Posts by Jason Bloomberg
766 posts • joined Saturday 8th March 2008 16:47 GMT
The generic unit probably applies...
"shitload"
Re: Security
If there were a zero-day exploit that made use of such a feature, the results could be devastating for both customers and Intel.
That seems to be a mighty big "if".
While a system relying on those silicon extensions could have issues if the extension were flawed it is difficult to see how faulty silicon could be used to create an exploit elsewhere. The flawed extension would have to affect something else the system relied upon for security to achieve an exploit through its use.
You could argue that every part of any implementation within silicon is an exploit just waiting to happen - and that may be so - but it seems a case of confusing threat with risk when it comes to how likely that would be.
A deep-throated Romanian
That made my Friday and nearly ruined my keyboard.
As the dentist said of Linda Lovelace; best set of teeth I've ever come across.
Poor sod
I was critical of what he was aiming to do but his only real mistakes were in it not looking like a worthwhile project while asking for money without a coherent and demonstrably viable plan on how he would deliver. As any 'send us your money' scheme may be a scam that probably made it look more likely that it was than was not.
If he had been more involved with the DIY C64 and retro-computing communities he might have had a better idea of what projects would be supported, what he could achieve and how he could do it and maybe even have a viable project, along with people willing to help him with that.
His real crime; letting his enthusiasm get the better of him.
Single chip C64 and DIY C64
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-One
http://www.syntiac.com/fpga64.html
Did he do any research?
I think Blehl's problem is he's a retro-computing nut, not a whiz-bang electronics nut, and I expect enthusiasm for recreating a C4 won't be as great as he thinks it is, but I guess you can't blame him for trying.
I note he's raised $150 out of $150,000 with just 18 days to go. I would guess Project Bread Bin is about to turn into Project Dust Bin.
Labour's mistake
Don't get me wrong, I never supported ID cards and still don't, but...
Labour's mistake was in not conning the country into embracing ID cards. They could have offered a two year deadline after which not having ID would be a criminal offence with a hefty fine. Given a £1K tax allowance incentive for everyone who signed up early, diminishing over two years, many in their greed would have rushed to get ID'd early. Critical mass, and missing out on getting 'free money', would have swept up most of the rest over time. They could have nudged the reluctant along by legislating that supermarkets must see ID to give cashback, must have ID to renew a driving licence, etc; making it near impossible to live without an ID card.
Would you take your 30 pieces of silver or miss out and still probably end up with a card?
It was only Labour's tight-fistedness and not understanding how to forcibly motivate people that saved the day. If they'd been willing to burn money to get an ID card carrying society they'd have achieved it. We dodged a bullet there.
Re: I sense a film series in the making...
Could the first title be "Fractured Glass"?
I would guess more likely "Fractured Ass" given the Gonzo Porn industry is likely to be the most interested in making films captured from Google Glasses.
Outside the brief?
Good question. Where do we draw the line; foraging, animal trapping, going on the game, mugging, bank robbery, international terrorism?
Justice and The Law
Law often says in cases like this, where an offer of settlement exceeds the amount of compensation awarded, the claimant is responsible for costs of trying to get a better award than they were offered; they incurred the additional costs of both parties on a gamble that did not pay off. And if that is the case it seems she doesn't have a leg to stand on.
The specific problem in this case is she had legal costs ($224K) which exceeded the offer made, but that is not the defendant's problem. Their offer ($85) was generous set against the court ordered award ($18K) and the court has to recognise that. The defendants spent money saying that she shouldn't have got more than they offered and the judge agreed so why should they pay the cost of proving that; they won that part of the legal battle and the loser pays costs.
How she ran up legal costs so high before the offer is a bit of a mystery and it seems they will go higher if the appeal is thrown out and I would guess it will be. I have seen people misled by solicitors promising things which would never be delivered and this may be a case of that or maybe their client is instructing them to continue despite being told it's largely hopeless to do so.
It's an unfortunate case but she won't be the first to have been caught out through over-optimism. If it was on the basis of bad or flawed legal advice she may be able to take her own solicitors to court. Unfortunately in cases like this it means spending ever increasing amount of money and still with no guarantee of coming out ahead of the game.
Re: Easy
Yes and no. I unfortunately ended up in this situation for some time a couple of years ago and it was not fun.
It can be done but you will likely find you won't be living healthily. You won't be able to turn your nose up at store brand 'basics'., but you do get the pleasure of being a real vulture fighting your fellow man at the reduced price counter. Try not to get too enraged or hateful at those with full trolleys who grab things simply because they are cheap while depriving you of what you are relying on to live. If you are lucky, you will discover the absolute joy of finding a five pound note lost in the street.
Don't forget to spend one of your pounds on leccy and gas or turn those off. And don't forget to make at least one trip to the dole office; a ten mile round trip on foot or lose three days or more food spent on bus fare. Get a local to scream and shout at you if you don't get there for 9 o'clock in the morning.
To really experience the pain of what having little money means make sure you have no more than that £1 for food, a mortgage payment and council tax demands and a couple of utility bills in front of you. Maybe ask a debt collection agency to give you a couple of calls every day to encourage you to get a job.
A £1 a day for food is probably the least of the worries. Many people don't realise they are just one or two pay days away from losing everything.
Re: Settlement + costs
An offer of settlement is whatever those offering it believe is fair in their mind regardless what the claimant thinks. The claimant can either choose to accept it or proceed with their claim.
I might believe your claim against me merits £10 compensation and I may offer £50 as a gesture of goodwill and to cover what I believe your reasonable costs would have been. I am not going to entertain your claim for £1,000 nor am I obliged to.
You may consider my £50 offer derisory but the court has to take it into account if you take it to court and they will take my side if they think the same as me that £50 was generous. I tried to settle and minimise costs for you, me and the court. You decided to go ahead no matter what the cost so you end up paying those, yours and mine, even if you win the case. I already gave you 'a win' but it wasn't good enough; the court is saying it was and should have been.
Re: WTF??
"she will remain solely responsible for the payment of the bulk of her own legal costs and obliged to pay a high proportion of the legal costs of the respondents. "
If you read that as; "she will be obliged to pay a high proportion of the legal costs of the respondents which would not have been incurred had she accepted the settlement offered which were greater than the court ultimately decided she deserved to get " you might she why she is responsible for those costs from a legal perspective.
How she came to rack-up $200K+ costs on a claim which was worthy of only $18K compensation is a good question but that is not the court's problem nor the defendant's. That she was out of pocket even when the $85K was offered is unfortunate but she chose which way to go; take that or risk losing even more. Given the costs were so disproportionate to the compensation ( even if it had been $85K or greater ) I would be surprised if the court had ordered Oracle to pay her costs in full.
When they say "savings for consumers"...
It will more likely be penalising those who don't fit the utility company's desired profile.
They hype sounds great but there is no explanation of exactly how any savings will be achieved. I suspect they are to be achieved through social engineering and 'savings' are really 'avoiding being punished' for non-compliance.
The obvious rationale for smart metering is to give the utilities a means to apply dual peak and off-peak tariffs; so they can charge more for peak use then tell people they can save by switching to off-peak use. Of course most people won't be able to switch much at all and off-peak savings will almost certainly be less than on-peak increases.
If anyone thinks the utilities are doing this to decrease their profits they probably also believe they own a pet unicorn.
Fiddling the results?
"if you’ve not been contacted directly through the post, or you watch cable or satellite TV, any interference to your Freeview service is unlikely to be due to the 4G test"
It's hard to tell what they are playing at here. The first part suggests it's not a full nor fair test trial, and if you have problems then tough, and the second is just nonsense.
I recall there was some mention that if 4G screwed Freeview but there were other means of watching then they did not particularly care and were not obliged to resolve the issue so it could be they are only counting those with problems they have to solve and ignoring the rest who also have problems who find it their own problem to solve.
Could this by why the last test reported so few problems, far less than predicted?
On the whole
It would be remarkable if any PM did not have at least one policy which was generally seen as a good thing. Every PM would be a great if we only judged them on what we saw as positives and ignored the negatives.
Thatcher is primarily seen as great by those who profited under her policies and choose to blame those who did not as that being their own failing. Thatcher is the patron saint of selfishness and her "I'm alright jack, sod the rest" legacy is a root cause of many of today's ills.
Many take her success in promoting greed and lack of moral concern for the less well fortunate amongst us as a measure of greatness. I see it as entirely opposite.
Meaningless
It is hard to tell without more data why the problems were less than predicted, whether that's because the prediction basis was wrong or the area is not accurately representative. The low figure proclaimed may be due to lack of interference but could also simply be lack of complaint or reluctance to complain.
How many did not read the letter, filed it as 'junk mail' so did not realise they could complain about any interference, put it down to 'atmospherics', simply could not be bothered to complain, or meant to complain but then found it had 'cured itself' so did not?
How many did not actually partake in the test, use Sky, FreeSat, VM or VOD, so had no idea what their Freeview was doing, or decided it did not matter that they had lost Freeview?
Re: My iPad is more robust than most of the appliances in my kitchen
What exactly is the definition of "robust" here?
Ability to survive being dunked in the sink, dropped on the floor, banged on the worktop to remove crumbs, scrubbed clean with wire-wool and cream cleaner?
Re: Don't bring Lucy Meadows into this...
It certainly looks like there is a prima facie case for her being hounded with the press looking to do a hatchet job against her ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/22/lucy-meadows-press-harassment
Maybe some people find this bullying and hate-mongering a vital aspect of a free press but others find it unacceptable. I don't buy into the American view that freedom of speech entails granting a freedom to hate, a freedom to harm when no harm is deserved. That may be unacceptable to free speech absolutists but I expect they would see things differently if they truly were on the receiving end. I see no wrong in protecting people from undeserved harm. It's as much about not doing the wrong thing as it as about doing the right thing.
The problem, dear reader, is you.
Actually; I think the problem is the RI. It's not providing evidence of its relevance nor the compelling need for retaining its expensive home. People have to be convinced it's a worthy thing they are buying into and the RI are failing to convince.
Re: On the evils of "making assumptions":
"I assumed (such and such)."
Which if I recall past reports was the case here. The events which filled the UEFI with 'crash data' or whatever, which then caused it to fail to boot, was brought about by a driver poking about in memory to try to figure what hardware was out there. Done on the assumption this was okay and would have no bad consequences.
The UEFI should not have been affected, the failing is ultimately in Samsung's camp, but it was this 'reckless poking' which provoked the UEFI to be filled and then crash and burn.
Just wondering...
Is there any actual evidence the events alleged took place?
It looks odd that the chap is crouching down, but it looks pretty odd what the desk staff are doing too. Are they all looking for something dropped?
Re: Fleabay
Where it does fall down is the power consumption and heat output
And the noise. I picked up a Dell Poweredge 4400 at a garage sale a couple of years ago for just a fiver! A nice machine but, with three plug-in PSUs plus large internal fans, it's like a jet aircraft when running.
I've got 1U servers which are useful, being easy to carry around, but again they aren't quiet.
Re: Is that it?
It is quite weak isn't it; no more than you will find people doing with other hacked together PC boards. There are advantages to the Pi - low power, compact footprint - but it is sometimes hard to see how it's really any better than a second hand laptop or PC costing £5 for the projects built around it.
What would be nice to see are projects which could not be done except with a Pi. Projects where the Pi brings something to the table, rather than just being a smaller version than how it would have been done before. There must be wearable projects it is being used in, applications for aiding disabilities, and things like that, something interesting, unusual, exciting, but all we seem to see are reinventions of the past.
The Kindle as a display is more a Kindle project than anything else. PC in a table, PC as a server, PC in a suitcase, PC connects to projector, PC connects to weather station, PC as another server wearing a "cloud" badge, PC connects to load sensors, PC running Asterisk. Yawn. Replace PC with Pi and it's still yawn.
Coming soon; bleeding edge experimenter connects keyboard, mouse and monitor to Pi to create a working computer.
Re: Not quite bollocks
I can see a lot of teenage boys paying off a girl to wear them into a locker room and stream the video to them...that's what I'd be doing if I was 14 again :)
One could do it now with miniature cameras so it's not a new threat. There are already virtually unobservable wearable cameras and those which can be hidden in pens and watches, in smoke alarms and almost anywhere. We can see how well they work when watching undercover investigations on the BBC, ITV and elsewhere. Unsurprisingly there is spycam voyeurism and porn out there now.
Does DPRK have to be Physical DPRK?
Does North Korea have any embassies or consulates in the west? Bung a server in one and they could claim it's in North Korea. Embassies and the like are not actually foreign territory but it would be good enough spin for a press release.
I suspect it's however more about stirring up the debate on free speech and censorship than anything else, suggesting North Korea is more freedom loving than the west.
Posted in Router crash downs CloudFlare services
Blog server down
Either they've ceased to be as fully disclosing as they were or their servers cannot handle the load ...
http://blog.cloudflare.com/todays-outage-post-mortem-82515
Opportunistic Apple bashing
How is this really any different to plugging in a USB module to deliver some functionality not included on the device itself?
One can argue whether this is the best approach or not, over how well a particular module functions, but the principle is entirely sound.
I'm going to have to add an external adapter to get my VGA monitor connected to a Raspberry Pi so find it a little hard to criticise Apple in this respect and I don't own a single Apple product before anyone accuses me of fanboism.
Crowd-sourced experience
Stole someone else's login credentials so you don't need any?
Re: capacitor-based overwrite
All that is probably needed to stop that working is a little more sophistication than 'whipping the battery out and in as quick as possible'. Just holding the CPU in reset or even shorting the power rail to 0V as the supply is pulled will discharge the capacitor and stop the CPU from doing the zeroing of memory.
It adds an extra layer of protection that needs defeating but won't make a phone secure against attack. And if an attacker is after the information (rather than just fishing) they will probably be prepared to put that effort in. In fact there are almost certainly other ways to attack the phone and get a memory dump without having to freeze it so, while it's a novel attack vector, it's far from the only one.
Hmmm
Do these cars that take their driver on high speed joy rides not have ignition switches?
Re: But you're still missing the point
Windows COULD do this but does NOT do this because it's been tested by Samsung.
Actually I think you'll find Windows did not do this because it didn't 'randomly throw data at the UEFI' as the Linux driver did. This article suggests Windows - and anything - can do the same in the same way and have the same adverse outcome.
The problem seems two fold; Samsung's UEFI should not have allowed the failure to happen, and OS's and other programs should not be causing it to happen. It was just bad luck in some ways that Linux caused the house of cards to come tumbling down. Not entirely bad luck though, because it was doing something that it could not explicitly guarantee the success of. Had Samsung successfully protected against that it wouldn't have been a problem but unfortunately it wasn't the case.
If you deliberately drive a car at a wall expecting the air bag to protect you from injury, when the air bag doesn't inflate and you hurt yourself then whose fault is that; yours, the air bag manufacturer, or both?
People just don't understand what a DVR is all about
Sure they do; it's unlikely that time-shifted 20% is from just 20% of users.
What we have are some people who are not only happy to use time shifting but are also happy to watch as it happens, ads and all. I still find I fit my life around some programmes on at a certain time on a particular day even though I could time-shift them, and do if I can't manage to fit them in. Perhaps it's just habit or I'm subconsciously conditioned but it doesn't feel unnatural. For commercial channels I will often live-shift, start recording and watch a short time later so I can skip the adverts and be in real time when the program ends.
Just because people aren't doing it the way you do, aren't time shifting everything, doesn't mean they don't understand what it offers. For sports; there's nothing worse than time-shifting and then some bugger telling you the result and how it was before you've seen it, so it's not always an absolute advantage.
Re: NOT a joke
Since when has misuse been sabotage? Why not go the whole hog and call it terrorism ?
I would suggest it's more "not a joke" to allow the emergency systems to get hacked.
Posted in El Reg contemplates the ultimate cuppa
Cup or Mug?
Mug for me, and don't get me started on hot tea in glass glasses
Though I will admit it is entertaining to watch someone pick up said glass and take three steps before realising they are melting their fingers to the glass, can't decide whether to turn back or go on, won't drop it so have to grit their teeth while pretending they are not suffering excruciating agony and looking like they are having a stroke or heart attack.
Re: I'm confused.
Ditto. "Virgin Media in being bought-out talks" seems to be the actual story.
Morally repugnant witch hunt
If we want compliance with some standard we should define what that amounts to and codify it in law.
Rabble rousing, lighting torches and picking up pitchforks to threaten and coerce compliance with some arbitrary standard should not be acceptable. It is vigilante mob rule which governments should not encourage and absolutely not indulge in
This is what government by Daily Mail commentards would look like.
Re: Random Poking - A million Pis waiting to die?
The Commdore PET one was the first one I ever heard of that would destroy hardware.
Looks like the Raspberry Pi could have the same feature -
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=5339&p=71145
Bad Firmware or Bad Ubuntu ?
Is it a firmware bug or the installation messing up the firmware or not playing right with it? It doesn't seem clear to me and I would guess no one will know until it is determined why they are bricked.
It's interesting that it requires a particular configuration to be rendered bricked; UEFI enable, booting and installing from USB stick and a power-off. Could it be that a power-off while the BIOS was being updated has rendered it unusable?
I once had a motherboard that, if you went into BIOS settings and accidentally selected firmware upgrade it erased the BIOS then asked for a floppy; you were completely buggered if you did not have that and powered-off or rebooted.
Re: The elephant in the room
Kids and schools already have low cost tools to learn about hardware; Arduino, Genie, PICAXE, Stamp and other microcontroller systems are widely used for that. The Raspberry Pi is actually far less robust for interfacing than any of those with a Gertboard or similar being essential to bring it to the same level of robustness.
That's not to say the Pi isn't a welcome addition but it does seem most people hyping how the Pi will revolutionise education have no idea about what is already being used in schools for teaching students. It's perhaps worth noting that the near £400K gift is buying 15,000 Pi computers where it could have instead bought more than a quarter million micro controller kits.
The main thing is not what kit schools and students are using but what teaching materials, help and assistance there is for that kit. In that respect the Foundation has a long way to go in catching up with the established players.
Re: Idiots
Idiots or just not thinking?
It's a danger of developing out in the open and forgetting its nature. I bet more than one has made the mistake of simply 'copying the whole project' into a repository without thinking what's actually in that project.
People can quite simply forget what they are working on is open to the public. With tighter integration between private and public storage it gets harder to tell what is private and what is not, and people even forget CD backup, USB sticks and drives are potentially public if ever removed off-site.
I wonder how many developers are scrambling to see if they have leaked sensitive information, how many can confidently say they never have?
Marketing hype?
the recurrence of an encrypted block of data of any appreciable size is infinitesimally likely
I was thinking that, but if you've got enough data in small enough blocks the odds get better. I guess someone better at maths than me can work out those odds. They might be able to dynamically apply an additional level of encoding to make a file/chunk more likely the same, carry that around as metadata, which could improve the chance of a match.
Dedupe or not; it doesn't make much difference to me as I really don't care how much disk space Mega are using or saving. Maybe they've got it and maybe it doesn't work very well in saving disk space. Not my problem.
Deduplication
Such deduplication ought to be impossible if Mega truly didn't know the contents of uploaded content, according to critics.
If A+B => X and C+D => X there seems no reason they cannot say X is the same and deduplicate without knowing anything about A, B, C or D.
"Knowing that two files are the same, even without knowing the content, nevertheless leaks information about the data".
Does it leak any useful or usable information though? I suspect not. If it does then surely the fact I have an encrypted file already means I can theoretically know every other file that could encrypt to the same end result.
Re: Being "insulting" should not be illegal in its own right
It probably should be illegal in some form or other. We seek to protect people from harm, punish those who cause harm, and if harm is caused through insults (or abuse) there ought to be a mechanism to address that.
That's the UK principle anyway and seems reasonable enough to me. it's different in the US where hate itself is not illegal nor a crime and citizens robustly defend the constitutionally protected right to hate.
The problem, as noted, is how to determine what is criminally "insulting" or "abusive" and otherwise not, whether the harm claimed is legitimate or not. The DPP/CPS's rationale for accepting the change was that all cases of legitimate prosecutions for "insulting" were also covered by "abusive" so it would not really affect things.
While the arrest for asking if a police horse is gay demonstrates the sometimes malicious nature of policing on the ground it doesn't follow that the law is unsound or that the trivial is being routinely punished in court, though such laws are indeed capable of being used punitively and prejudicially.
@M7S - Connected households
Surely with all these future connected households we hear about, where one can start the bath running whilst still travelling home valid connections will be a requirement?
You can have the home-side systems push status to the cloud, ask if it's meant to do something and do it, so your direct interaction is with the cloud not your home, your home is always polling and making outward connections rather than accepting incoming connections.
There are disadvantages to polling but it's likely to work for most homes for most things which don't need instantaneous interaction. Response times can be reduced at the cost of more frequent polling and greater bandwidth use and it can be dynamically adjusted.
Most residential customers probably don't get a static IPv4 anyway so that model id going to be adopted to allow an internet of things to work before everyone is on IPv6. That seems to be what Electric Imp is doing.
Re: @ John G Imrie - "He didn't steal anything"
Theft is usually legally defined along the lines of "permanently depriving someone of something".
True, he did not steal the actual documents, he simply made copies of those without authority (hence breaching copyright), and in the course of that deprived the copyright holder of income they were rightly entitled to.
"Copyright theft" is simply the term we have adopted to describe that.
Re: Yes, red arrow me
If you want convenience, faster Internet and 24 hour megamarts, live in a city or large town. If you want a quieter life and to be closer to countryside, live in the country but don't expect the same convenience.
Not everyone gets full choice of where they live and why should it have to be one or the other. Let's move society forward; not hold it back with continuing divisiveness.
I would rather we strived to deliver the best we can to everyone, minimising disadvantages for all. We should be aiming to give country folk better infrastructure as well as giving town folk greener spaces and better environment.
"Eight of the women were so accomplished that they ended up living with me"
Dressed in skin-tight all-in-one black leathers, touting machine guns, guarding the volcano entrance and occasionally taking the cat out for walks?
Re: Who holds the reference data?
Best point made so far; the first thing any barrister should do is call into question the police's "proof".
Given criminal cases rest upon "beyond reasonable doubt" it is highly unlikely any case would stand or fall on the issue of a tape recording and some correlation (or not) alone and, if it did, that it would withstand an appeal. It is therefore rather moot in the scheme of thing.
Of course the police are very likely to use claims of being indisputably able to prove their case and get a confession with the promise of going easy if one fesses-up and that's where it has best application. It's often easy to have a suspect to believe a jury won't believe them than get the jury to not believe them. It's simple social engineering.
Re: The slinky is both falling and contracting at the same time.
That was my thinking, but, watching the video, the gaps between the rings towards the bottom don't seem to be contracting while the top rings are and the top falls. It does seem the point to which the top and bottom would collapse is moving from top to bottom as well, some other lower point is also moving in the same direction; above that point it is a contracting spring, below that it remains non-collapsing spring.
No matter how it actually works; the spring explanation seems far more reasonable to me than 'hangs around defying gravity until it receives a signal not to'. However; superb videos, so an overall thumbs-up.
Re: Basic Facts
How many commentards actually checked what Andrew claims it says in the Levesden Report is actually in there?
Or did the great majority make the same mistake of simply believing whatever they read?
