Posts by The Indomitable Gall

"Social authentication" - old news

The photo-based authentication has been in place for several months at least -- I was on holiday in November and when I logged on from Cybercaffs it said I'd connected from a new location and had to verify myself.

You're presented with several pics of the same person (I can't recall the exact number), drawn seemingly at random from tagged photos and a selection of several friends' names to chose from. This happens 4 or 5 times, and you're given the option to skip (I think you get 3 chances to skip) just in case the photos are bad or it's someone you don't really "know" know.

It's a sensible system, but there's two little flaws.

1) It seems to select very strongly connected people (one of my brothers or sisters was always included) so if the attacker knows you at all, he's likely to know these people. Of course, this is because they're trying to make it easy for *you* to recognise them, but hey-ho...

2) Judging by the wording of the message, it's about registering the location the first time you connect from there, so if you're in an unscrupulous cybercaff, the same people who sniff your login details will have access to the terminal/subnet/geographic location (whatever it is that Facebook considers a location) you used to connect, which will now (presumably) be whitelisted by Facebook.

It's a step in the right direction, but they've got a very, very long way to go yet....

You have to *supply* a phone number.

As you have to supply a phone number, this cannot be fully integrated. It would seem likely that you connect to wifi, get greeted with a login page, enter your phone number and activate. The MAC address and phone number are in different parts of the system, and only seem to be linked by the user's actions., not tech.

It would be funnier...

It would be funnier if they had actually used the correct verb. The motto makes no sense.

Wealth of Nations

The latest edition of "The Wealth of Nations" has been retitled "The Wealth of Formerly Bankrupt Banks" after the events of the last few years.....

Does she fancy me? There's an app for that.

Elevated body temperature is a sign of sexual arousal.

That's the only app I can think of.

Slowing the winds, slowing the tides

Well, as we've already built massive amounts of buildings on land and many causeways and walls at sea, and as we've razed mountains and while raising other land, not to mention the dozens of aircraft stealing disrupting the high-altitude air currents, we're already interrupting the winds and waters more than a few turbines can.

Nonono.

Put it this way.

The mall has security cameras ostensibly to protect its shoppers. The mall has not asked consent for security footage to be used for entertainment purposes. The mall's security company has therefore violated their agreement, and they have to be held to account.

If behaviour like this goes unchecked, security cameras become a routine invasion of privacy.

Age bracket

Shaun the Sheep is broadcast on CBeebies, the BBC channel aimed at the 0-6 age bracket.

But it's also broadcast on CBBC, which is aimed at slightly older kids.

Google told me this in about a minute.

Completely Dependent

F111F,

The first Yugoslavia thing was a mess, where a bunch of peace-keepers did sweet FA while being shot at.

The Kosovo thing was an illegal invasion by NATO, not sanctioned by the UN, where a bunch of cowards with big guns stood back and bombed seven shades of sh*t out of civilians and military alike, blowing up a Chinese embassy, the entire civil infrastructure of the capital of Serbia and a fleeing band of the very same Kosovar refugees we said we were there to save.

XBox360...?

In prisons, "red ring of death" has unpleasant overtones.

And by the same token...

can I just point out, that "English" is not actually any kind of a language as far as I can tell......it just means you speak French corrupted Dutch really REALLY badly and pronounce everything like a chav!

Good for the goose....

Learn YOUR history

John Sanders:

" ETA never killed for democracy nor anybody's rights, they killed because they believe in their mythical country that was invaded by the Spaniards. An invasion that of course only happened in their imaginations. "

ETA did originally kill for democracy. Unfortunately, direct action of this kind ends up attracting the wrong kind of person. The internal politicking in the film "El Lobo" isn't too far from the truth, by all accounts.

OK, so Navarre wasn't invaded by Spain -- it was allied by marriage -- but the historical Basque nation is far from a "mythical" country.

You cannot disarm the power of groups like ETA by labelling them with the broad brush term "terrorist". Certainly they *are* terrorists, but that's only part of it.

Whether you are a supporter of Basque independence or not, you have to take into account the very real issues of self-image and collective identity that ETA draws its support from. If you deny the Basque identity, you push people who hold that identity towards those that do recognise it.

Respecting people's personally identity is the only way to undermine secessionist terrorism.

Personally, I say the same thing about both the Basque Country and Scotland. Give us a referendum, then we'll all have to live with the results and stop arguing about what they would be. In both cases, I'm in favour of independence, but in both cases, I believe that's a minority view and that the vote would come out as "no". So just ask us, please....

Nonsense.

"i can see how about 0.0001% of people who own a ps3 might be interested in linux on it but we all know the vast majority of hacking is purely to run copyritten games, meaning loss of income for sony. in the end we will all end up paying for that."

A) 0.0001% or otherwise is irrelevant. They're Sony's customers.

B) The vast majority of hacking may be to run pirated games. I don't believe it is, but that's irrelevant. The most important hacking always comes from homebrew and/or Linux fans. They break the system to do what they want -- the warez junkies come in as a second phase, picking up what the homebrewers did and extending it. It's always a minor step, just as GeoHot took fail0verflow's hack and modified it to do more than originally intended.

Many people saw the original OtherOS option as a very shrewd move by Sony -- they gave the homebrewers and the Linux crowd an "easy in", which meant they had no reason to break open the OS or firmware.

And it worked pretty well -- without the assistance of the homebrew crowd, the dedicated pirates were on their own and didn't get very far.

With OtherOS still in place, the fail0verflow guys would never have gone to the effort of breaking the encryption.

Yes, they coined the term, but...

"App store" was an Apple coinage, but it was coined in a generic way.

As others have already stated, "app" and "store" were both generic terms. More importantly, the pattern <something> store is a very common generic pattern.

MS's main argument is that showing a generic word into a generic pattern gives a generic result.

Imagine someone invented a hoverboard (like in Back to the Future 2). What term would you use to describe a place that sells them? "hoverboard store" (US) or "hoverboard shop" (UK). You wouldn't expect the first place that sells hoverboards to get that as a trademark, would you?

That merely leads to goldrushes, not genuine innovation or creativity.

Very much worth a story.

"Not worth a story in my opinion. It is well-known that one needs an effective keyspace of 2^80 or more (symmetric ciphers) today."

Among those in the know yes. But wider education is required.

The useful angle in this story is that it puts an easily understood metric on security: lucre.

Try giving your average Joe a simple explanation of how weak his wifi security is. Go on, try it. Not easy, is it? Then tell him that it costs less than a fiver to crack. That's a very powerful demonstration, and should get him to listen to your description of how to generate a good key.

/metoo

I reckon they'll get bitten by the watchdog for this one....

Nobody said it wasn't...

...but nobody said it *was*, and I think that's his point. While the charges of "molestation" are frequently mentioned in cases like this, the tag "paedo" doesn't tend to stick. But then this isn't the NoTW, so it's not a label that the Reg throws about anyway.

But don't you understand?!?

If I've given my work for free, everyone else must too!

Yes, if I code for free it is my personal choice. BUT EVERYONE MUST MAKE THE SAME PERSONAL CHOICE. I DEMAND IT!!!!

</sarcasm>

What the GPL junkies don't get is that it IS personal choice, and some people have different priorities.

The GPL is good because it allows coders to demand "quid pro quo", so they give and they get. Personal choice.

Even freer licenses are also good because the allow coders to say that they don't need quid pro quo -- if they are confident that they're getting enough out of the code for their own benefit, they don't need any quid pro quo.

NASA is acting in public benefit, so they don't care about "sharks" -- they're doing what they've always done with their research (cold war secrecy excepted) and making it available to others. It's a public research group, and that's how these things work.

Rackspace is a storage/hosting provider, and to them, the main goal of the software is to get people to use more storage and bandwidth. Widespread availability of the platform facilitates this.

So, yes, both parties CHOSE to go for a "very free" license, because it is in their interests.

I find it interesting that random internet commentards think they know Rackspace and NASA's business better than Rackspace and NASA. How many degrees do these commentards have? Less than the minimum CV for employment at NASA, I'd guess.

Multiprocessing...

OK, so everyone's talking about multicores, right? How about an asymmetrical multicore? An ARM core runs the operating system, office suite, web browser et al, and legacy apps run on an x86 on the side.

As the x86 is a "hot" chip, it could be powered down when on battery and not required, much like the current tranche of laptops with two graphics chipsets. If the OS isn't on it, there's no problem, surely?

This is how I always envisioned the endgame for x86, but everyone said asymmetrical multiprocessing was too complicated to schedule, but now that GPUs are now fully-fledged computers in their own right rather than highly limited coprocessors, we're working in an asymmetrical environment already. The problem is already solved.

Think of it this way...

Libraries have had an effect on book sales, true, but their effect has been limited.

Basically, buying books is massively more convenient, so it's generally worth the extra money.

Libraries are inconvenient not just because of the short loan period, but also because:

* You not only have to go to collect the book, you have to go to give it back. You can collect at your convenience, but you have a hard deadline for returning. Inconvenient.

* Bookshops store loads of copies of popular books. Libraries only have a few. Inconvenient.

* Fines for late returns put people off using libraries. Self-disabling electronic loans save people like me from forgetting to bring the book back and incurring fines.

Electronic book loans drastically increase the utility value of library loans, which damages the comparative value of buying.

New angle?

Sorry, all 360 degrees have been spoken for.

But then again, there's always imaginary numbers.

So how about 90i degrees? I call it the "firm-belief-that-you're-right angle". This explains not only the Arab-Israeli conflict, but also the LibDem/Tory coalition; the war in Afghanistan; the Daily Mail....

Who said anything about celibacy/abstinence?

They said that they "*CAN'T* wait" until they're married. That means they're *not* abstaining. Keep up!