?
[1] Touch screen. Nothing attached to an Android device or anything else "smart" can be described, even loosely, as a keyboard. Perhaps one of those Bluetooth wotsits that is twice the size of the 'phone, but that's about it.
Isn't that a "feature"...
...of HFS+ anyway? You know, fill it up with tunez from iWotsit and it goes mams vertical with no space left just as you finish ripping your last CD.
Re: Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006 s48?
The WTA(2006) is Ofcom's jurisdiction, specifically the RIS as-was. The rozzers will do nothing except assist the RIS if and when needed.
Re: They've actually broken another law.
No, they haven't. To whom have they disclosed? Only themselves, which is quite correct and intended usage. Google, however, even have my MAC mapped despite SSID beacons being disabled since wireless went in at this location, a pretty clear indication that I don't want my access point being used in this way, and are disclosing it to all and sundry so they can locate the device seeing the MAC.
How do I know? Samy knows.
I say again, it's illegal. If Sergey could wave a magic wand and end up in a jurisdiction where they're subject to no laws, he'd do so. He has said as much. This, however, is the real world.
I have even appended my SSID with _nomap, even though it never gets broadcast. I suspect they'll take as much notice of that as they do SSID broadcast being disabled. Or would, if I had left the thing connected.
They've actually broken another law.
Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006, Part 2, Chapter 5, Section 48:
Interception and disclosure of messages
(1)A person commits an offence if, otherwise than under the authority of a designated person—
(a)he uses wireless telegraphy apparatus with intent to obtain information as to the contents, sender or addressee of a message (whether sent by means of wireless telegraphy or not) of which neither he nor a person on whose behalf he is acting is an intended recipient, or
(b)he discloses information as to the contents, sender or addressee of such a message.
(2)A person commits an offence under this section consisting in the disclosure of information only if the information disclosed by him is information that would not have come to his knowledge but for the use of wireless telegraphy apparatus by him or by another person.
(3)A person does not commit an offence under this section consisting in the disclosure of information if he discloses the information in the course of legal proceedings or for the purpose of a report of legal proceedings.
(4)A person who commits an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale.
(5)“Designated person” means—
(a)the Secretary of State;
(b)the Commissioners for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs; or
(c)any other person designated for the purposes of this section by regulations made by the Secretary of State.
The offence is disclosure of the contents of the beacon packets (i.e. MAC address and location of the transmitter) where the transmission was not intended for their reception. The whole using other people's equipment to provide a location is an offence in the UK.
Re: Jim Morrow Gets it wrong
Secondly El Reg commentards have a duty to avoid [using the] emotive word hacking [to describe] the trivial task of accessing voicemail.
Nicely put, sir. At last, a bit of sense. I'd go a little further and say that hacking should not have the negative connotations that The Media[TM] attach to it within this community but your admonition will do nicely.
Re: Go on...
Problem is, all the sandwiches will be egg...
Would that be...
Professor Chown -R www:www, to give him his full title? Relative of little Bobby Tables, by any chance?
Just asking
Who ate all the Pi's?
@NoneSuch
What, you're going to sign on as an extra on East Enders?
BMW?
You mean Audi, Shirley?
http://livesniffpetrol.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/LetterFromAudi.jpg
Anonymous
"Earlier this week, hacktivisits self-identified as members of Anonymous"
Right, time to clear this up. Anonymous isn't a group or organisation, it's not exclusive to "hacktivists," it's not a script-kiddie collective and you can't be a member of something that doesn't exist. What it is is a badge you can hang upon yourself to identify with a cause, which may not be the same as someone else's cause when using the Anonymous moniker. Apparently, the Polish parliamentarians got this exactly right.
If you support or oppose something that lots of other people support or oppose, don a V for Vendetta mask and you're all one of the same collective by discarding your identity and other opinions for this one issue. Unless you have two heads, ballot stuffing isn't a problem. It's really that simple - no violence, rhetoric or effort required apart from turning up. Stupid shit like "members of Anonymous hacked my cat-flap" really is nonsensical. Anonymous is a way to leave your own political views aside and join the greater good, to say "On this issue, I'm with the silent majority." It really is a subtle and elegant concept, which is why so many people just don't "get it."
Disambiguation
"In Star Trek, there were three potential types of tricorders: the medical one, an engineering one and a "standard" tricorder used for scouting out new territory."
ITYM "standard" tricorder used to make loud noises to draw hostile phaser fire towards the accompanying cannon fodder/security ensigns. This is in addition to really bright hand lamps and people who couldn't pass unnoticed in a riot.
Fire at will, unless his last name's Riker. As for medical tricorders, one message is "5cc's of something technical and attach a doofer with LEDs to the patient's head" (thereby drawing more phaser fire from something with more latex on it than a dildo) and the other is "parrot sketch."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JswhkwvtMV4
The eyes, oh god the eyes!
What is the reason behind Microsofties with that fanatic stare in all of their stock photos? Ballmer has the prototype too-scary version but they all seem to have it to some extent. The explanation would make a good article, I think...
Please get it off the front page: It's frightening the dogs and is almost as bad as Billy G draped over an XT or Michael Dell's smug mush.
No mention...
...of the small rouge one? Fie! For shame! ;o)
Shirley...
...you mean "CHARGE!... Run away!"
YES!
Another intrusive bully bites the dust. Well done Trevor and the EFF.
Re: Or put another way...
"...my hard drive is OK at the moment so I can afford to get righteous and preachy."
*ZZZT* *Tick*
*ZZZT* *Tick*
*ZZZT* *Tick*
Oh, bugger!
To err is human
To really fuck up requires a machine.
If it were anyone other than rms?
Is the message wrong, or is it just because it's rms, who is an idealist, bringing the message that draws all the harshness?
They're *both* wrong. Non-free software can be ethical, providing you have a choice in what it does and how it is used. Unfortunately, Apple takes this one step further and produces non-free *devices*. Tell me truthfully, who owns your iPhone? Apple? Your service provider? If you've answered "me!" then you haven't thought about the principle of ownership. How can you own something when its software dictates to you?
What is owned is you, by the device. Continue along this slippery slope at your peril.
Posted in El Reg in SHOCK email address BLUNDER
Well done
See, you lot, this is how full disclosure is done. Hands up, we ballsed up. Anyone can make mistakes; it's how you own up to them that inspires confidence.
The baaaandwidth!
So that's why it has been like wading through cold treacle this week. Pray excuse me while I go club some fanboys and/or their iShinies to death with a maul...
Meh
When is the dmr memorial? Without Dennis, there would have been no OS X, iOS or any of the shinies you all adore so much.
How long
...until this turns into standard premiums for the "withs" and inflated premiums for the "withouts"? It's inevitable.
Antennae
Antennas. It's radio, not insects.
Sorry, pet hate. I actually prefer "aerials" even though that's not a good term for things that are no longer exclusively up in the air.
Now, where's my "Steve Jobs with a lossy ringo ranger on his head" icon gone?
re: Mandatory Google ID
And I just skip it entirely, install a custom notROM (currently CM7 nightly as the CM7 stable suffers from a most annoying hard-lock when charging on the Blade) without all the Google spyware muck and have done. There are plenty of .apks outside of the market to keep you busy, including some gems (ATide) that you can't get from Ogle.
Note well that there is currently no unlock solution for the Skate/Monte Carlo aside from those silly X-SIM adaptors that don't work very well with USIMs. The Blade/SanFran is still the budget phone to get if you want a half-decent system, some major de-Oglage and SIM-freedom and its absence here is a serious oversight.
Re: mod_gnutls
Just so everyone knows, mod_gnutls enables TLSv1.1 and 1.2 on Apache 2.2 without any issues. Works fine with IE9 on Windows 7 as long as you enable the two later TLS protocols in Internet Settings. The config is almost 1:1 's/SSL/GnuTLS/g' except that mod_gnutls needs GnuTLSPriorities setting for all virtual hosts.
http://modgnutls.sourceforge.net/downloads/docs/mod_gnutls_manual-0.1.html
@Ken Hagan
Agreed. I see your point now. Apologies for not recognising it before.
A lot of the discussion on the OpenSSL lists has been met with "we mitigated this in 2006/7 with padding" which really isn't an adequate response. Yes, it may be fixed in OpenSSL itself, but those servers and clients that are relying on its crypto libraries aren't protected by the mitigation.
Using GnuTLS' OpenSSL compat is no use either; you're stuck with exactly the same situation where the calling process knows nothing of its other features. However, we can use mod_gnutls in place of mod_ssl on Apache to get TLS v1.1/2 support. I can see this becoming the solution of choice for Apache users if it delivers what it promises to, although we're still stuck with the client situation. I'm going to have a fiddle with it later on a test box.
http://www.outoforder.cc/projects/apache/mod_gnutls/
As for browsers, it's still either RC4 lockdown or Opera/IE on Windows 7.
