Posts by David Hicks
1066 posts • joined Tuesday 22nd April 2008 12:44 GMT
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.
Posted in World+Dog says 'no thanks' to 3D TV
Where's the content?
I bought a 3d tv months ago. Besides Monsters vs Aliens that came with the tv (and doesn't work in a PS3), where's the content?
Go into a BluRay shop and you just can't find anything 3D. There are very, very few PS3 games available in 3D. To drive a 3D tv from a PX you need a bang-up-to-date nVidia card and even then it dowsn't work for everything.
People will buy as and when 3d is no extra cost and there is actually something to watch on the damn thing.
Posted in Gifts for the Geeks
I'm sorry but ... a USB endoscope?
Holy moley.... why?
Also zero points for guessing what this will be used for in reality.
X86 not the answer perhaps?
Doesn't the Power architecture clock much higher these days?
Sod the roaming charges
Roaming charges or no roaming charges, being able to use a GPS system when you can't get a mobile signal is important for it to be really useful.
Well, important to me because sometimes, just sometimes, I leave the city and end up lost in places with no network.....
Posted in Apple iPad vs... the rest
Perhaps the smartbook could have worked
If, instead of showing them off at CES and the like for several years in a row, one or two were actually released.
Yes, I know there's the Toshiba AC100 now, but it's too little and too late, they should have been out in '09 when the manufacturers were proudly showing them off.
As for the iPad - is it the only 9-inch tablet so far?
The others seem small by comparison.
Posted in Asus Eee PC 1015PEM
Agreed
The only netbook I'd be in the market for now would be a revamped 901.
9 (maybe 10) inch, a decent amount of solid state storage, 2+ GB of RAM, nVidia Ion GFX, decent battery life. I can cram linux on afterwards but would prefer not to give money to MS.
Yeah, the 901 was and still is a fantastic machine. I've replaced most of the parts in mine over time so I now have one with 2GB of RAM, 68GB of fast solid state storage and a replacment wireless card and camera so it's now MacOS X compatible :)
500,000?
For 6,000 downloads?
83 quid a pop? Good lord.....
YES
Of course they're supposed to go and solicit information. Get it any way they can, it's called journalism.
You think investigative journalists just sit and scratch their arses until someone drops all the info they need on their laps?
Posted in WikiLeaks.org resurrected in US of A
That's a mighty convenient assertion
People will die if we reveal the dirty games governments play!
LOL.
It must be hell living in fear like you, constantly wondering which nut-job is going to push the button this week.
The truth is that more open government, more accountable government with less secrets, would have to behave better. Yes, there is a need for secret communication between ambassadors and central government, there's even a good case for espionage. What there's not a good case for is the sealing of anything and everything, for decades. because it might cause someone some embarrassing, or it might reveal that the way our governments run things does not live up to our ethical expectations.
Yes, I'm sorry, I do have a moral code, and anyone getting my vote needs to demonstrate at least a significant overlap with that.
To be able to cast my vote responsibly I need to know what's going on, unless there is an immediate and compelling security reason not to. Most of the stuff released by wikileaks does not meet that criterion.
Or are we just supposed to vote for people on the strength of what they say and how they appear?
Are we to continue to be treated as children by those in power?
And if so, what is democracy but a game used by the empowered way to put down revolution?
It's Lik-Sang again...
It's sickening that companies can source stuff from all over the planet, taking advantage of materials, labour and tax regimes as they see fit, but when someone else notices a business opportunity in a similar vein, they get sued.
Just more proof that the western world is in thrall to big business.
There does seem to be a way around it though - set up a website in the foreign country, but aimed at the UK market. Surely that can't be illegal yet?
If any of this corruption and dealing is news to you
You were probably inadequately cynical in the first place.
Humanity and its leaders are as corrupt and tribal as ever. You only have to read all the people who attack Assange's character or rant about national security to realise that a lot of folks still worship authority and power structures, and anything that upsets the alpha monkeys upsets them too.
If these people didn't behave like little emperors and didn't classify anything and everything as a matter of course, we wouldn't need wikileaks. But they do, they behave like power-drunk arseholes, using OUR money and OUR mandate, without considering that they should ever be responsible to us.
I hope when Assange does meet his sticky end, ior gets himself disappeared, that more people will wake up and smell the bullshit.
Posted in Visa approves wireless payment chip
Ummm...
As far as I know Chip & Pin hasn't been compromised, and I used to write Chip'n'Pin transaction software so I'm fairly well acquainted with the cards and their standards.
The only attacks I've read about are either hilariously impractical or rely on legacy support for the magnetic stripe.
I know, I know, new technology is scary (and I have severe doubts about the wireless system if it really is as quick as it's made out to be) but EMV is pretty secure.
Posted in Mozilla vows Google 'Crankshaft' riposte
I still think too much goes on in the browser
Yes, you can do some neat stuff now, but on the other hand javascript leads to massive amounts of bloat, pages that load horrifically slowly as scripts and content are pulled from a huge number of different servers, not to mention new and innovative ways to track people.
I don't use noscript (yet) but javascript loaded in from third party sites is not allowed in my browser.
I miss the days when the web was a dcocument display tech...
They have as much right to do this
As the governments of the world have to take my money and kill in my name.
None whatsoever.
I wouldn't like to extrapolate from anecdotes
But I 'suffer' from the same. Give me a block of time off work and I turn pretty much nocturnal in only a couple of days.
Not that I actually like it that way, waking up late afternoon with most of the day gone and then staying up all night at the computer when the rest of the world is long asleep, it just seems to be what I gravitate to. I've always had trouble with mornings and get most of my best stuff done when everyone else has gone.
I've worked with others like me, but I've also worked with the opposite - talented coders that are in at 7am every day, bright eyed and bushy tailed. Freaks!
Quite the opposite
The right has always been the home of small government, it's the left that are associated with economic and legal control-freakery.
I don't ever think the damage of the last labour administration will be undone, but anything to get away from the "Nanny knows best" years by making government more transparent and accountable is a good thing.
If the conservatives could shake some of the cow-towing to big business and the pandering to religious interests, they'd be about perfect in my book
Bastards
Arseholes like these are the reason that tickets sell out ten minutes after they go on sale, and then immediately appear on ebay and other sites.
Hanging's too good for 'em.
I think my honesty and deceny may have run out
After informing them twice.
I'd have been consulting my own lawyer to see what my options were and the likely outcomes at that point.
If running unsigned code on a client...
"If the security on a PS3 is compromised and it can access PSN unfettered, that represents a threat to the PSN security and any threat to that is a threat to the security of my financial transactions and information held within PSN."
If someone else running unsigned code on a client machine can expose your personal or financial data then Sony have dropped the ball and deserve to be sued for negligence.
It's that simple. If you're any sort of IT professional then you ought to know that relying on client security in a situation like this is a recipe for enormous, embarrassing and costly failure.
As for the rest -
"people who think that their actions have no consequence. Just like Geohot though that his breaking into the hypervisor had no consequence. Yet it did, it resulted in the removal of OtherOS."
Yup, what a wonderful reaction from Sony, someone finds a way of modifying the hardware to gain hypervisor access so everyone loses OtherOS. Except of course that PS3 slim models had no OtherOS anyway and it looks for all the world like Sony were looking for any excuse to drop it. Either way, it's not a proportionate response and is questionable in terms of legality (see ongoing lawsuits on OtherOS, not that I have any faith they will come to much).
Geohot was in the right, IMHO. Your blaming him for losing OtherOS is like blaming a free-speech advocate for the resulting government clampdown after they speak up.
"Downgrading your firmware back to a version prior to these is great and all, but things move, games get released, new firmware is mandated."
Sure it is, but much new firmware doesn't add anything and the games simply check a version number, this can already be spoofed. Games that genuinely require new features will probably be supported in time too, through the use of custom firmwares and further exploits.
"The PSN is Sony's network, not yours, the firmware is theirs, the encryption keys are theirs and the stolen service key that was cloned to allow the jailbreak exploit is Sony's too."
Actually, that specific instance of the firmware, within the limits of copyright, fair use and other relevant laws, is mine to do with as I please. Well, it is in my book, Sony would probably disagree and they can probably afford enough lawyers that anyone actually looking to do anything with their firmware ought to be careful.
And the exploit doesn't rely on a clone of anything, it's an exploit that mimics plugging and unplugging a few USB devices to overflow the stack and then inserting code in just the right place to get it executed. It may have needed a service jig to find the exploit, but the exploit itself doesn't rely on any copyrighted stuff.
This downgrade stuff may indeed be based on a stolen or 'borrowed' service jig, nobody knows yet as it appears to be all hype.
I don't necessarily disagree when it comes to the PSN, it is Sony's network to do with as they please and they may choose to boot people off that they consider to be pirates, or who have the ability to run unsigned code and could be running bots, cheats, trainers or whatever else.
However your reasons not to want compromised systems on the PSN are unbelievably dumb. Sorry, but they are.
Personally I really like what happened on the PSP - custom firmware arrived that allowed you to boot into homebrew mode, which Sony could detect and not allow network stuff to run, or into original mode which would get you online but not allow hacks.
And the reason I attacked you character was because you seemed genuinely angry about people gaining access to their devices and genuinely gleeful at the idea of retribution from on high. By a huge corporation, on hobbyists. You seem to delight in the idea of authoritarianism and that's usually not a good thing in terms of character.
Competitive?
Well, if you're the only person in the business of white iPhones, sure, you're only competing with yourself and can sell for whatever you like!
Why is there so much bile in your post?
Really, your words drip with bile. If you don't wish to do this, why all the hate?
To address some of your concerns -
1 - Firmware 3.41 was current up until a couple of months back. 2 months doesn't make a game 'classic' in my opinion, nor that of the gaming shops.
2 - You can already run some games that rely new firmware on 3.41
3 - I disagree that running the games I bought from the hard drive or running homebrew is pointless
4 - This is a question of ownership of a machine I bought, not some mission to harm Sony. It's MY computer. I will run whatever I want on it.
5 - Some of us have better things to do with our time than spend it playing online anyway. Perhaps you ought to get some IRL friends, it might help with the anger issues you seem to be having.
Errr, no.
3.42 reliant games can already be told to run on 3.41 and 3.15. I'm sure it won't be long before 3.5 games can be made to run on 3.41.
As for PSN access... well it works with 3.41 and the hack right now. So FAIL on you, 'freetards', as you so delightfully put it, will not have to mess around flashing things back and forth.
Also, who gives a crap about racing games? Most boring genre after those dumb flash games dressed up brain as brain exercise.
Posted in Cloud Engines Pogoplug Pro DIY cloud box
What's the processor?
I have a sheevaplug which is great, but firstly it's a couple of years old now (and there are better chips available) and secondly it's on the other side of the planet.
So what are the actual specs here?
I'd love to hack debian linux on to it....
Isn't it fair?
No it bloody isn't!
I pay you a fee for a number of GB a month, and I expect to get that delivered. If your infrastructure can't cope you have no right bitching about it and shouldn't have sold me the data allowance in the first place.
Here's a hint, the BBC, Google et al, they all pay for their net access too. Everyone pays their provider for access to the net and they get just that, net access. That's how the internet works.
If you can't afford to provide your customers with the bandwidth they want (and PAY FOR) then raise your prices and improve your infrastructure.
This is nothing short of extortion.
nonsense
My other half wouldn't take being dumped over facebook, please.
And my mates would just think I was either drunk or had been hacked.
Taking FB too seriously is the main problem.
Can't log in to the account
Amazone require an https login to actually buy anything. Not sure about what happens if you have 1-click turned on.
And if facebook can affect my credit rating then, frankly, I can do without one. I don't operate on debt anyway.
They screwed up.
Cheap, solid state storage, no Windows, 10 or less inches. Good netbook formula.
When you start trying to put windows and full, heavyweight windows apps on them, and then slow them down and make them more fragile with a hard drive, then make them almost as big and almost as expensive as a regular laptop/notebook, then you've failed.
Meh
So you can get into mah facebooks. Big whoop. If I log on to fb and someone has posted something nutty/obscene under my ID, or shared all my data with a billion and one 'applications', I should care why?
Likewise amazon, really, as long as it's not the actual purchasing bit.
I know, I know, computer security, personal data, blah blah blah, but who really gives a crap if some geek in an internet cafe can see your mate's status updates about how wrecked they got the other day, pictures of someone's new baby, or if (as happens frequently when someone leaves an unattended machine somewhere) there's an unexpected status update proclaiming a joyful appreciation of being on the receiving end of a bit of bottom-sex?
Posted in First Windows Phone 7 handsets sell out
Sick of the shills
Maybe WP7 is a good platform. But the hype is annoying.
The breathless adulation that comes through in many of the articles and a lot of the comments just doesn't right true.
It started well before the platform was available, with 'ordinary citizens' posting positive reviews and comments on net forums when it was pretty unlikely that any ordinary citizen could even have seen a handset, let alone had time to form such strong opinions on the platform.
Maybe I'm just cynical. But I don't think so. Even if it is just fanboi-ism it makes me sick.
Posted in Top Ten Retro PC Games
Heh...
I was in [CT], which never did an awful lot, we were running out of one of the halls of residence at Imperial College back in 96/97. We played a few matches against [SG] (Spice Girls) who, IIRC, were at Birmingham uni, some DM and some TF. One or two other matches but not a lot.
I loved QW TF...
I remember taking on a few of the [QL] (Quake Lords) guys 1:1 on duel servers and getting my ass handed to me, which suddenly turned into some sort of bizarre reverence when I told them I hadn't learned to use a mouse to play Quake with yet and had managed a few kills... After that I learned and got better!
And of course there was Sujoy Roy running around looking like a great orange hulk and fragging everything in sight.... Dear god, the man has an entry on wikipedia. I either want to kill him or steal his life, I'm not sure which!
CT stood for Clan Trumpton and we named ourselves after the firemen. Pugh, Pugh, Barney-McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb :)
I was Captain Flack, the one doing the roll-call. I believe we had a Windy Miller and a couple of other characters too. Ah, good times!
Posted in Airport screeners go for the groin
LOL
The TSA operatives might want to think about who's being humiliated by whom after they have to grope some fat, sweaty geek's balls for the 30th time that day.
Posted in Dell skunkworks brews ARM server future
As someone who's been using these for years
It's about time the world started to notice.
Marvell's kirkwood architecture at 1.2GHz is already powerful and fast enough to make decent client machines, browse the web a bit, serve up media to the telly and play some a bit of music. And all for a few miserly watts.
By the time these clock double and stack multiple cores on a single chip, there's next to no reason they shouldn't be used in a datacenter.
Supercomputers, perhaps not yet, but FLOPs-per-inch have got to be approaching x86, and FLOPs-per-watt must be ahead already.
Posted in Top Ten Retro PC Games
Errr.... Birth of the clans through unreal? Get real!
The clans came about in 1996 at the latest, with Quake and Quakeworld. I know 'cos I was in one!
Quakeworld, a low-bandwidth, latency-reducing Quake-1 modification is what really kicked off multiplayer FPS over the net, modems or 'real' connections. That and the guys that made QSpy - later Gamespy, so that you could find a game and launch into it with a few clicks.
Unreal Tournament and Q3 came along years later.
This article is revisionist history!!
This is why real FOSS is good
Because if java was a real open source, patent free, unencumbered language, this nonsense couldn't happen.
Whilst I do find it entertaining to watch the giants slug it out once in a while, I'd rather we had a world without this nonsense.
False
"you mock the US's use of mag stripes. in the US, when your card has fraudulent activity, the card issuer is required to prove the authorized user initiated the transaction by either signature or an ATM photo. from what I understand, under "chip and pin", merely the use of the pen proves that the transaction was authorized and the user must find a way to prove that it was not."
Not true. The credit laws in the UK (dunno about europe as a whole) have the same provision. Any dispute requires an immediate refund by the credit card issuer, who then undertake to investigate the fraud.
If Chip & Pin was not used then the retailer assumes liability and refunds the money to the bank and must investigate the fraud themselves. Or just write off the cost.
If Chip & Pin was used then the bank assumes the blame and investigation costs/procedure.
But here's the rub - EMV is pretty secure. I'm sure there are exploitable holes in there somewhere, but it's pretty secure, so it becomes more suspicious and the banks will look into it very closely.
I don't believe that there have yet been any successful Chip&Pin card clones. The current fraud vectors are magnetic strip and customer-not-present (i.e. internet stuff). The strip is the major hole because it is clone-able and retailers have the option to accept it, at their own risk. I'll be glad when it's gone.
Debit cards operate under different legal frameworks but the fact that, as yet, no clone fraud has occurred makes your situation pretty unlikely.
because cloning ain't possible right now
"(and why, if someone installed hardware to clone a mag stripe, wouldn't they clone the chip too since it is in fact cloneable?)"
'cos it's not possible at present.
It's possible to intercept comms between the card and the terminal, maybe find out the PIN by a bit of decoding, and create mag-stripe data from the info you've gathered. This does not allow you to create a cloned chip card.
In fact, IIRC, the only current cloning method involves using an electron microscope to try to read the key off the in-chip storage.
"banks in the UK at least have this fantasy that it is not, and hold the cardholder responsible for fraud"
That's actually illegal if we're talking about credit cards, they are obliged to refund the money immediately you tell them a transaction is fraudulent.
I would be genuinely interested to read about cloning techniques if you know some concrete details though, I used to work on EMV systems (retailer, issuer and acquiring bank systems).
The most I can find is that some cambridge researchers have figure out it's possible to clone an SDA card (the cheap type which we ought to move away from) and then use it only for offline (very low value) transactions. Not much of a threat there compared to mag strip eh?
Europay
E stands for Europay, who used to operate the mastercard scheme in europe, if my memory serves me correctly. They were merged into mastercard a few years ago, but the three companies that gave the scheme their initials are the three that founded it in the 90s, IIRC.
EMV - Europay, Mastercard and Visa.
cash machines have had chip and pin for years
The only type that don't do it are the dodgy ones you find in shops that ask you to insert and remove your card. The inner workings of Bank ATMs have used chip for ages.
Most likely is that there's a hybrid reader inside, in case someone without a chip or with a broken chip tries to use the machine. This is the major weakness in the system, though should be getting phased out over time.
Posted in Ten... bedside iPod docks
How can there be ten essential bedside docks?
Surely you only need one, but if they're essential that implies you need them all.
i suppose the english language can suffer the pollution and loss of just one more word...
Errr...
You could already take stuff purchased in the duty free shop through quite happily, because the duty free shops are between security and the plane. It was liquid from outside you couldn't take onboard.
This will have the in-lounge vendors in tears because during the restriction people couldn't even bring a bottle of water through and therefore pretty much had to buy anything they wanted to eat or drink from them.
Posted in Just how special are Power Users?
Depends on what the power user is doing
I have a pretty beefy laptop - quad core i7 - which I use to run a variety of virtual machines which I can reset after testing out various scenarios.
This could conceivably be provisioned centrally for the dev team, and I could then get away with having effectively a dumb terminal from which to read email and log into other machines, OTOH I like to have control.
And am I demanding. Hell no, I installed a non-standard OS on the machine and do my own support.
I can see the ego factor, but matching budget and hardware to actual needs is what you should be aiming for. Blanket policies in which everyone gets the same may save cost on purchasing but they have to leave room for edge cases.
I'm just not seeing it
iPhone has Mac fans and other hip types. And lots and lots of people who want an easy/shiny smartphone experience and the Apple brand.
Android has geeks and customisers, and lots and lots of people who also want easy/shiny smartphones, some of whom know about the google involvement.
Nokia has hoards of loyal Nokia customers who still have some sort of niggling idea in the back of their heads that Nokia means capable and reliable.
RIM has business in its pocket.
Where does windows fit into this market? Are they trying to poach the "oooh shiny and simple" customer base from iPhone and Android? Because they're not going to get many geeks and MS doesn't have the cool factor of Apple.
Actually, MS doesn't have the cool factor of an old pair of tweed slippers.
Posted in WTF is... DLNA?
It's quite good. The Xbox 360 never did play nice with others though
I've used a variety of FOSS and commercial DLNA servers and clients. They all work to varying degrees.
I think the best combination would probably be a playstation 3 setup to play against a good, powerful server that ran mediatomb, where mediatomb was set up to transcode all the unsupported stuff. It's annoying as hell that the playstation just refuses to play a lot of things. My Samsung Tv can do more formats but for some reason lacks the ability to pause.
And the Xbox 360 refuses to play with most FOSS servers other than ushare. And then ushare has to be built with xbox protocol extensions.
Despite DLNA being nothing new, it seems we're still quite a way from the seemless "plug into network, play all media" scenario that they were hoping for. Or maybe they weren't, what with the tightly controlled format specs.
Can we stop with the cloud stuff please?
It's basically just a small linux server. You could even call it a NAS.
To use the term 'cloud' for this shows just how meaningless the term 'cloud' has become.
is 'the cloud' limitless remote storage? Is it SaaS? Is it processing power on demand like EC2? Is it webapps? Or is it now just anything with a network port?
getting sick of this nonsense.
Who's going to start a case for two and a half grand?
Ummm, anyone?
If you have a legal firm willing to work on a no-win-no-fee basis and they come to you and say they'll get you a few grand if they win at no cost to you but the odd letter and a bit of effort helping us get the case straight now and then...
I would, wouldn't you?
And in this case there were 130 grand awarded. I'm sure the lawyers will take a nice chunk of that, but I wouldn't be turning my nose up at half or even quarter of that figure.
