Posts by David Hicks
1064 posts • joined Tuesday 22nd April 2008 12:44 GMT
Contracting definitely has its appeal
I have a project. If I do the project on time and to a good standard we're done. Maybe I'll get another, maybe I won't, maybe I'll take it, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll raise my rates, maybe I won't.
But there's no bullshit appraisal based on management opinions. There's no writing down your useless goals for the year which are irrelevant a month later, never mind a year later when you have to try and twist what you actually did into a narrative that somehow supports what you said you were going to do, despite the fact those goals were discarded ages ago and you did an awesome job on whatever the hell else it was you were doing but somehow that might not count because it doesn't align with the agreed targets and anyway you haven't been engaging with the wider company and perhaps we can push for a little more leadership training in the next period and would you like to write an article for the staff news letter next month and by the way we've got an all-hands staff meeting this afternoon that's going to take three hours but be entirely content free because the visiting that exec has mastered the art of saying long strings of vaguely encouraging sounding words without conveying anything close to what might be considered a fact, factoid or piece of information in them......
Bugger all that for a lark.
Posted in Ten technology FAILS
'I don't really need to pay £15 for a BD to just see better pore definition on some actors face'
Oh but High-Def is a *great* leveller.
You realise that the prettiest people that hollywood has to offer, even with all the makeup artists money can buy, still have bad skin and even the occasional lady-moustache.
Posted in Ten technology FAILS
Re: Linux?
Yeah I know, "The Year of the Linux Desktop" perhaps deserves the fail tag. Though I'm not convinced that was ever anything but a taunt by the 'anti' side.
Linux is incredibly mainstream though. It's the most popular smartphone kernel, it's on a lot of wireless routers and other infrastructure, it's in your tv, it's running your ISP servers, it's on credit card terminals and it's in a hell of a lot of other places. You're quite likely to have more linux devices in your life than windows ones (unless you're a sysadmin!)
Perhaps we ought to change the ironic slanging to "next year will be the year of the GNOME desktop" ;)
/flame on!
Posted in Ten technology FAILS
Re: Linux?
One of the most, if not the single most popular/common OS on the planet.... sure I can see why that would be in a list of technology failures!
Posted in Ten technology FAILS
Re: Secondlife Is still Alive.
I can get away with reading the reg at work, not so much an immersive 3d environment....
Amazon are very much in my bad books right now
But that's mostly because they just delivered my new memory stick to my mum. I'm sure I changed that default address....
Re: Previously...
There are many side effects of taxing corporate profit rather than sales. In theory -
- Struggling, barely profitable companies get to keep employing people without having to worry about the extra tax/sales disincentive that would come about if your plan was put in place
- It encourages reinvestment into the business. Why pay tax on profits if you can plough much of it back in and make the company even better?
- It hits those that can pay (profitable companies) vs indiscriminately applying to people who may or may not be the best targets. As the other poster mentioned, VAT is regressive.
The theory breaks down when profits can just be spirited away though.
LOL@Intellectual Property
'This is how EU entities pay for the use of Amazon’s technology and intellectual property, which is primarily developed in the US'
That might be an entertaining diversion if Amazon in the UK/EU/Wherever was an independent entity with a relationship to the parent something like a fanchisee, but that's not the situation is it?
Theoretically I should be able to pair a PS3 controller...
Could do that with my N900 and the emulators I ran on it. That and tv-out made for much Sonic related joy in various hotels I found myself stuck in.
I assume that I probably could do the same with my newer android phone, but it doesn't seem that easy.
Reminds me I still haven't played the last one
And now I've looked it up I'm not sure how to go about purchasing it. There are a bewildering array of editions available, all of which have some extra stuff (but not really all of it).
Cheapy platinum edition it is then?
My Wii is jailbroken
Nintendo didn't seem to put anywhere near as much effort into stopping it as the other console makers, and I like that a lot.
I could load the homebrew channel to run non-approved software. Some nice team or other made a homebrew browser (I suppose we'd call it an app store now). I could run an isoloader so that I could play the games I bought and ripped from a drive - far faster than the optical drive and no messing about with disks. I could rip games to play on Dolphin on my PC.
I hope the U is fully broken before long, I might get one if I can do my own things with it.
I'm sure there is truth underpinning this report somewhere
I'm sure many concerned people were honestly horrified by what they found. I'm sure they put the report together as best they could and with as much honest gravity as they could. I'm sure that they did their best to convey the seriousness of the situation to those that could convert concern into action.
I'm also sure that in the past we've seen minor errors at multiple stages that have resulted in scores of kids being removed from loving homes. Tread carefully.
Re: 3 questions
@Paranoid AC
Oh I see, you meant to be compliant with the law! Of course I considered the legal landscape - I was looking at ignoring it completely and rendering it ineffectual. I guess it comes down to whether you prefer compliance and legalit or security and maybe being imprisoned.
I mean, of course you can't have properly secure comms and comply with all the various laws, the laws are specifically designed to prevent real security. You only have to look at the UK where many standard TLS ciphersuites could be interpreted as being illegal because you can't provide the government with a decryption key afterwards.
I don't think it would be that hard to secure a persons audio comms using decent tech and a reasonable frontend. I don't think it would be that hard to do it in such a way as your comms are unbreakable, even to you (after the fact), but that doesn't mean you wouldn't get put in prison for using whatever I designed.
Usability, flexibility, whatever else are really no more difficult to overcome than the tech issues, IMHO. But you absolutely have to start with the absolute knowledge that you *cannot* have real comms security without the user taking some extra steps - for instance meeting, in person, the folks that they want to talk securely to and using something like NFC to perform a 'bump' certificate exchange/cosigning.
I'm not saying these guys are doing that or are even any good, mind, I haven't looked into it.
Re: 3 questions
@kyza - Pls forgive density in this question...is this the equivalent of, or similar to, a one-time pad?
If this was directed at me....
OTPs are designed for encrypting smallish messages, and the pad itself must be exchanged between parties ahead of time. Generating and exchanging enough OTP data to carry on multiple phone conversations (you'd need a pad for each side) would be a hassle and you would have to top up your pad with face-to-face contact every so often.
OTPs also do not provide the protection of a proper authenticated encryption scheme, either. In the way they are typically used it's perfectly possible that a message could be altered in flight (say by a compromised router) if you make certain assumptions about the format of the underlying data. Using a GCM-like system protects against this. This weakness is something I thought of off the top of my head and I'm not even a crypto expert, just an interested amateur. I'm sure there are other weaknesses an expert could point out.
Re: 3 questions
Re: Question 3, I'm not sure what you mean by 'Really Secure' but using standard encryption methods you can get to the point where it's basically impossible to decrypt things.
By 'standard methods' I mean a proper authenticated encryption* scheme, public/private identity verification using private trust infrastructure and an ECDHE style key exchange mechanism with frequent changes and disposal of session keys. Recent versions of TLS implemented in well-audited libraries will do a lot of this for you.
In the case of data streams created like this they cannot later be decrypted by anyone, including the original parties, as all the keys used to encrypt the data are long gone. Legal sanctions then become useless.
(*authenticated encryption does not mean encryption with RSA-style authentication, it means schemes like GCM)
Infection vector?
That's the more interesting part to me. Do we have a malicious employee? A remote exploit and then privilege escalation? Just some weak passwords?
The only time bad things happened to my public facing linux machine were during the time when it really shouldn't have been public facing and had horribly weak passwords. I was still half-way through adding kernel support for the platform, the root password was 'root' and root SSH access was allowed. Not that that's how they got in, first they gained access to the 'dave' user (password 'dave') and then spent quite some time guessing at root.
The eventual attempt at using their new-found power was full-on retarded though - they created a ramdisk (on a machine with 32Mb of RAM) and then tried to run a shoutcast binary, compiled for x86, on an experimental ARM box....
Posted in Ten Linux apps you must install
Re: Normal people don't use Linux
I'll say here what I've said before - If you can't make one of the friendlier Linuxes work for you, and after days of struggling, then you have no right working in this industry.
It's really not that hard, and as much as you think you're showing us how broken linux is, you're really just exposing your incompetence. Which is why you've posted as AC no doubt. Wise, nobody I know would hire you after that admission.
Until such time...
...as it's decided to be a security risk and canned, with no refunds and no apology, if Sony's usual tactics are to continue.
Re: If you encrypt something more than once...
@Arion -
Good point on the re-encryption. Must be that it just doesn't help when talking about double DES.
You're wrong about it being algorithmically secure, by the way, check wikipedia - there are three known attacks, one of which requires time equivalent to 2^39 - 2^40, quite a bit less than 2^56 brute force. From what I remember this may be down to a badly designed S-box.
Re: Reminds me of an odd australianism
LOL, no I'm not sure if the burpless cucumbers are better for down-under bottom barks....
Reminds me of an odd australianism
In Australia you can buy two types of cucumber - regular and 'burpless'.
I had no idea cucumbers and belching were associated, but apparently it's a big problem down under.
'the desire to see a digital realm free of property rights or permissions'
*cough* *bullshit* *cough*
Western democracies have done exactly the opposite over the last two decades, giving in to the IP lobbies to allow ever more stuff to be 'protected' with bogus patents, to make DRM legally enforced, promote the abuse of copyright to kill grey markets, the list goes on.
Re: If you encrypt something more than once...
It's not a simple question.
I'm not sure that's really what's going on here - I think it's storing encrypted files remotely and transferring them over an encrypted link, meaning they can't be spied on in transit and the data is useless to anyone unauthorised anyway.
On the broader issue - it's already been said that it depends on the algorithm. Triple DES is an EDE mode where you single-DES encrypt with one key, decrypt with another then encrypt again with the first. The mathematical properties of DES are such that just encrypting twice with different keys (Double DES) doesn't help and may in fact be worse than just single DES.
It seems to be better to use a stronger algorithm like AES and a longer key length. In the appropriate (GCM type) mode of course
It's necessary
I'm glad it came here, because it's a very necessary service - when you're offering your flagship phones without SD slots and only 8-16GB of onboard storage, something had to give.
I still don't get why exactly they hate the Micro-SD slot, and why they don't add more capacity to their phones if they won't provide it, but at least with this you can access your music on the move. Still I reckon I'll be sticking to Galaxy, rather than Nexus, devices for the forseeable future.
Posted in Mobile phone sales slump bites Nokia
Re: Wow... so Samsung then
I am genuinely puzzled. Not annoyed but puzzled. What is the psychology of someone that gives me a downvote for an expression of surprise over some market share figures? I haven't showed favouritism to any one company, or even approval or disapproval of the figures compared to others. So why?
Many, many of the things I say on the internet are objectionable, partisan, foolish and stupid. This time I can see it. Are you, dear reader, the one that gave me the downvote? Could you explain? Genuinely befuzzled by that.
Posted in Mobile phone sales slump bites Nokia
Wow... so Samsung then
Rule the roost in both smart and overall phone sales.
Knew they were big, but not that big!
Re: Boom or bust?
Salaries in Perth are fantastic compared to the UK. But so is the cost of living.
How do you fancy £7 a pint?
The sunshine is amazing though. I do miss that when sat here in southern England in November.
Brilliant ain't it?
Now whether you committed and offence or not could come down entirely to how many people get their knickers in a twist, and whether or not your dumbass mate forwarded it somewhere.
Awesome!
Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this
@ mutatedwombat
Just moved back to the ol' uk from there a couple of months ago. Loved the place but couldn't quite settle. At this rate I'll be running back again soon!
Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this
You can take care of yourself? Then why on earth do you need the police to arrest someone for burning a poppy?
Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this
Again, so what?
It's not like he's hunting down people on the street and harassing them. It's just a picture on facebook.
It's markedly different from racist comment - this is not targeting people for the colour of their skin. I'm amused (reading a couple of posts back up) that you think these are equivalent, calling skin colour an aspect of someone's personality. It's not, it's a physical fact.
The USA must horrify you. A land where racists are free to express their contemptible ideas and everyone else is free to see them as the scum that they are. I'd far rather live under those laws than under these, where a vague idea of offensiveness is enough to get someone arrested and put in prison. I'd far rather Nick Griffin was legally allowed to say what he really thinks and be even more despised because of it.
Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this
Hmm, that would be criminal harassment, the key being that someone is specifically being taunted. I don't see that here.
Note that I don't really agree with hate-crime legislation either. I don't see what difference it makes if someone was murdered for their skin colour, for their clothing or for no reason at all - it's still murder.
"Who do you deem as being the base animal then? The person at which end of the calling?"
Why do I have to pick only one?
Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this
The line is where there is a victim of criminal harassment, physical violence, property damage etc.
Not just what someone chooses to get upset about. Just because you hold something sacred doesn't mean you should be able to stop me from expressing how contemptible I think it is, and you are for holding that belief.
Getting offended about something someone says and seeking vengeance (physical or legal) is barely above the animal in my estimation, not human at all. Are we to arrest people for making insensitive jokes about 'your mum' ?
What a lovely polite society we would then inhabit. Perhaps anyone not observing social conventions could be shipped off to the colonies.
Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this
I mean seriously, bun what you like, I'm still not seeing a victim.
Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this
Really? I don't see it.
I would support your right to do both, and see them as roughly equivalent. You certainly shouldn't face legal sanctions for either activity.
Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this
"Who said anything about making them beyond the point of criticism?"
You did when you supported arresting someone for posting a picture and a swearword to facebook. Doesn't matter when it's said, you don't get to decide these things. If you did then you and people like you would quickly suppress all political dissent. See the writings of George Orwell and multiple historical examples all around the world if you need any reference material on that claim.
"This is not a case of the scroat facing sanctions for having a point of view; this is the scroat not having respect for the fact that there is a time and a place for things."
Lack of respect is not sufficient grounds for legal sanction. Nobody was hurt here, there was no victim (no, feeling offended doesn't make you a victim), so there was no crime.
"If you can't see that, they I wish you all the joy that the anger of your misplaced offence will deliver you."
All I see is someone scared of people expressing themselves. it's very sad.
Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this
Remembrance is about remembering how horrific war is, that we don't enter it lightly, about making sure we look after our soldiers past and present, and about honouring their memories and being thankful what they did for us.
It's not about turning past soldiers into gods, inviolate to any criticism. Hell, go and read some WWI war poetry if you think the whole thing was an honourable but necessary sacrifice. That's not what the poor bastards stuck in the middle of it thought at the time.
And it's certainly not about arresting people who disagree with you or forcing into line those that choose to be stupid on the internet. The appropriate response here would have been for his mates to tell him to stop being a nob.
I find it hugely offensive that you think failing to observe a cultural tradition should be met with legal sanctions.
Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this
"And I believe from what I've read, that most commenters agree with that kind of common sense; and that is where this scroat failed. He decided to get in the way and disrupt things."
What a load of nonsense. He sat in his bedroom and posted to facebook. In whose twisted worldview is that getting in the way of or disrupting of anything?
"You are making comparisons that are bending things. A soldier, politician, those responsible for the decision to go to war, are here, alive, and can be brought to public enquiry to defend themselves."
No, you are making excuses for a police state. The moment you give people the power to arrest based solely on perceived offensiveness, you have lost freedom. There are plenty of people who would push for this to be used in criticism of a current war, and they'll justify it by saying it's offensive to the troops, and can't you just wait until it's over, this is disruptive, it's not appropriate to speak like this now. This can then easily be expanded to leaders - how dare you criticise the PM in a time of war! That's dangerously seditious! You're giving comfort to our enemies!
Without the first amendment we would have seen exactly this in the US over Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd hate to see it here.
"Those who laid down their lives ... can't."
So what? I mean really, so fucking what? It's not like the guy is desecrating their bodies or tracking down family members and harassing them, he's just an idiot posting a dumb picture to facebook and mouthing off about squaddies. And defend themselves from what? A swearword and a picture of burnt emblem. OH MY GOD BETTER CALL IN THE UN!
"And yes, I do care what a 19 year old scroat thinks ... they are the next generation and if they show such disrespect for something such as this, then it is us who have failed them. This is the civilisation that we have already created."
Guess what, you don't get to decide what the next generation think is important, and you certainly don't get to put people away for thought crime. Maybe (and I hope this is true) they value freedom of speech and freedom in general more highly than you do.
Re: Some people are just dicks.
Or we could just ignore it, because what some idiot in a bedroom in Kent posts to his facebook page isn't exactly of national security importance, you know?
Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this
So there are certain things you can't ever say and certain times you can't say them, lest you be locked up?
What a nasty civilisation you propose.
Who gets to decide what and when? How are you going to make sure this doesn't expand to any criticism of soldiers, or a war, or the current political leader?
I agree that what this kid did was dumb, insensitive and offensive to some people. So what? Aren't the rest of us adults? Who gives a crap what some 19 year-old scrote thinks about anything?
But by all means, let's chuck away basic freedoms so nobody feels offended by people's writings on the internet.
Re: God dammit
@AC -
Err, yes, flag burning is protected speech, meaning the government (local, state or federal) can't do anything to you if you do that. Fellow citizens may then, illegally, beat the tar out of you. They should be arrested and prosecuted for that. If they aren't then that's a failure of the police and court system. Violence is never an appropriate reaction to speech.
That situation is far, far different to the authorities themselves coming to whisk you away because you posted a picture to the internet that some people found offensive.
What is it you don't understand here?
I'll also remind you I said that there's a lot wrong with the US and I don't hold them up as a model. I just think that guaranteed freedom of speech is a wonderful thing. For god's sake look at our ludicrous double-secret-super-injunctions and people from foreign counties coming here to sue each other over things never even published in the UK. These things should not happen.
Ah TCR tech shops...
In the early 90s they were the place you could find new things. But by the late 90s and early 2000's you'd only bother if you needed something right now and didn't mind paying double the online price.
If you could wait 24 hours then why would you bother? You could never get the selection you could find at an online retailer, and the prices were huge. End of an era?
God dammit
This country needs a first amendment.
There's a lot wrong with the US and the way it goes about, but protecting people's right to be an insensitive arsehole (and to be judged by the rest of us for it) should go without saying.
The kid in question needs a clip round the ear from an older relative, not police involvement.
Re: Impressive number
Yeah, the S3 outsells the most popular iPhone model now too.
Hah, and they said hoarding wasn't a dominant behaviour
78 percent eh?
In line with expectatikns really. Bitcoin is mostly hoarded, speculated on or traded on the silk road...
Well that and...
... that the guy, despite being a patent holder himself, didn't understand the concept of prior art and has been quoted thusly -
"The software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa. That means they are not interchangeable. That changed everything right there. "
That was his reasoning for dismissing and ignoring all prior art claims. This verdict is so full of holes I could use it to drain my pasta!
Re: quote: Straight off the bat, Torvalds wasn't too keen on KDE user interface:
If you want old-style desktops then it might be worth investigating Trinity (KDE3 fork) or MATE (gnome2 fork).
However it's unlikely these will be available by default in your distribution of choice. I recommend installing XFCE as it's well supported, up to date and simple. in debian or ubuntu it's as simple as typing 'apt-get install xfce4', YMMV for other distro's but they all have it. If you're a Mint user you could also try cinnamon.
@Anonymous Coward
Patents and copyright are very different things. Before ranting about patents it might be wise to figure out the distinction. Comparing open and closed source to infringing on software patents is nonsense.
In the world of software (and now it seems computer and phone hardware) infringing on someone's patent is basically inevitable. They were supposed to be for non-obvious things that took a lot of work to invent, and the idea was that instead of keeping them secret, you published them so the world could benefit. In exchange you got a limited monopoly on production. What we have now is the opposite - patents granted for stupid, obvious things that other people were going to do anyway, and the patent system used as a weapon to suppress competition.
Re: Lets be honest
If you're entirely under the control of agents and clueless managers then maybe there's your problem. Could be time to find another position or strike out on your own?
As for reliability of product, you know some folks have to program that medical equipment used by the med staff, right? And 10,000 lines is a tiny codebase.
If you're working for muppets and with muppets, it's time to move on or admit you're a muppet too.
Posted in Ten... Apple iPad Mini alternatives
Re: Jesus..
That's why it's so cunning!
I know, it's silly, but there could have been an effort somewhere in the Apple corporate structure to make sure that things are still framed that way, such that even talk of other devices always casts them in the shadow of the fruit.
The alternative is of course that the majority of tech journos are Apple fanboys, which is probably more likely.
