* Posts by Matt Fowler

13 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2007

UK age-checking smut overlord won't be able to handle the pressure – critics

Matt Fowler

OK, who's going to start the League of Digital Woodland Porn Fairies?

Raspberry Pi, up a tree,

Solar panel, battery.

Set up to act as an AP,

sharing free obscenity.

Apple: Our stores are your 'town square' and a $1,000 iPhone is your 'future'

Matt Fowler

face-scan in non-voluntary situations?

I wonder how the face-scanning will play out in "police demand you unlock your phone for them" situations.

In legal terms it's likely to fall in the same category as fingerprint-unlock (not eligible for US 5th Amendment protections as it's not something-you-know), but I wonder how it will play out technically.

Also, will it unlock on a sleeping / unconscious face?

Would you like to know why I get a lot of action at night?

Matt Fowler

PiVPN for easy DIY-VPN

As I recall, the last time I used Virgin East Coast, I was able to get in to an OpenVPN running at home on a Raspberry Pi, just on the default port. (I also don't think they block the port for SSH.)

But they certainly do block some hostnames involved in many commercial VPN-for-anonymity providers (including proxy.sh for damn sure).

http://pivpn.io has a lovely script for easy hand-holding install and setup of OpenVPN on the Raspbian distro. They say to pipe it straight from curl into bash, but it's probably a far better idea to download it with wget, eyeball it for nasties (it looks ok given my very limited skillz) and then run it.

This is also damn handy for accessing any at-home resources you don't wish to expose via port-forwarding. Which, IMHO, should be absolutely everything - apart from your OpenVPN service, of course.

Mr Angry pays taxman with five wheelbarrows worth of loose change

Matt Fowler

shops can opt out of big bank notes...

US bills are marked with the "all debts" wording as noted up-thread, but...

Buying something from a shop is not a debt. You don't "owe money" to the shop - the goods are purchased by agreement at the point of checkout. If there's a posted policy about not accepting £50 notes or $100 ones and it's applied in a non-discriminatory manner, you're accepting that as part of the transaction.

But if the tax-man says you owe them $3000, that *is* a debt - and if there's no law saying "can't pay debts with stupid amounts of coinage / small bills", and the currency specifically says "all debts", then you're entirely free to wreak hilarious petty satisfaction as this gentleman did.

Duncan Campbell: GCHQ and me and a roomful of Reg readers

Matt Fowler
Alert

also on The Register's own youtube channel

This video is also up on Youtube on El Reg's very own Youtube channel - where you can see it through the joys of HTML5 Video, with no Flash requirement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJfFOJVRMNU

Armouring up online: Duncan Campbell's chief techie talks crypto with El Reg

Matt Fowler

Re: Asymetric key?

David:

That's exactly what PGP does - a single-use symmetric key is generated, used to encrypt the message itself, then that symmetric key is encrypted with the Public Key cipher and bundled up. It's called a hybrid cryptosystem.

If you PGP-encrypt something to multiple recipient public keys, multiple encrypted copies of the symmetric key are included - one per recipient.

Revealed: GCHQ's beyond top secret Middle Eastern internet spy base

Matt Fowler
Black Helicopters

Re: Official Secrets Act?

For anyone not aware of Duncan Campbell's history in this area, he's been arrested under the Official Secrets Act before - and he ultimately walked out of court a free man. (See wikipedia "ABC trial", and deeper coverage on his own DuncanCampbell.org site)

Then after that, there was the Zircon satellite affair in 1987 (again, google and youtube it).

Duncan Campbell does not fear the British state. The British state fears having their monstrous unregulated surveillance machines exposed to the populace.

Amazon floats free Windows Server clouds

Matt Fowler

Nobody said you were locked to 1 instance at a time

Because these are compute-hours, maybe you could fire off 750 instances and burn all your free time in only one clock-hour?

Kindle Fire: An open letter to Jeff Bezos

Matt Fowler
Alert

Blame Google, not Amazon

The Google apps are not part of the open-source Android platform.

Device makers have to get in to contracts and so on with Google to get to include the Google Android Market and the Google Apps (gmail et al) on their Android products. Equally, Google would need to submit their apps to the Amazon App Store for them to be available over that channel.

Google is the one stopping you from running the official Gmail app on the Fire, not particularly Amazon.

Ofcom proposes UK phone numbers prefix re-org

Matt Fowler
Alert

Freephone-Premium already exists

Freephone 0800 operators already pay more to receive calls from some phones than others.

Calls to 0800 numbers from BT Payphones cost the operating company more per minute than from a plain old BT residential landline.

I would settle for "from mobiles, 080X numbers should be treated as 01/02/03 and be included in bundled minutes or otherwise charged at the same rate as an 01/02/03 call". It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be pretty fair and easy to understand.

Applesoft, Ogg, and the future of web video

Matt Fowler
Megaphone

Interesting, but careless writing

The Apple-backed audio codec is "AAC" not "ACC", the plural of "codec" is "codecs" (not "codex"), and VP3 is the codec which turned into Ogg Theora - VP8 is the newer one that people are hoping Google will open up.

The MP3 licensing issues are also why there are regular raids on German tech-fairs to expel vendors who are selling MP3 player devices with no licenses for the related patents.

Clash of the compacts: Eee vs Air

Matt Fowler
Alert

corrections

The "standard" EeePC 4G does not have an analogue POTS modem. (It's got the connector in the port, but it's closed off with a rubber bung because there's no electronics connected to that). I believe the cheaper "Surf" variants have the modem actually present.

Also, the MacBook Air only has ONE usb2 port, NOT two. The other port next to the usb2 port is their "micro DVI" connector.

Another difference to note is proper wired-Ethernet ports. The Eee has one, the MBA does not. I know it's "all about the wireless", but it still feels notably absent.

Disclaimer: I'm a happy Eee owner.

Asus Eee PC 4G sub-sub-notebook

Matt Fowler
Go

No more internal Mini-PCI-E slot

The 3G modem accessory must be external. On newer revisions of the hardware build, people over on the EEEUser.com forums are reporting that there is no connector on the board for the mini pci-e slot.

(Plus, we've seen some photos around of a device which looks rather like an Asus-branded Huawei 3g usb modem - the same technology that Three and Voda supply as "mobile broadband" products).

It is fairly easy to hack your way out of the Easy Mode interface as shown (big icons etc.) and in to "Full Mode" - a KDE desktop environment but which still has some nice GUI utilities for adjusting a load of settings. It's ideal for me as an intermediate meddler-with-linux.

The SD card slot will take SDHC cards too, but SDHC is surprisingly slow to use. It also gets on just fine with my 4gb high-speed usb flash drive. It plays XVID video very nicely indeed, no conversions needed - just bring your AVI files!