Posts by Ole Juul

Expensive

the bet is that $29 per month seems reasonable for a personal website

Can someone explain to me what a customer would get for that amount of money that they wouldn't get from a $4.99 per month (or less) shared hosting plan? Some companies offering shared hosting have both excellent customer service and one click site building software or WordPress, or whatever you want. If the market is for first timers, I don't see them sticking around as soon as they see what they can get for a fraction of the price elsewhere. Perhaps this is what Keef (above) is hinting at. Sales and marketing doesn't actually offer any direct benefit to the consumer.

PS: I was just looking around earlier, and found that one can get a low end dedicated server for less than $20 per month. OK, that's not useable by most of the "personal website" crowd, but it's an interesting comparison with the prices on offer here.

Amazing

Assuming the guy took a day off once in a while and slept at night, it seems to me that he'd have to set up one account every 20 seconds or so if he was to get to 750,000 in a year. Did he use a script?

New TLDs offer new opportunities

I think they are actually a technical advancement and I'm looking forward to being able to filter out all kinds of idiots without half trying.

Complacency and technology

New technology can bite you if you don't think it through. This guy did claim to be an engineer, though judging by his stream of excuses, that could be in doubt. In the end, I think it is really the complacency that got him into trouble. He's used to getting away with this sort of thing and it's apparently the police culture there. If he had thought it could have caused him trouble, he could probably have used cash or covered his tracks more effectively, but a nice friendly and ubiquitous mobile app just didn't trigger any warnings for him.

But anyway, yes, we could sure use M-Pesa here in Canada.

Bogus argument

If private business is not providing the service, and indeed is unwilling to do so, then there is no loss to them. In fact they can't logically argue that there is even any competition. The pertinent argument here is that the telcos are causing an economic loss to both business and society by not providing an adequate essential service in the first place. Their argument that there is no money in it for them, is completely irrelevant.

Use the same electricity twice.

In exchange for hosting a leased server, households get heat for rather less than would otherwise be the case.

And hopefully offer a free gigabit drop as well. *grin*

Anyway, this is all too obvious. Where I live in a northern clime in a not-well-winterized century old building, I need to supplement my heating with electric. So, I have a half dozen computers on all the time. This is not a luxury, but just an easy way to use the electricity twice - no extra cost.

Good for them

From the Swedesboro-Woolwich School District technology page:

"Encrypted files were restored from backup to their original state. Servers were restored to remove any trace of the malware. Email and other systems are being restored as quickly as possible."

It looks like their IT may actually be well managed. So I guess they don't need to pay the ransom.

Good

Nice to see the internet is still working as it should. The legal system is suspect though.

Still using dot matrix here

I don't have any mainframe experience, but I do have a love for dot matrix printers. I've got a small collection of good ones, and in fact have one hooked up and turned on most of the time. It works fine for printing out personal stuff, and showing up at the odd meeting with a piece of perforated computer paper does garner a comment or two.

His view

The corporate view is one of farming the vulnerabilities of the market. His story would be different if he had other interests. Things could be very secure if that was the actual priority and users were willing to go along with that. That said, he's generally correct because the market isn't going to go off in his/her own direction and eschew the vulnerability causing complexities of bling.

Revealing

Andrew Little said the spying efforts were "outrageous” calling it a "misuse" of security and intelligence agencies.

Besides, it shows they've got lots of time on their hands to do unrelated work. Obviously some budget cuts are in order.

Water issues

All my Nikons are gone, but I've still got a nice collection of historical cameras including the Kodak No1. Otherwise there's a good 4X5 and a home made box camera that takes film up to 15" wide. I've even got a stash of film up to 8X10, lots of unused paper, and the fixings to make my beloved D25 developer from scratch, and piles of trays and tanks. So what's the problem? Where I live now I'm on a septic and I can't be putting my rinse water in there. It's nice in the country, but I really miss my old photography, and the many hours spent in the dark with that lovely smell of developer and other chemicals.

Nice job you got there

“They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,”

That would result in lost jobs for German intel, but I don't think it would lead to a "heightened risk of terrorist and espionage attacks" as suggested. At least not if you look at demonstrated proof of concept to date.

Google dominance

I don't accuse Google of doing anything wrong, but their dominant position is starting to become a problem for the ecosystem. I know it's the people's choice to opt in, but I still worry about the lack of diversity.

Gotta admit

It's hard to come up with anything intelligent to say about this.

Respect?

. . . put pressure on the US authorities to respect EU privacy laws.

This is sad, but I don't think the current US authorities are capable of respect, at least not for others.

Walmart still has a chance

. . . it seems almost quaint that there would be an area of the internet in which large corporations do not have overweening power.

Surely they won't prevent Walmart from getting WalmartHorse.sucks.

Off the hook

"We decline at this time to require disclosure of the source, location, timing, or duration of network congestion, . . ."

They'll be pointing at the other guy and saying, "I didn't do it". I guess I'll be seeing dropped packets, buffer bloat, and other frequent "underinvestment issues" for as long as I live.

Interpretation

To ensure all is fair, carriers and service providers will be asked to disclose commercial terms for prices, fees, data caps and any allowances.

I wonder what kind of interpretation the carriers will apply here. Perhaps they will be framing this information in terms of "per serving" and "percentage of daily use" for their average subscriber. Seriously, it will be a long time before I trust them to not screw people around.

Judicial oversight as a security measure

A new retention law, . . . aims to provide safeguards by introducing judicial oversight of access to the data.

So, people won't be allowed to hack into databases any more? That will work really well. No?

key internet enablers

That would include manufacturers of routers with open access as the default? Perhaps also pre-installed operating systems with known vulnerabilities? My thinking is that Google et al are right in that they shouldn't be included. They are after all, like the rest of us, basically transient users taking advantage of current internet protocols and not actually essential. But I would argue that the real enabler is your operating system, or at least the networking protocol stack part of it. In any case I really hope that the European ministers have some basic understand of what the internet actually is. The fact that they were even looking at Google, Amazon, and Ebay, doesn't give me much hope.

This isn't the right fix

That level of paranoia is either a sickness or a deep fear of retaliation. The same budget put toward professional help (if it's the first problem) or making friends (if it's the second), would yield vastly better results.