Posts by copsewood

@L 4

I agree with Arnold on this one. Women who are capable of having a healthy and sustainable relationship across the gender divide are more likely to be capable of having a healthy and sustainable relationship across the generation divide. Same goes for men - and this is equally important if one parent dies through whatever causes and the other has to bring up the children on their own as a single parent. Becoming a parent singly without a stable partner (stable in both senses) just selfishly increases the risks of orphaning the children because of the simple fact that there is no backup if the one involved parent dies.

@Eduard Coli

"Surely they can capture data from a central intercept location like the Peoples Republic of America.

Pushing this down to the client seems clunky."

Parties with access to update handsets are almost certainly not the same as those with access to infrastructure. This all suggests the snooping is being done by whoever is paying someone working for the software supplier without adequate quality assurance in respect of code review. Or maybe the entire software supplier was collared, but that sounds less likely than a rogue developer, given the supplier of this will get less work in the telecoms sector as a consequence of poor QA, unless the work is from other snoopers and badguys.

The local telco doesn't need to push software down to the client to snoop on their own customers' conversations, and has every reason not to provide evidence of snooping in respect of software pushed down to the client. If whoever arranged this snooping had the ability to tap into the local network infrastructure that would have been the preferred approach. This all implies that for the snooping party, compromising the handsets was the more feasible approach. I really can't imagine many engineers working on mobile telephony infrastructure in the UAE or in many other places for that matter having time to read the source code of handset firmware updates - these probably mostly come from the handset manufacturers or specialist software firms contracting to the handset manufacturers.

OK so Gary's been a naughty boy

Come on folks, let's keep this one in perspective. The kind of thing someone should get a hundred hours community service for shouldn't make them into a martyred saint or folk hero. Given that the nature of his alleged offence is not enough to hold him on remand because he isn't a threat to anyone, this also doesn't justify grinding him through years of trials to decide whether or not he's going to be locked up in a foreign country thousands of miles away for years on end.

Gary should be tried in this country or better, the judges should decide he's suffered enough already. The fact that the Mail is on his side doesn't mean we should automatically think they are as wrong on this as they are on most other issues.

time to downsize the 4th estate lobby

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The relationship between aspiring politicians and media moguls has always given too many swing votes to what the tabloids decide to publish during an election campaign. So the newspaper owners say what copyright protection and extension laws they want and politicians who want support from mass media say "how soon ?" .

The alternative to fighting the resulting bad laws which violate the US 4th ammendment and ECHR article 8 through constitutional law courts or civil disobedience is by supporting Pirate Parties, who now have their first representative in the European Parliament. Having politicians of other parties compete for pirate swing votes forces them to think differently compared to having them compete for mass media support for swing votes of dimwits influenced by tabloid editors.

she has every right to sue

Even 30 years ago when I was working on telecom underground plant we had to put cones out and road signs around our manholes before lifting the covers. We also had to use pedestrian barriers if on a pavement.

OK, so some sighted people have their heads in the clouds. But imagine what it's like for someone with visual impairments to encounter a hole in the ground where there wasn't one before.

function creep

Or the idea that data collected for one purpose can't be used for another. I'll be interested to see if what comes out of this process fills a gaping hole in the UK Data Protection Act, which makes the collector of personal information obtained for one purpose but supplied for another purpose guilty of a breach, while enabling the reuser of the same information for the new purpose able to claim they obtained it "in good faith" from the collector of it or some other dodgy intermediary. This hole enables someone to attempt to setup the 118800 mobile phone directory service from such dodgy sources claiming this use to be totally legal:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/12/connectivity_legal_threats/

@louis - put up or shut up

Show us the source code if yours is as good as you claim. Or if you're intending to sell it like Windows, then at least show us the compiled binaries. And if you can't do either, then why should anyone who can't see your claimed emporer's clothing not consider yours in the same light as we do perpetual motion proposals apparantly intended to seperate gullible investors from their money and which crop up on a frequent basis ?

@Mark 65

" 1. I haven't been able to find anything suitable for remote support (not RDP) of the LogMeIn / TeamViewer type where very little is required of the user needing support - they're pretty PC illiterate. *** Any suggestions for software gratefully received *** "

Install openssh-server on their computer and login to it using ssh -X their.IP.Add.ress from your client. The -X gives you X forwarding. Then you can run GUI apps from your shell in background, e.g. try

gedit &

and it should run on their computer but display on your client.

You'll have to forward the ssh port on their firewall/router if they have a router. Good idea to install denyhosts if you do this and have good passwords. If your parents don't remember good passwords or can't input these, then their login does not want ssh remote access, sudo bash to their from your login which can have ssh access configured, so you can run their programs on your desktop if they have a GUI app which they can't congure themselves.

"2. Less solvable however is the lack of ISP support for Linux. They're utter bastards, barely support Mac and are completely unwilling to help for Linux. It's the same old windows checklist - reinstall TCP stack etc - bullshit. A router, rather than modem, should negate this bullshit entirely. If the router has a connection then from there it's your problem unless they offer total support contracts."

The router solves it entirely as you say. Everything talks Ethernet these days and can do DHCP to get an address from the router. One thing you may have to configure if you have a very old fashioned ISP is the ISP DNS server addresses. On Linux these go in /etc/resolv.conf . See point above about forwarding the ssh port, but the router should be configurable using a standard web browser on any computer on the LAN side of the router pointed at the IP of the router on the LAN, typically 192.168.1.254 , check the router documentation for this if not. Worth checking router documentation before you buy to make sure the router is controllable by you by this means and not left in an insecure state (e.g. WiFi left on with open access when you don't need it, unable to turn PnP off etc. ) without giving you ability to change this. I've seen some wretched router setups like this recently, though there may be a more suitable firmware in some cases.

misses the point

It's trivially obvious that if you want to do the things you need a traditional PC for as described in the article, that you're likely to continue using a traditional PC. But you can't put one of these in a large coat pocket. Mobile phone apps are limited by the physical constraints of screen and keyboard. The potential market niche covered by the netbook concerns devices between these extremes, and this is probably a smaller niche than either PCs or mobile phones.

Trying to do traditional PC things on these suffers from bad ergonomics, slow keyboards due to a higher error rate even if you are a touch typist and shoulder and eye strain coping with the smaller form factor if used for any length of time. So what are netbooks useful for ? The Chrome OS design is based on the assumption that web applications, where the data and profile are obtainable through multiple devices including netbooks where the client is mobile, are the primary reason why people will bother to buy and lug around the hardware. The reason I've never wanted a traditional laptop for these applications is because these are too big and heavy to be worth lugging around.

My own experiments with an Acer Aspire One running Ubuntu Netbook Remix suggest web apps to be very useful when I'm on the move, though I have also used it to upload and display holiday snaps from my camera as well and to handle urgent email. So perhaps Google will be cutting their potential user base if standard USB devices (cameras, printers etc. ) already well supported by Linux are not included. But I'll never want to do traditional PC things on it because of the form factor - and this has nothing to do with the OS.

@david wilson

"And do those US provisions extend to stopping people being chased up for sharing copyright material?"

While the US clearly led historically on bringing privacy rights into constitutional legislation, I suspect there are cultural reasons that the EU will lead in connection with taking legal cases defending ISP customer data protection and challenging private copyright surveillance to this judicial level. The fact that there now is a Swedish Pirate Party MEP in the European Parliament is evidence of these reasons.

It can take many years for judicial processes to make constitutional rights effective in specific areas, as the many decades taken between the ending of slavery and racial equality laws making the full citizenship of blacks and other minorities effective within the US demonstrates.

This process is accelerated through changes in political perception and through political action. Until the Internet there was little possibility of a movement for limiting the reach and extent of copyright, because the beneficiaries of copyright (i.e. mass media) were the sole means by which any such voice could be presented and heard. Also prior to the technical capacity for copying being in everyones' hands, copyright imposed a practical legal obligation upon very few people. Prior to the Internet, the form of mass surveillance now being challenged was also not a possibility.

@Fraser

"There are many things that some groups of people consider controversial, in some communities it's controversial to suggest that gay people should have the same rights as hetrosexual people, that doesn't mean that the people who hold views like that are in the right."

You've just given us a very good example which proves that what is considered controversial is subject to change. When I first heard the word "homosexuality" this was a criminal offence, and few people would have thought the idea that gays should have equal rights worth consideration, while I guess that in many liberal societies today the idea that gays should have equal rights is probably the majority view.

Then, in various US states, having a judge who was a Klu-Klux Clan member presiding over a trial of a framed black civil rights activist would not have been dismissed as representing a conflict of interest until this issue was appealed to the federal level. It's the same kind of issue here: the presumption that being an advocate of a copyright extremist advocacy organisation doesn't create a conflict in this trial is being used to marginalise any opposition to extreme copyright by branding it criminal. Yes, it's true that the repression here isn't on the same scale as that of blacks in the southern US in the fifties and sixties, but let's not ignore the fact that copyright extremists are threatening to lock their opponents up in jail here and are attempting to use their power as judges do this.

Liver disease and transplants are no joke

Someone very close to me suffers from a congenital liver disease. Others with more advanced forms of it in her support group regularly receive transplants. A now retired friend from where I work had one about 7 years ago and is doing well. But living with someone else's liver in you is a large risk, as is any kind of liver disease or transplant. This isn't the kind of thing anyone has done unless they expect to die fairly soon otherwise.

I don't use Steve's products but wish him a long, healthy and happy life regardless.