Posts by Christian Berger

That should be illegal

After all it's manipulating other people's data intentionally. It should be just as badly punished as if I was to go to my bank and add some additional digits to my bank account.

I'd gladly pay for the BBC...

.... but they won't let me. The only thing I can get is hugely overpriced BluRays from BBC video.

Are you sure this is not an old article?

I mean this sounds more like something from the 1960s:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=vUpeAAAAIBAJ&sjid=3WANAAAAIBAJ&pg=6885,3667738

The UK simply is not attractive for foreign well educated people

I mean let's ignore the prejudices about the weather and the food, because frankly nobody cares if it's raining all day long, in fact that actually reduces the glare from the window on the screen. ;)

The UK is a country where you can end up in prison for not giving your password when _you_ are accused of having done something wrong. The UK even has key escrow. The UK has the highest number of surveillance cameras in the world per capita. The UK has ISPs which have ctively messed around with everyone's internet data. (BT and Phorm!)

Sure compared to the US the UK probably still is great, just think of the medical care system which is worthy of an industrial country, and yes, the UK has the BBC and Channel 4, but on an international scale that doesn't quite make it.

To contrast that...

The Cray 1 only had a single patent.

Does this include noscript/Adblock users?

One would think that would heavily skew the results. People who care about their computers might have such addons installed just as they have certain operating systems. They would then not be counted.

That's essentially pointless...

... but a nice marketing coup. It's not like Apple could do anything against it without giving up basic principles.

It'll just change the business model of those companies slightly.

Instead of creating a hype to be bought by some larger company of insane amounts of money, startups now hope to be bought by an insurance company for insane amounts of money because that way the data will be bought with them.

And that...

...in probably the only European country where terrestrial television actually works as a whole.

Uhm, not really

There are now cheap ESP8266 based WIFI boards around which cost around 5 Euros a piece and have a nice serial port. They contain a minimal TCP/IP stack and can be easily controlled from just about any microcontroller you want. Plus there's a fairly obscure SDK available which should allow you to actually do everything on the board itself.

The Internet was meant to survive a nuclear war...

... but nobody back then has thought of MBAs.

How reliable are those systems?

I mean those systems are probably cheaper than actual workstations and the operating system could probably easily be replaced by something more suited for professional use (like some Linux or Windows Server instead of Windows 8 or whatever they are shipping this with).

How reliable are those systems? Is this typical "if it left the shop it's already half broken" quality, or is this something decent?

Come on that series cannot be _that_ bad, can it?

I mean surely this seems very dated now, but calling it "Medieval terror bastards" seems harsh. It can't be worth than "Saphire and Steel". What does that even mean in the context of a 1970s children's TV series?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYmbt2RVqCg

Ohh you mean that organisation in Iraq? That's named "IS" not "ISIS", they had a rebrand recently.

The goal has already been reached years ago

The goal was to have independent systems apart from GPS. Because of political problems, Galileo will never operate without the consent of the US. That's why Galileo cannot do this directly...

However the announcement of Galileo has prompted other countries to start their own, truly independent, systems. Glonass is just one example. In fact many "smart" phones already have combined GPS Glonass receivers.

It's depressing to see how much effort they put into DRM...

... and how much effort it takes to remove that DRM again on the customer side. All of that would be so much simpler if it wasn't for idiotic DRM which neither protects content nor helps anybody in any way.

If you want to see what's streaming without such idiocy, look at the streaming at the Chaos Communication Congress in late December. There they have a fairly well scaling streaming infrastructure which is simpler and works more reliable... unless the network there fails.

Even if you are not paranoid

You will know that you will have to do harm the people around you and all over the world. You will be responsible for opposition forces in some country being tracked to kill them because your prime minister likes the dictator in their country. You will have to find security holes and are not allowed to get them fixed. If you take such a job, you will make the world a worse place... and if you want to quit they have more than enough information on you to blackmail you into staying.

If secret services would act for the common good, they would do so publicly, or at least disclose what they did after a sensible amount of time. What we see instead are secret services fighting of every little bit of democratic oversight they have. The sensible thing would be to close them down, and maybe, if we kind parts of them useful, to recreate those parts.

That's not much saver than what we have now

Today most mail servers already use TLS for all their connections, so only the involved servers see the headers. Of course those are self-signed certificates... but for governmental attackers that's no less of a problem than actual ones. In both cases you need to do an active attack which is potentially visible.

Same goes for any sort of "encrypted webmail service". Even if the browser was a secure environment, once you can break TLS you can send any Javascript you want over that connection.

So what shall we do? I believe we should make GPG more user friendly while keeping it compatible with what he have. For example the default configuration of Enigmail could always attach the current active key for the sending address, plus it could automatically store public keys it got from e-mails that were signed. In the default setting it would then try to make smart decisions on which keys to use when. So if it recently got a signed e-mail from someone you'd send back an encrypted one to that address.

Of course you should still be able to do everything manually, if you choose to do so. Also for mobile devices you could do key exchange via QR-codes.

The point is, we already have good infrastructure, which was not designed by idiots. Redoing it now again risks that it'll be done by the current flood of idiots who think that earning their money in writing shitty apps for mobile devices and reading a the Wikipedia page on Cryptography makes them suitable for designing systems that should protect peoples lives.

And all of that effort, just because of the lack of multicast on the Internet...

...and a severely broken copyright system which forces/allows TV stations to limit their broadcast area.

Just think how differently radio on the Internet is. Today you can tune into virtually every radio station in the world from wherever you are. It's like shortwave, only often in "better than FM" quality.

We could have the same with television. The step from 128 kbit/s audio to 1024kbit/s video isn't big enough to make it infeasible.

Television used to be different. Back in the 1990s, you just started your TV station and put it onto a satellite. Everybody in Europe could just receive it. Television was a lot more European, it didn't know as many boundaries as it does now. Today when I order "Cartoon Network" in English on my cable company, I get a monstrosity known as "Cartoon Network Deutschland", which has very little to do with the real "Cartoon Network" as it only shows shows which have been dubbed to German... which means that those shows have been shown on other channels for years and are continuously repeated. The result is something more akin to "Pop" than Cartoon Network.

Apparently the problem is more "botched administration"

At least that's according to what the people working there actually complain about. That's something that can, unfortunately, now be found for every platform.

One bizarre complaint was, that people couldn't get "mobile devices" quickly... which is actually more of a sign of decent administration since it's good practice to not let every insecure device onto your network.

People usually take that for granted on Windows.

Uhm, no

Well first of all most of todays computers have MMUs. Virtually every slightly more modern mobile phone has one and certainly everything that runs Linux. And yes I think we all understand how MMUs work, and what vital work has been done in the last years to improve on it.

"License plates" or other identity schemes where you have to show your passport to get to the net, won't help anything. Just look at malware like WhatsApp, you can find out who made it, but that's of no use, you still cannot get the malware aspects out of it. The only thing this helps with is make it easier for governments and companies to track the opposition. There are people whose life depends on anonymity.

What we need to do instead is to make computers more secure. We are already much better at this than we were in the 1990s, except on Windows and mobile phones. Instead of misinformed grumbling we should go on on that path and make our systems even more secure. We need to understand where our current weaknesses are and find out ways to circumvent them.

This feels very retro-futuristic

Like sci-fi series where people live in stations on the moon, but only have one computer on that station and communicate via videophones with monochrome CRTs.

Come on, we shouldn't need this by now.

Even ad companies can now build self-driving cars. Trains and buses have reached a point where they are far more reliable and safe than cars. We shouldn't have large parts of our population driving around regularly in cars. It's 2014 not 1964.

Fascinating...

....how Microsoft actually managed to lower their market share by bringing out a product that's even less desirable than the old Windows CE-based devices.

You could build Bitcoin heaters

After all it's just a waste turning electricity into hot air. You could easily build a water heater which, instead of just having some wire heating up, having some computer mining Bitcoin.