Posts by David Hicks
1085 posts • joined Tuesday 22nd April 2008 12:44 GMT
Some detection possible?
In order to emulate a keyboard *and* a mouse, one would have thought that you'd need a USB hub chip in there too, at which point you have a policy that could deny the use of hubs, probably.
I may be wrong of course, there could be a way to have mouse hardware + teensy pretend to be a logitech composite input device. But either way, to be able to send keypresses I have a feeling the system needs to recognise it as slightly more than a mouse.
Posted in Samsung NC110 matte-screen netbook
Rip off Britain?
Looks like you can buy it in the US for under $300.
Hell, you can get it in Australia for $360 (AUD).
Sure there's tax to contend with, but 329 quid is an outrageous liberty to be taking with the British public.
If they are Sk1pt KiDD!355
Then god help us all, because if script kiddies can do that then think what real talent could do.
Yeah, I know
But it is an extra thing to carry. i like the slidy keyboard on the N900. I know it's a brick compared to a lot of the newest smart phoens, but that doesn't bother me all that much.
Posted in EFF backs away from Bitcoin
Bubble, Bubble, toil and trouble...
Bitcoin is in a speculative bubble. A serious one. It is pretty much only used to speculate and trade. There is virtually nothing you can actually use it for that approaches normal economic activity. Most of the currency seems to be in private hoards.
I don't imagine that the value will crash immediately the exchange opens up again, but I do expect it will crash when the current wave of media attention wanes due to press/public boredom. Unless a real economy starts to function in bitcoin it is not and never will be an actual currency.
The fact that most of its proponents are all treating it as an investment says a lot. Expect tears before bedtime.
And that's even if the current rash of hacks, breakins and trojans subsides.
Posted in WTF are... connected appliances?
Soon, in a fridge near you -
Third day, scared and all alone in the cold and the dark. Why do they hate me? #lastsausageinthepack
Posted in WTF are... connected appliances?
Clearly, in order to complement the smart fridge...
... we require the Smart Sausage!
Not only will the upcoming smart sausage know it's the only one left in the pack and it'll be able to monitor it's own internal state so you'll never throw away another good sausage.
Not only that but as part of the smarter home network, your Smart Sausage will be able to monitor your bowels on the way down and tweet any medical recommendations!
Almost sold
There are some good hardware upgrades there, but NO KEYBOARD?
The physical keyboard is the only thing that makes using things like the python development environment and the terminal in any way tolerable!
And no, there's not really a joke or any sarcasm in that. I actually like being able to do that sort of thing on my phone.
The sad thing is that it's still probably the best phone on the market for the likes of me.
These are not weaknesses in SSL/TLS
They are weaknesses in the current PKI. And yes, the PKI is thoroughly broken. There are too many vendors supported by default in all the browsers, virtually guaranteeing that at least one is vulnerable to some sort of attack.
Perhaps the browser makers should perform a thorough audit of each authority before allowing it in?
Or perhaps it's time for some other clever PKI scheme... not a clue how you'd go about making a better one though. There must be a way!
Posted in Well, that about wraps it up for the NBN
Umm... you functionally moronic?
Seriously, the NBN is about putting in decent, modern infrastructure, which is exactly what this country needs. Doing that at less than 100MB in this day and age would be ridiculous and unlikely any cheaper.
Posted in Bitcoin collapses on malicious trade
One compromised account
One, single, compromised account managed to crash the market completely. Wow.
And the reactions to the 'rollback' are understandable. What's done is done. Anyone that bought low (and had half a brain) would have moved the coins out of mtgox as soon as possible. The rest is just compensation to people who lost out.
Also it's amusing that the guy says Bitcoin will be back around 17.5 when the market is restored! Undoing a bunch of trades surely doesn't magically make it worth what it was before...?
This whole thing just shows exactly how shaky the bitcoin economy is. The high value is there simply because the volumes are so damned low. Any one of the early adopters that's sitting on a few thousand 'coins' could destroy the whole thing at a stroke.
Posted in Well, that about wraps it up for the NBN
Shove it where the sun don't shine, Turnbull
I live in Perth. If I could get reliable 10 Mbit maybe I wouldn't care so much about the NBN, but sure as hell something needs to be done if I can't get more than 3-4 in a state capital! And that's on a good day!
Australia still doesn't seem to get this "internet" thing. Retailers haven't realised they actually have to compete with overseas offerings now, and the government doesn't seem to have realised that part of the reason Australians don't use the 'net all that much is because the infrastructure is out of the stone age.
Oh, a mixed estate
I thought we were going to be investigating hypervisor stacking.
Running KVM on Hyper-V under VMWare ESX, just for a laugh...
That devaluing has a purpose
The purpose being to keep money flowing. If money never devalues then people hoard it.
And so you get what we had here (before the theft), people hoarding masses and masses of bitcoins, but the actual volume of the bitcoin economy being so low and so unstable that this one guy could have caused the value to plummet by selling up. And he didn't even have that huge a treasure trove.
I hope you haven't sunk too much 'IRL' cash into the scheme, but if you have then... well good luck I guess. You're going to need it.
Riiiiight
And it's totally not a scheme for early adopters to hoard coins and cash out at the expense of later users... totally, yet this guy somehow has a hoard of 25,000 of them.... And if the market couldn't handle about 0.25% of the coin supply being put up for sale then the bitcoin 'economy' is clearly mostly made up of these hoarders.
Also if there's no way to show or pursue theft then somebody also f*cked up the system design.
Posted in Asus Eee Pad Transformer Android tablet
Probably not yet
Nvidia haven't released open source graphics drivers for these for Tegra2 yet, there's no free alternative as far as I know, and I'm pretty sure there's no closed source driver for generic, non-android linux either.
Good plan, but not quite available yet.
At least they could give us a way to switch most of it off
That would be nice.
I've found a way to stop the irritating preview panels appearing by blocking some of the stuff involved with adblock.
I too miss the days when there was just a logo, a text input box and some results.
Posted in Bitcoin slump follows senators’ threats
Shakes the establishment?
LOL.
Some think of the children type mentioned the drug trade and Bitcoin to a couple of Senators who figured they could use it for some more "tough on crime" political posturing. That is all.
Note that while it may be out of their control at the moment, if made illegal it will wither up and die as the mainstream avoid it.
Also LOL @ the standard "OMG we're enslaved by money" rant.
Posted in Bitcoin slump follows senators’ threats
I'm not sure it's a matter of being keen on it
So much as seeing what it is - a flawed attempt at wresting monetary control away from government. It suffers from a variety of problems (mostly related to the limited supply and mining) and its image isn't helped by the fanbase of people who don't think they should have to pay any taxes, ever....
Posted in US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin
Still not a threat
Anything that can (and will) be squashed with a simple law is no threat.
Maybe you and I see the definition of the word threat differently. Whilst it does have claws and teeth, I wouldn't consider a housecat a threat. In the same way I don't think anyone would see bitcoin as a threat. It's not only.
If you want to change taxation, if you want to reform the monetary system (and this meme does seem to be growing), if you want to reduce the control that the government has over everything, these are not bad aims. Picking up a new currency, especially a flawed one, is not going to work without associated political reforms.
And I'll repeat - it doesn't matter what currency you use, the government can and will find a way to tax you.
Posted in US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin
Adding people ups the value
Or haven't you noticed?
And therefore those that already have bitcoins get better off the more people that use it. Not because they get more bitcoins, but because they have more bitcoins already, and the new miners can't make anything like the same amount as the production rate of coins drops sharply over time.
Posted in US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin
Look, I object to high taxes as much as the next fella
And I'm as suspicious as anyone else as to what the government spend it on.
However, for bitcoin to be taken seriously as a threat to entrenched interests, it would have to be able to be taken seriously on a large scale by a wide selection of the population. I'm quite comfortable predicting that it won't be.
Add to that that making bitcoin transactions and conversion into 'real' money illegal acts would be both easy as a stroke of a pen and effective in massively reducing the potential audience and therefore its viability as a currency. No, it's not a threat to anyone.
A real popular movement with a replacement currency that was actually viable, sure. Bitcoin, no.
As for your Rothschild quotes, well you may want to think about applying them to the early adopters and their very profitable early mining activities. They may not control the currency, but they sure as hell made sure they got the lion's share of it early on.
Posted in US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin
WOW, seriously?
Bitcoin doesn't threaten anyone, it's a niche attempt at a currency that's going to fall flat on its arse.
Leaving aside the built in hyper-deflation, bitcoin is no threat to anyone that wants to spy on transactions or tax you because (and this is if it isn't flat out banned) -
1 - It stores the details of its provenance, certainly the last transaction. Unless you launder it. There's a good reason money laundering is illegal in the real world. Expect it to become so online also.
2 - You will be taxed if you have significant bitcoin income, one way or another. There are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. Never forget this.
But a threat to existing interests? Sorry but that's laughable. Worst case for bitcoin is that it's made illegal. Not because it couldn't survive, but because the numbers of people needed to keep it useful wouldn't be there.
Posted in US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin
Yup, interesting idea but fundamentally flawed, IMHO
Over a third of all the bitcoins that will ever exist are already in the hands of a very few people. In the theoretical situation in which bitcoin actually goes into wide use, these people get to be instantly rich due to massive deflation, because no matter how many people join in, the rate of new bitcoins being created is held constant, approaching a limit somewhere around 21 million.
Massive and continuing deflation will not only make these current holders of bitcoin rich, but will also mean that nobody spends them. If the value of currency is going to be more tomorrow than it is today, why hold on to it?
In a 'real' currency this isn''t as much of a problem, because people still have to eat and therefore spend. Bitcoin is not going to be anyone's primary currency in the mid term though, just a secondary.
So what should sensible folks do now? Probably, I think, mine some bitcoins and hang on to them for a while, just in case ten years down the line the deflationary disaster has somehow been averted and 1 bitcoin is suddenly worth a million quid....
Morally? Who cares?
Now contractually, that's different. Using GPL and similar copyleft licenses, companies are legally bound to give back any improvements or derivative works they distribute. This seems to me like a great arrangement - if companies want to sell FOSS stuff they can, but everybody gets rights to the source code of binaries they receive. Plus additions and improvements make their way back up the line, slowly, so the hobbyists and other geeks and freaks are happy.
Whether the benefit gained by the firm is 'morally' equal to the amount they give back is irrelevant.
Morality only ever seems to come into the conversation when you throw BSD zealots into the mix, because apparently giving things away with no restriction is a morally superior action. Also not using this right to clam up and give nothing back is supposed to be the moral thing to do. Witness the outrage when some wireless drivers were copied from BSD to Linux, improved and put under GPL....
Posted in Digital shoppers ripped off @.com.au
Let me know when they look into physical goods
Especially cars!
Australia is even more ripped off than the UK. The price of goods from foreign providers, including shipping halfway across the planet, should not be cheaper than buying locally. But it is, and by far more than the GST.
Just a shame you''re not allowed to get cars shipped from other countries.
We've been trolled by Nokia right?
They went from the undisputed world leader in handsets to a company that put out so many slightly different phones that nobody knew the difference, all of which were adequate at best. Destroyed by their own internal competition, management squabbling and adherence to an outdated, broken GUI system.
So then they announced a total turnaround, a move to a new OS (even though they had invested several years in a next-gen OS of their own), new management strategies, new everything!
And other than the OS the fist major new strategy is .... wait for it ... exactly the same strategy that screwed them up last time!
This has to be a joke of some form. In a month or two they're going to announce the new Meego-running Nokia N and the Nokia F featurephone. All other models will be canned, this Winphone 7 thing will be abandoned and Elop is going to go on TV just to say "psych!"
Right?
This is why we can't hve nice things
First the AHNULD version, and now the Underworld version! Great! Why not lets just go piss on Phil's grave?
OTOH, Bill Nighy is a good move, he was in Sean of the Dead so he can do no wrong.
Is this not overkill?
Surely you just need to get Dalvik running on another OS rather than running a whole VM for this?
Or am I just not thinking cloudy enough?
Humbug I say!
Posted in Danish embassy issues MARMITE WAFFLE
As an expat, a homebrewer and a marmite lover...
... let me say - I should be so lucky!
Paying Australian specialty-shop prices for Brit-Mite* is no fun at all!
(*it has to be relabelled due to Marmite already being a thing here, it's another yeast extract spread but it's just not the same)
Can we all agree now?
That if you put information online in a way that it's accessible to anybody else at all, you've made it public?
And that even if you haven't made it accessible to anyone else, you've probably made it public anyway?
And that if you don't want information to get into the hands of hackers/your boss/your mum, it's best not to publish it in the first place?
Fortified with vitamins and iron!
Have they banned cornflakes too?
Posted in 3D fad fades for Yanks
3D at the cinema will remain a novelty
Until 3D at home takes off.
3D at home will never take off until there's some decent 3D content available. There's really not very much of that around, and the price of a 3D Bluray movie is currently in the awesomely ridiculous range.
No, sorry, I'm not paying 60 bucks for that post-processed fake-stereoscopic nonsense, nor for that hastily re-rendered version of a five year old animated movie.
I like stereoscopic 3D, but it's hard to see how the industry could make the market for it any worse if they tried.
Posted in Catch of the Day hauls A$80m
Online retail in australia...
“It is still early days in Australia when it comes to online retail and to support our next phase of growth we were open to overseas investors who could share a different perspective into the online retail market, as well as bring new skills, advice and contacts to further our growth and expansion,” they said.
I'm sure a different perspective would be useful. it would be most useful if applied to the Australian government who make Aussie retail the joke it is at the moment. Why would I bother ordering from an Australia site when I (as a private citizen) can get good delivered from overseas more cheaply than the retailers are allowed to buy them from the importers? Importers who, AFAICT, are given legal monopoly status which allows them to set whatever price they like and gives retailers no recourse to the international marketplace.
Of course high prices on imports are part of the idea it seems, to stimulate Australian business. Except I'm afraid I don't know of any Aussie branded TV or computer hardware, and if there is any I'm sure they're just a brand on top of chinese, korean, japanese or other asian manufacturing.
Time for Oz to drop this spectacular legal/monetary screwup and embrace the free market.
Who missed the point?
The delay of latency may be for every packet, but this improvement only saves one round trip when an SSL connection is set up. That does not happen for every packet.
Not yet
There are a lot of problems with PKI, a hell of a lot. But it's still better than nothing at the present time.
I fully agree that browsers now ship far too many 'trusted' roots, however there is currently a reasonable expectation that the nerd sitting at the next table at the coffeeshop is probably not going to be able to silently hijack everything you do with a browser plugin. This day may come, but we're not there yet.
I've just started reading the draft paper
It eliminates the certificate exchange steps.
I haven't finished reading the paper yet so I'm not sure how they justify this, but so far it's not sounding like a great security move. It uses a mechanism that seems to be related to resuming dropped connections.
Whilst I do understand the protocol pretty intimately, I'm no security researcher. I wonder what Moxie Marlinspike will make of it....
Update to previous message
I *think* they just left the cert authentication bits out of their "False Start" TLS handshake diagram, instead of skipping it durng False Start handshake. But here's the kicker for me -
"Note that the TLS client cannot infer the presence of an authenticated server until all handshake messages have been received. With False Start, unlike with the default handshake behavior, applications are able to send data before this point has been reached"
Then -
"the security goal is to ensure that if anyone at all can decrypt the application data sent in a False Start, this must be the legitimate peer: while an attacker could be influencing the handshake ... the attacker should not be able to benefit from this. "
So TLS False Start allows some application data to be sent before full authentication has been assured, but an attacker shouldn't be able to get at it. As yet I don't understand what they're doing in-depth enough to say if this leaves security holes. However, the idea of sending data before the handshake has been properly authenticated is a weird one and as I said before, I'd be really interested to get the insight of one of the hardcore SSL hackers like Mr Marlinspike.
Didn't know I was an elite
Guess I am though!
By legacy I assume they mean
Anything not .Net, right?
.Net is hardware independent so that programs can run on windows of any flavour. Good strategy I suppose.
I gues sit all depends just how legacy we're talking too - I don't think it'll be long before someone ports DosBox to Win 8 on ARM, then you can run your real legacy apps!
As someone that's been toying with OpenCL...
..I'm impressed at the performance figures.
Now if they would just put some effort into fixing the damned OpenCL compiler and runtime everyone could be happy. The total lack of feedback from the compiler on about half of all compilation errors is annoying. The fact that OpenCL kernels often compile and run and do nothing when they have blatant programming errors also doesn't help.
Still, forefront of technology and all that....
Posted in Linux kernel runs inside web browser
LOL
Apparently not so much yet, the iPhone browser won't run it, instead the emulator puts up a "Browser not supported" message.
I got it running in Firefox on my N900 though :)
Posted in Fags flash butts in nightclubs
They are for people who have quit the "real" stuff
After smoking for 15 years it took me just a couple of weeks with one of these (different brand, same idea) to decide that the "real" ones tasted bad. TBH I was probably close to quitting anyway, but these made it much, much easier. And I didn't even use the ones containing nicotine, just the flavoured vapour. Now I puff on one of these every once in a while, but not every day.
I'm not sure I see the purpose of the proximity sensor thingy, other than "Hey, cool, you use one too!" and a bit of a conversation starter.
Do people actually use these in non-smoking venues? I got the feeling that it looks enough like smoking that staff and other patrons might kick up a fuss.
And one last thing, el-reg, whether they actually release any nicotine or not, they seem to help a lot of people get off the fags so are to be encouraged IMHO. Of course the government will get around to banning them sooner or later.
LOL
The stereotypes aren't entirely unfounded, it's true.
OTOH try watching something like Ghost In The Shell sometime, I'd recommend the Stand Alone Complex series. No suspiciously young girls, no tentacle rape. Also no spoon-feeding every little story detail like western media, it leaves a bit more to be figured out and thought about.
I enjoy them, once in a while. They do sci-fi very well.
When they're not drawing a 200 foot tall monster destroying tokyo with it's hundreds of giant prehensile penises that is.
It can't be opt-in
Because then the trackers and advertisers would instantly have every person suddenly opted out. The user is a commodity and while not that many people will bother to opt-out, almost nobody is going to opt in. The advertisers would argue that most people are fine with being tracked (never mind that most people don't know about it....) and that it unfairly burdens them or some such thing.
Basically there's a lot of money in it, and if you start to take that away from big advertising firms like Google, you'll suddenly see them get very, very interested in buying their own politicians and laws.
What a surprise
The advertising giant is against user privacy options because they could affect revenue!
This won't get through I assume, but it would be nice. At the moment a combination of Better Privacy, Adblock Plus and Cookie Monster for firefox stop most of the client-side tracking that I don't like, but there's nothing to stop trackers from just using my IP address or using the more nefarious 'evercookie' methods.
Having a legal requirement to leave me the hell alone would be good. Having tracking as "opt-in" instead of the usual "opt-out" would be even better, but that'll never happen in a million years!
So what's next on the linux phone front?
I had an Openmoko freerunner which was dreadful in terms of both hardware and software, largely due to bad management of the project. Really, you're going to have one of your so called star developers spend the next six months redesigning the on-screen keyboard for the seventh time? You don't think maybe getting phone calls stable first would be a good thing? LOL...
Now I have an N900, which is fantastic because it's a Nokia linux phone, and we all know that (until recently) Nokia stood for quality. Even when they lost their way in terms of being cutting edge, you knew with a nokia that it would damn well work or they weren't going to sell it. But Maemo was merged into Meego, and then that was shelved. This seems mostly to have been because of management territoriality causing profits to disappear and competition to be ignored.
So... what next?
Who's going to make my next full-linux phone? Or am I going to have to build it myself out of gumstix and gaffer-tape?
@David W.
"There was a warning (vague, albeit) about copy protection, and the software itself wasn't malware."
Err... define malware?
The Sony XCP software was apparently installed silently before a EULA was displayed, and the EULA didn't mention taht it installed hidden software. It then ate resources, caused bluescreens, put in measures that allowed processes to hide themselves and generally caused trouble. Then it prevented you format shifting music you had bought, except to a few (mostly Sony) devices.
Whether it's criminal depends on how you interpret the actions against various laws about using computers without permission, laws Sony are currently trying to bend as myuch as possible in their favour when it comes to people accessing their own playstations without Sony's permission...
sony shouldn't be shut down, they should be ignored and left to wither and die.
187? Amateurs
They should take a look at Sony to see how the pro's do it.
Holy Carp!
Australia, government minister, technology related.... and it's not a huge jar of pure, condensed, filtered, unashamed idiocy!
Wow!
