Posts by David Hicks
1061 posts • joined Tuesday 22nd April 2008 12:44 GMT
So 80% of the time it can pick between a known list of 158 people?
And this is supposed to be good enough for use in court? Holy hell...
With a false positive rate of 20% on such a small sample it's next to useless for picking people out of the general population, surely? All you could hope to get is "this guy we already suspect writes in a similar style to the release", which has got to qualify for pretty weak circumstantial evidence at best.
DOH! Reading fail...
... and there I was assuming that these guys had claimed to have tracked down the people releasing "Anonymous" email, not just "anonymous" email.
This is going to get rapidly more confusing.
If you have to go to these extents
In order to get people to not just throw out your data, or give it a veneer of respectability, then you must already know you're peddling bullshit.
You're missing the point
It's not about whether the cookies themselves contain identifiable information.
It's about tracking. It can be a random number in the cookie itself, but when half the internet brings in something from doubleclick or google-analytics then google and the other ad networks can track your browsing habits and get a good picture of everything you do online.
Some people have a problem with this.
Seriously?
He'd get worse if he was in Saudi Arabia so it's OK?
As long as you're just a little bit better than the worst thing you can think of, then everything is just fine?
You shouldn't be allowed to vote.
But that's exactly what it needs to say
An online shop for instance, could not track until someone clicks an "add to cart" button, or a buy button. Then they say "we need cookies to carry on or the site won't work" and the prospective buyer then makes the decision.
I'm not sure anything more than session cookies are required even then.
A forum site which remembers the user via cookies could survive with session cookies if it made people log in every time, and be login-free if the user agrees to persistent cookies.
There are many ways to minimise cookie use, and there are many ways the user can be told (or asked) "cookies or no site for you".
If you need it pointing out who are the good guys ...
... and who are the bad guys in this situation, shoot yourself now.
A hacker group, variously called script kiddies, a great hope for the future, youthful activists or just plain terrorists is demanding - get this - that the US government treat a prisoner awaiting trial as a human being.
And yet some people will have a problem with this, somehow. Despite the history of 'innocent until proven guilty', despite the prohibitions on 'cruel and unusual punishment', we saw that those running the show had no regard for human rights when guantanamo bay was set up. We saw that nothign had changed when Obama forgot to close it down. This is just another in a growing set of things that ought to be making any true patriots of the USA scream bloody murder. Except those that wave flags and crow about how great the US is are more likely to side with the military because Manning is perceived as the enemy. Not a US citizen, not a soldier (that they claim to venerate) but the enemy. And the enemy deserves no rights, is not human, for some reason.
A website does indeed have access to cookies it creates
Now think about the average website. That facebook 'like' button is a script brought in from facebook that can set and read cookies, regardless of whether you have a facebook account, they can track you across anywhere with such a button.
A lot of pages bring in stuff from google-analytics, and that gets to set/read a cookie also.
And then there are the ad networks, and the bigger ones will have content across millions of sites. Hell, this very 'reply to post' page brings in scripts from doubleclick (google now, I believe).
So it's not as simple as cookies only being set for the site you're on, it's cookies being set for hundreds of sites you never visited explicitly but were brought in anyway.
Take a look in your cookie dialogue in your browser. There will be hundreds. This is why I recommend use of the "Cookie Monster" extension with firefox, it lets you control this stuff and switch off third party cookies while allowing the first-party ones you need to make the sites you actually visit work correctly.
That would be the "do not track" header, surely?
That the browsers are now putting in place.
Or you could, you know, not track anyone until/unless they actually log in to your site having clicked through your terms of use. Casual browsers should not be tracked by default.
Why does everything need a session? And why is it a problem to have a session in the URL for most online activites in which any sort of session security is secondary?
The thing it's a subsidy
Corporate genitalia aside, the crapware subsidises the OS cost, or the full machine cost. It's one of the reasons the likes of Dell can sell windows machines cheaper than they can linux machines (volume and support costs being the other reasons of course).
Either PC makers will 'get' this and PCs go up in price but come comparatively crapware-free, or 'signature' just becomes a premium windows PC branding and almost nobody buys it because it's more expensive.
OTOH, is it that hard to run "PC Decrapifier" or similar on a new box?
It's what I've always done.
Posted in iPhone to whup Sony PSP 2
Which is about a third of the nintendo figures
And I wonder how many actual unique customers there are, because I account for three of those 60 mil PSPs due to theft or damage.
There is a world of difference between a $2 causal game a decent handheld game. The question though is not whether there is a difference, it's whether anybody cares.
Every time I hear of the application of laws made in the last decade
I'm happier about my move to Australia.
No, it's not exactly a shining beacon of freedom and has it's own problems but they don't seem to be quite as stupid as the UK, and I'm not quite as familiar with (and contemptuous of) the political system here yet
Posted in iPhone to whup Sony PSP 2
Hard to tell
They've not only competing with iPhone though are they, they're trying to compete with the handheld gaming king - Nintendo - who have led the pack since the original gameboy days. And this time around they have the 3DS, which is out now and has 3D and everything so it must be great!
And the Sony model will be a lot more pricey than the Nintendo offerings. And they let the last handheld platform just kinda languish for a few years. And there's quite a bit of bad-will towards them anyway.
Going to be tricky to pull of a huge success.
Just give up the pretence at legitimacy
and shoot the guy already. That way people will know you don't fuck with the military. Hell, why not take out his family too, so people know you're serious. Nobody snitches on the mob^H^H^HUS Military and gets away with it.
I got some sort of facebook popup/intermediate page...
...when I logged in the other day, asking me if I'd like to share my phone number and address. And then I noticed on the sidebar that it was offering to find more friends for me if it could just have my email address and email account password please? We won't keep hold of it! Honest!
How about no.
I'm not surprised that the less savvy end up giving ever more data to the beast. I am surprised we haven't seen more fallout from that yet.
I'm sick of this nonsense
I don't care who got there first. I din't give a rats arse.
Stop trying to divide off and claim parts of our language you miserable corporate bastards. If you want to trademark and claim words as yours then at least have the decency to make up some new ones.
Tux, because linux had app stores before either party. And they're free...
Posted in Australians safe from Mortal Kombat
So it'll just get pirated then?
Like what happened with the banned versions of Manhunt 2 etc?
Personally I enjoyed manhunt. Playing it on a projector but otherwise in the dark was a genuinely dark, brooding and scary experience. But people just focus on the fact you could kill bad guys with a shopping bag...
Posted in BT Home Hub 3 ADSL Wi-Fi router
Fob?
What happened to the "fast setup" button?
Does it have one of those? Because I like those.
Have you been living under a rock?
Let's see...
Maemo is/was debian based. That's a phone OS, by the way. Pretty embedded. And then there was the hacked around debian that came on my NAS, the WD Sharespace, and what came with the sheevaplug which was ubuntu. You could run debian on the Openmoko. You can run it on the Playstation 3.
As far as I can tell, RHEL doesn't even support ARM or MIPS, only x86/64, Itanium and POWER variants, so it would have to be very hacked around for a lot of embedded use.
Maybe in your line of work you only see RHEL based systems. I'm guessing that's because you mostly work with Power chips then?
Since moving here I have noticed that the online presence...
... of the average business in Aus is not wuite up to what I expected, coming from the UK.
You get used to it pretty quick though, and I quite like actually going to the shops now. it would be nice if the price of stuff came down though. It seems that nearly every imported good is ridiculously pricey because some distributor has an exclusive deal and can't be worked around, or the law protects 'official' import channels and makes all others illegal. This seems to apply to everything from books to computer equipment and is justified under some misguided notion that it protects Australian businesses.
When something can be ordered online and shipped to you for 50% of the price in the shops here, something isn't right, and it sure as hell doesn't put Australian business at an adantage.
I've found debian to be better than ubuntu for a while now
I speak as a software developer, not your granny and what she can use, so please read with that in mind. Debian, for me, has *just worked* for a number of years now, in a way windows hasn't and ubuntu hasn't either.
The install process was not quite as polished or painless as either of those, but the end result was I didn't have to spend days tracking down third party drivers (windows!) nor did I have to rebuild alsa from source every time the OS gets upgraded because the one that ships with the OS doesn't recognise the headphone port (ubuntu!).
I've run debian on everything from a 266MHz arm NAS device to a z series mainframe. Awesome, solid, OS.
Posted in What sealed Nokia's fate?
You're right, there must be different N900s
I guess I got one of the good ones, that boots up reasonably quickly, takes decent pictures, works well as a GPS, does flash fine, if a little slowly (yours doesn't?), and works brilliantly not only as a net device on its own but also as a 3G wireless modem for my linux machines.
I'll agree that the manufacturer totally lost it though.
Instead of incrementally developing the OS, adding stuff, making improvements and fixes and delivering them (the usual linux model), and then delivering improved hardware as and when they could, they ended up doing the same thing that killed Openmoko - "Oooh! Shiny! Let's ditch it all and start again!". So you end up with two years of no real progress, no released devices and no income. In the meantime the managers who weren't directly responsible for screwing up the maemo unit were busy screwing up the rest of the company and whoops, suddenly the 'next big thing' doesn't have the time to mature, despite the fact it's 7 years old.
Why so many rabid folks?
It's Sony's right to ban whoever they want from their servers. Absolutely true.
Doesn't mean they aren't arseholes for doing it.
Remember kids, just because something is within the law doesn't make it good, nice or proper. A lot of people feel that they own the ps3, that linux and the network were advertised features, and that, hell, if they want to run non-approved software on it then whose business is that. Same as with the iPhone, same as anything else.
As for the cheating - PC game services somehow survive and prosper with in an open system, why not the PS3?
It never got quite that easy
You still needed a way to install it, that's not provided by the default firmware and needed to be unlocked.
And that wasn't quite all, don't know the specifics, but there were still one or two keys to be found when the lawsuit kicked off, and all has gone relatively quiet since then.
Posted in Apple cripples iBooks for jailbreakers
I agree
I'm not really sure.
Do I have to sign a license agreement before they take my money?
No? Then I'd say I own that copy of the software, and like a paperback book, can scribble in it and alter it to my heart's desire as long as I don't give away or sell copies, or claim it was my work.
I donh't think he did much wrong either
But given what's going on at the moment you would have thought some common sense was a useful skill in a PR droid. Maybe not though.
OTOH how many people outside of techy circles even know what a crypto key is, let alone what one looks like?
Posted in iPad TWO: What, already?
After hours of peering at SSL hex dumps
I wasn't thinking very metaphorically. So sue me!
Boycott affect them? Maybe not
However if I cease to give them any of my money, I know I'm not funding this bullshit.
So it would be nice to see this behaviour boycotted out of existence, I'm well aware that will never happen.
It's enough for me that I'm not helping them harass people and destroy ownership rights.
Posted in iPad TWO: What, already?
Why is there what appears to be a razor ad?
In the middle of the story?
Weird...
So Apple finally caved and are putting a forward facing camera in the new one?
Well let me be the first to say DUH!!!
This form factor is perfect for video calling, they missed a trick with the first model. Unless of course it was part of the plan all along...
New iPad 2! Does all the shit you assumed the first one would do!
Holy Crap!
A big corporation promoting the technically literate, and what's more those from within instead of taking part in the usual "Musical Execs" game.
Colour me amazed.
For all that it's mostly an army of me-too morons
It would appear to have a very competent special forces unit as well, most likely made up of disgruntled and amoral black-hats with proxies and botnets all over the place.
Piss them off at your peril, it would seem.
@Cameron
Sorry, sarcasm doesn't always come across well on the internet.
I was protesting that no, they're not good, they don't let you do what you want with your hardware at all, and that this sucks.
I wouldn't have such a huge objection to the whole thing if they released an easy way to run an alternate OS, from the ground up, so at least you could use the hardware in the way you wanted. Instead they do their damnedest to make sure you can't run your own stuff on there at all.
Posted in Marry Microsoft, analyst tells Nokia
Jaysus....
Nokia were once the driver of the phone market. The only way to ever get back there is to start driving it again. For that they need maemo/meego.
It's that simple.
Signing up with MS would be the last straw for a lot of people. Nokia always did things their way, and their way was great. The last few years have seen an explosion in the number of models they sell, all very similar and all equaly behind the curve. Make something new, pretty, slim and meego based. Please.
How would that help?
Unless they're moving to IPv6 then you'll still need an IP address whether it's dynamic or static!
Nowhere? Really?
So that's why they release that open edition of the system software?
No PSN but run what you like?
Or even bootloader documentation so we can put linux on it and be done with it?
Sure Sony are telling you what to do with it, and trying to prevent you from using your hardware as you see fit. At every turn.
Posted in Archos 101 8GB Android tablet
Finally, something in a decent size!
All the other android tablets seem to have come out in 'not much bigger than a phone' or 'too big for your pocket but not big enough to be useful' sizes, this one actually looks the right size.
The camera on the front is perfect because the 'killer app' for these things has got to be video calling via skype or similar.
That it's missing 3g is no great shame, and the price is significantly less than apple's too. May actually have to look into this...
Posted in UK.gov braces for Anonymous hacklash
Legitimate protest and crime
"Legitimate political protest involves no crime."
What on earth are you on about?
If the laws are bad then legitimate political protest can certainly involve crime as currently defined. Look at the civil rights and suffragettes movements. Look at all sorts of things.
I'm not saying it's the case here, but sometimes you have no choice but to break the law in order to make a legitimate protest.
Or are you one of those that thinks direct action is always wrong and that laws should be changed for the better through the democratic protest?
In which case.... ROFL. The very idea of democratic change for the better directed by the people! I've rarely heard anything so damned hilarious!
Fraud? Settled?
How the F*CK do you "settle" a fraud charge. After scamming hundreds of thousands of people out of money there should be jail time, total asset seizure and a good faith effort on behalf of the government to return the money to the people who were deferauded.
Not a fine and a promise to be a good boy from now on.
Jesus christ...
Posted in UK tech retailers are rubbish
Bust?
I thought PC world and the likes were more likely to go bust because they're losing so much money.
Even the 'normal' folks don't like them any more. It's now common knowledge that they're overpriced, their stuff is behind the times and they don't know what they're talking about.
Buying from an established online firm (and there are many) is every bit as safe.
Linux on ARM is not new
I've been running it for a good 5 or 6 years now. It supports dozens of devices and multiple processor variants.
Not to mention the millions of Android devices out there in the world.
Sorry to say it, but that's rather an ignorant comment...
Posted in Samsung N350 dual-core netbook
Dual core good
Battery life - bad but not terrible
Hard drive instead of solid-state storage - lame.
Apart from the new processor, things really haven't progressed much since the eee901, nor have the prices dropped.
I don't care if you're in the "make 'em cheaper" or the "make 'em faster" camp, some real progress on either of those fronts would be good!
Posted in The Last Airbender up for nine Razzies
Vampires Suck....
Actually does deserve to be on the list because it was as slow and bad as the films it took the piss out of.
The main actress does a *fantastic* Mary-Sue (sorry, I mean Bella) Swan impersonation, to the point where "Vampires Suck" is a close contender for being actually as painful to watch as "Eclipse"
Posted in End of the line for ID cards
See you in ten years
Maybe 20.
But it'll come up again, oh yes, because the people behind the scenes still want it, and politicians always seem to cave to them in the end.
In some ways the credit crunch is a very good thing as there seemed to be no other way there was ever going to be a check on government profligacy or invasion of privacy.
Posted in Computacenter joins cloud club
How is this new?
Haven't you been able to outsource your email needs for two decades now?
Seriously, screw "the cloud"
Posted in Nokia C7 smartphone
C'mon Nokia! Change the game!
And whilst you're at it let's have Meego punted into centre stage eh? Between phonezilla and chipzilla you'd think there would be something worth selling by now!
Posted in When one oligopoly screws another
Not a truly free market
"If there really is gross profiteering going on, then vendors will appear who are able to.undercut exiating retailers. If they *don't* appear, that tells you that gross margins may be good, but that nett margins aren't."
Part of the problem seems to be that parallel imports by retailers are either illegal or otherwise prevented, probably through some perversion of IP law (Remember Lik-Sang in the UK anyone?)
So if the wholesalers are gouging, and if you try to buy from another country you get the law pointed at you.... what is there you can do?
Better Privacy, Adblock Plus and Cookie Monster
Firefox extensions, people should use them. Better Privacy allows control of LSOs, Cookie Monster lets me control normal cookies and ABP lets me control what content my browser loads.
This set allows me to have some confidence that I'm in control of the information being stored and handed out by my computer.
For instance, there's no need for facebook to know when I'm visiting other sites, yet they do because of the facebook buttons you now find everywhere. Solution - facebook content and cookies are blocked outside of the facebook domain.
LSOs are deleted on closing the browser, most sites don't get to place cookies at all and I don't retrieve or run behind-the-scenes javascript from google or doubleclick.
As a result the web is a faster, cleaner experience.
Posted in Archos 43 16GB Android PMP
Sounds great
Now what sort of 3G sigal does it get?
Oh I see, it's not a phone.... doesn't cut it for me then, device convergence is the way to go at that size, IMHO.
Posted in Western Digital My Book Live Nas box
Amazed at the transfer rate
As I have a WD sharespace and it can barely manage half that. They must have finally put a decent processor in the thing, because the sharespace hits the CPU limit when chucking out 24MBps, and that's using ftp. Samba and scp are even worse.
I could have sworn I've already seen
... glasses with wing mirrors.
