* Posts by PerfectBlue

100 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Aug 2009

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Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data

PerfectBlue

The EU is great, unless of course you're the victim of an European paedophile, in which case your abuser can't be deported to their country of origin, or you belong to a main stream religion in which case you can't dress how you want, where the symbols that you want, or express the opinions that you want. Because when it comes to basic rights, only secular rights seem to count these days.

PerfectBlue

It goes both ways.

For example, the EU ruling that the UK can't expel EU citizens who commit heinous crimes such as rape and child molestation. Or ruling that certain groups can be considered protected minorities even though their customs and practices are considered backwards and barbaric in the UK (No, not the obvious one, think again).

Microsoft engineer caught up in sudden spate of entirely coincidental grilling of Iranian-Americans at US borders

PerfectBlue

Re: And the consequenques fo failing to act?

Yes, finally, somebody who gets it.

This is what the wall is supposed to be about.

Keep out the foreigners, MAGA, lock her up, drain the swamp, free cheaseburger for veterans and all that.

I trust that we'll be seeing you at the Trump 202 victory party.

PerfectBlue

Re: And the consequenques fo failing to act?

Not really. There are credible reports that Chinese Americans are regularly being approached by Beijing, which reminds them that they still have family back in the old country who might come to harm if China's interests weeren't taken into account.

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

PerfectBlue

Re: Elon Musk

I may be wrong, but I beileve that was determined to be OK as it was supposed to be an insult rather than a litteral accusation of pedophilia. Though I haven't been following the case that closly so I may be wrong.

I'm actually OK with this, as I understand the facts to be (My understanding is that Musk didn't try to dig up dirt until after the law suit was suggested). I think that we should be free to insult people online and that it would set a bad precident if it became a crime to be rude. Especially since people become offended so easily these days.

Now, if somebody launched a sustained campaign of hate and abuse agains t an individual and were to bombarrd them with offensive messages, that would be a different story.

A couple of insults should be fair game. Otherwise simply disagreeing with somebody and calling them a nasty name would become illegal. Supposed that you called disagreed wwith a review on the Reg which gave an easy ride to a bad product and you were to call the writer a shill or a hack on twitter. Do we really want ot live in a world where that's illega?

People need to be more ressiliant, and to understand that the internet isn't the real world. I'd never shoot somebody in the head, repeatedly teabag their corpse, and intimate that I'd had close physical relations with their, mother in real life. But I priobably did it in Fortnight at least 3 times last night. One would be considered a criminal offence, the other would be conisdered a normal night in for a 12 year old.

PerfectBlue

Speaking as somebody who identifies as a huge great nerd I think that we should take ownership of these terms: They OUR words, so it's OK if we say them. Psychologist, not so much.

Or, to put it another way, If a rapper can use the racial expletive that shall not be named freely in public, then it should be OK for us, right?

What is UltraViolet™ and why should you care?

PerfectBlue

Catch?

Too good to be true, you just know that there's going to be a catch.

I'm wondering what it is going to be.

There's probably going to be a two teir system with a free version that lets you do less than you currently can with a DVD (Like locking it down to set devices), and a premium version that has the features that are listed above, but where you have to give up some of you content if you stop subscribing (making this a long rental rather than an ownership deal).

Porn found in Osama bin Laden compound

PerfectBlue

Yeah, right

Sorry, but I'm just not going to take this at face value.

Bin Laden was an ultra conservative, so were most of his followers, and they were living in a highly conservative country. One of their biggest complaints against Western lifestyles was the consumption of porn.

The actual odds of them having their own porn cache are pretty low.

This sounds an awful lot like a smear campaign. The only thing here that surprises me is that it wasn't child porn. Next thing Washington will be claiming that he had a cooler full of beer, or maybe that they'd found some pictures of him at a frat party.

Maybe he sent his laptop back to Best Buy to get it fixed? There's bound to be some child porn on it somewhere.

Washington releases videos of Bin Laden looking frail and watching TV reports, but they won't show us pictures of him dead, or of him doing anything terrorist related. How about some actual proof that he's dead? Or that he was still an active threat?

PC rental store hid secret spy hardware in laptop, suit says

PerfectBlue

Again?

I wonder if there is a forum available that tells users how to block this system using the Firewall feature built into most quality home networking kit?

Personally, my money is on the rental company having "disclosed" the tracking feature in the small print (in some totally obscure and non obvious way).

iPhones secretly track 'scary amount' of your movements

PerfectBlue

Surprise?

To be honest, I'd taken it for granted that most smart phones did this.

In the US the Feds mandate that all US cell phone have lojack capabilities so that the cops can track you. It's actually written into the rules. So the fact that Apple records them comes as no surprise to me.

PerfectBlue

Encrypted Backup?

"Any privacy loving person will already encrypt their backups,"

I hate to disagree, but where I come from privacy means a 14 year old girl hiding their cell phone while they;re in the shower so that their mom can't browse through their text messages.

The idea of encrypting a backup simple wouldn't occur to 90% of smart phone users. Most smart phone owners aren't technical people. Most probably don't back up at all. Syncing their iTunes with their laptop is probably the closest thing that they get to doing a backup.

You buy an iPhone because "it just works". Not because you want James Bond style privacy.

PerfectBlue

Yeah, right.

"Apple have made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements.”

Personally, I don't have jealous spouse, and I don't think that a private investigator is going to tail me. My life just isn't that exciting.

What I am concerned about is that a cop or a fed with a generic search warrant could snare your cell phone and use the data on it to go on a fishing expedition. If they know where you are, and at what time, they could potentially try to tie you to who knows what.

Even if you didn't happen to be near an actual crime they could imply that you were and use that to try to entrap you.

"Say, young African American male, I see you were on 2nd and Broadway at 6:30 yesterday evening ..."

iiNet against the world: final round draws near(ish)

PerfectBlue

Hmm

Probably for the same reason that they don't target pen manufacturers when dealing with personal cheque fraud.

Oh, and because the cell phone companies have a heap load of money to pay for lawyers.

Download data versus piracy claims: the figures don’t add up

PerfectBlue

USB Keys?

Who uses a USB key these days?

They simply plug their iPod Touch into somebody else's computer and transfer 100gig of music from one PC to another throught a "backup' program.

PerfectBlue

Blah, Blah, Blah

The key here is to look at the way that the content industry calculates their figures for piracy. They don’t simply ask people about their downloading habits, they apply a series of “modifications” to the answer that people give them, and then present that as their final figure.

A year or so back a British computer magazine did an editorial about a recent (for the time, that is) survey that claimed that piracy was rife in the UK. The found that the company took data from a small number of people, decided without actual evidence that a significant percentage of the people who said that they didn’t pirate were lying, and changed their answers, then extrapolated this across the entire internet using population of the UK. Along the way they turned a handful of people who admitted pirating stuff into millions of people.

Basically for every 12 year old son admitted that one time they downloaded a single music track, they determined that there must be a couple of dozen 90 year old grandmothers who downloaded Call of Duty 1 to X.

Seriously, they "extrapollated" the data so far that it became meaningless.

There was also a report done a while back on pirated iPhone apps. When the report was analyzed, and the number of pirated apps was compared to the number of people who'd actualy jail broken their phones so that they actually could use a pirated app, it turned out that the average iphone app pirate must have something like 1 million apps on their handset.

Internet Watch Foundation: Abuse images takedown speeds up

PerfectBlue

Maybe you should mention that ....

What this article should be saying, but isn’t is that the IWF is pretty much totally unaccountable as it’s not a government body and is not regulated by OFCOM. It can block anything that it likes, it doesn’t have to tell you that your trying to access blocked content, or that your content is being blocked. If the IWF determined that a picture of your child playing in your garden without their trousers on was pornography they could knock it off of the web for the vast majority of people in the UK and nobody would know about it except them. For everybody else the pictures would be invisible.

The IWF should be outlawed until such time as it puts in place a system by which it contacts content owners and informs them that they are being blocked, in order to allow them to argue their case. If a content owner is hiding their identity, then by all means block them, but legitimate content owners should be given the chance to challenge their blocking.

It’s scary that we don’t’ even know how much legitimate content is being blocked. If it weren’t for them blocking a picture on Wikipedia most of the people in the UK wouldn’t even be aware that the internet is censored in the UK.

This IWF is the unofficial outsourcing of censorship to vigilante busy bodies. They need to be made accountable before they take it into their heads to block other content. It may only a matter of time before they start blocking suicide discussion forums, or eating disorder forums, or who knows what that’s controversial but legal. They won’t tell you what they are blocking.

Make streaming a felony: Obama

PerfectBlue

Yes, we did read it. Did you read our responses?

I think that we all get the bit about it being other people’s content. What’s at issue here is the shift from civil to criminal law.

If you break civil law they don’t throw you in a privately run prison filled with sex offenders and gang foot soldiers, or keep your fingerprints and DNA on file for the next gazillion years.

When your kid gets hauled up before a judge for downloading a couple of music tracks, I’ll remind you of how bad life can be for people who are in the system. Say, if you want to get a scholarship to pay for college. Got a criminal conviction, too bad. Want to be a cop, work for a big company, work for a federal or state body? Want to be a school teacher. Sorry, you downloaded a Michael Jackson CD when you were a teen, so no way.

Virgin tempts Brits with fee-free TiVo

PerfectBlue

Really?

"Intelligent Recording (this is the part that if you are not home and have forgot to put East Enders in a series link, the system will record it for you - because it realises that you NORMALLY watch it)."

So, if my kids sneak down stairs late at night to watch something "unsuitable", it will start recording other similar programs for them?

So, I could end up with a PVR full of episodes of Girls Gone Wild and Slash Gore theatre?

One-third of Aussies 'are pirates'

PerfectBlue

It's hard to take you seriously when ....

It'd be nice if people would stop dragging out the word "freetard" every 5 minutes. Let's just call it piracy and the people who do it pirates, OK.

I know that this is a pretty informal forum, and it's not as if we're standing in front of Congress or anything, but if you are trying to get a serious message across about a serious issue name calling isn't the best way to get your argument across.

No matter how much industry experience you have name calling makes you sound like a teenage throwing a tantrum because a big bad company is asking you to pay for something.

On the other hand, these piracy claims are ridiculous. For a start, in in 3 Australians would include a lot of small children and senior citizens.

Now, I conceed that some parents will show their nippers pirated Disney videos and so on, but 1 in 3?

I remember a British report on piracy a while back where one of the big PC magazines looked deeper and found that they people who wrote the report had surveyed a tiny number of people, and had then "presumed" thata percentage of them were pirates, but weren't admiting to it, and they'd extrpolated from there. I think in the end the survey came up with some ridiciouls claim based on this extrapolation. They basically just took the number of people and kept on multiplying them, till they reached X million.

If anybody wants to look up the exact numbers to see what I'm talking about it was in PC Pro Magazine a year or so back. The article should still be on their website somewhere.

Passenger cleared after TSA checkpoint stare-down

PerfectBlue

Wiretap laws

Well, in a number of places (Mostly in California, I think), cops have charged people with wiretap violations for recording cops abusing their powers.

In the UK they have also repeatedly detained people who try to photograph police badge numbers.

PerfectBlue

yes ... but ....

Most people don't know this, and they hand over their memory cards\delete images believing that they have no choice but to comply.

BT shields gentle customers from Min of Sound pirate raids

PerfectBlue

silly

These days, all that it takes for them to try to prosecute is an IP address.

It won't be long before the accuse somebody with an internet enabled TV or some other device, which will have an IP but no download capabilities, of file sharing.

PerfectBlue

Libel

I was under the impression that under British laws this was the case. Remember, that in a libel case, it is the defense who is guilty until proved Innocent, but the prosecution who can be found to have committed libel.

If you make a serious accusation against somebody then that person is considered innocent under law, and you (as the person making the accusation) must prove them guilty of whatever it is that you are accusing them of.

You are the prosecution, and they are the defendant. If you fail to prosecute your case then you can be found to have committed libel against them by making an accusation that you cannot back up.

This is how it's supposed to be, otherwise somebody could simply make a serious accusation against you, and you'd have to prove that it was false, rather than them having to prove that it's true.

Suppose that a big newspaper made a serious accusation against somebody who couldn't afford a lawyer. Under libel laws the newspaper must prove that what they have said is true, rather than you proving that ti's false.

This is how it works in a lot of countries. Such as the US, UK, Japan and so on.

Wales loses 'dot-cum' domain to tax haven

PerfectBlue

.Wales

So, when is England going to get it's own domain? Or it's own parliament.

Too long have the English been slaves of the UK. Free the English, Free the English, Free the English.

PerfectBlue

Sarcasm?

I really hope that's sarcasm.

English is only a common language when you consider it as a second or third language. When you consider first languages then it's a poor second to Chinese.

About than 1 in 6 of the world's population read Chinese as a first language. There are already more Chinese internet users than there are people in total in the US, or in Europe.

Give it a few more years and there will be more Chinese people on the internet than there are people in the US and EU combined.

Based on this, the internet should be converted into Chinese, as Chinese outnumber everybody else.

One-third of iPad fanbois don't download apps

PerfectBlue

No Apps?

Are we actually talking "people who have NEVER downloaded an app"?

This sounds like one of those statistical fallacy that crops up now and then, where they take results across a large population of data and then chop off everything at the very top and bottom.

So people who have a gazillion apps, will be removed from the data as a statistical anomaly, and people who have 2 or 3 apps will be counted as having zero.

I think that the actual figure is probably more like "1/3 of iPad owners has downloaded fewer than 5 apps", but they are counted as having zero as the statistics are not accurate enough to take account of them due to estimating and averaging.

Apple trade marks 'There's an app for that'

PerfectBlue

Their ability to provide an app for anything

"Their ability to provide an app for anything" - except for that thing that teenage boys spend approximately 25% of their waking hours either doing, thinking about doing (often with the aid of a naughty magazine).

Still, there's plenty of apps for that on Android.

PerfectBlue

Why the fuss?

Why all the fuss?

A company has trademarked an advertising slogan. This is worth a second glance.

As far as I'm aware no other company has a slogan close enough to this to be a problem, and it's use in comedy routines and attack ads is protected by fair use clauses (Parody, and so on).

This is a normal business decision that happens a million times a year in the US. It's not a big deal. You trademark your slogan just like you trademark your logo, copyright your content, and patent your hardware.

TV numbers sink as iOS usage rises

PerfectBlue

Get real

Oh, come on.

My Prime time network viewing has dropped to almost 0, and I don't even own an Apple device. The same is true for most of my family and friends. While those who own Apples devices aren't even using them during prime time.

The reason for the drop is a combination of factors

1) The shows are garbage. Pure and Simple

2) We now have hundreds of channels to choose from, and time shifting PVRS. So even when we do watch TV during prime time we're not necesarily watching a prime time show, and when we do watch prime time shows they may be from several days ago. I can't be the only person to record several episodes and then watch them all back to back on a wet weekend afternoon.

3) Ditto for video on demand, Tivo, Netflix and Youtube.

4) Can you say Nintendo WII, or PS3?

The truth is that our lives are now so full of alternatives to prime time TV, which is pretty poor these days, that we've all got better things to do. Including better things to do than to tap a tiny little screen on an iPhone.

Sure, some people will be playing games on their iTouch or iPad during prime time, but I doubt that this is having much of an impact on TV viewing during this time period.

ACS:Law's mocking of 4chan could cost it £500k

PerfectBlue

Never underestimate the creativity or a bored bunch of teens?

Are you sure that they're teens? Not middle aged men pretending to be teens?

There appear to be more teens on the web than there are teens in the world. Half of them are little kids pretending to be older, and the other half a adults pretending to be younger. There's probably a couple of real teens there. Just by pure chance. They are the ones who are sitting around looking confused while everybody around them talks about Hannah Montanna and The Who.

PerfectBlue

Need you ask

While the media likes to make out that 4Chan is just a bunch of teenagers playing silly pranks, some of its members are extremely skilled hackers. If they put their heads together there's probably enough hacking talent on 4Chan to get into just about any system, let alone into the off the shelf website commissioned by that particular company.

The odds are that their security procedure was to turn automatic updates on and then leave to get on with things itself.

They probably just installed a web server package onto a second sever and plugged that into the net to cope with the extra demand caused by the DDOS, not realizing that the second server had sensitive information on it.

iPhone fanbois run off road in CoolBrand race

PerfectBlue

Simple

Understated means subtle. Something looks really good but doesn't jump off the shelf and hit you between the eyes. It's designed to look good in a subtle way by not attracting attention to one feature of itself.

overstated' beauty means that something is garish. It looks OK, but makes too much effort to be noticed.

PerfectBlue

Dreamland

I often wonder how much credibility any of these "cool" surveys actually have. Or how in touch with the real world the people who do the judging are.

Some of the stuff that appears in surveys like this often falls into the "fantasy" category. They're nice, but are so unobtainable that they don't occupy people's thoughts very often.

For example, Austin Martin is right at the top, but your average man on the street won't think about them for more than a couple of minutes before getting on with their lives. Yet there are 10s of thousands of school girls out there who will insesantly nag thier parents for an iPhone for months "because all of their friends have one", and a fair few boys who'd rip their own scrotums off if they thought there was an iPad inside.

If you were to go out on to the street and ask the average person what they thought was cool, things like the Aston Martin probably wouldn't feature in the top 50, and you'd probably have the iPad, iPhone and iTouch all in the top 10.

I'm not an Apple fan (don't own ANYTHING Apple), but they generate such a frenzy that you cannot ignore them.

ZoneAlarm slammed for scarewarey marketing

PerfectBlue

Seriously?

In all honestly, that pop up actually looks like a fake one. If I'd seen that on my PC, I'd have presumed that it was not a real Zone Alarm pop up at all, but rather an attempt to copy it.

Tinfoil 'radiation shield' maternity wear hits 'Frisco

PerfectBlue

Snake oil?

While this may be just another form of snake oil sold on the back of scaremongering, I would like to point out that there are literally thousands of substances and/or chemicals that scientists assured us were safe, but which were later found to be harmful.

Just look at the number of factories during the 1970s and 80s where the women working on the production lines had a level of miscarriage that was several times higher than the national average rate of children born with birth defects, and it turned out to be the "harmless" materials that they were working with.

I'm filing this particular item of clothing down in the useless draw, but I'm putting my skeptics hat on when it comes to the issue of EM radiation in general.

There are multiple verified cases around the world of people suffering medically verifiable symptoms after spending time near EM sources.

I've got family who worked with radio and EM based navigation equipment and they will tell you that EM burn is no joke. It's like sticking your hand in a microwave.

Admittedly they were working with high powered systems rather than domestic ones, but I there has been minimal actual research done on the long term health effects of low level output devices, and what research there has been has all to often centered on a small number of brand new devices, whereas people in the real world will often be around dozens of different devices at the same time, some of them old and/or malfunctioning and thus outputting on different or unpredictable frequencies.

I'm going to hold off on calling low level EM devices safe for a while.

WikiLeaks readies next release

PerfectBlue

Probably

So, you're saying that it's not in the public's interest to know what the military (one of the largest sinks of tax payer's money) is up to?

Personally, I think that it's more important for the state to be accountable than a private company.

I can boycott Coke or Pepsi if they use Indian slave labor, I have that choice if i'm made aware. But I can't refuse to pay my taxes if they are being used to blow up Afghan civilians. That's not a choice that I have. So it's more important that we be made aware in order to shame them into stopping.

PerfectBlue

There should be no need for Wikileaks

In an ideal world there should be no need for Wikileaks to publish these documents.

The Washington should have archived them and willingly made them available for public consumption itself.

The government is needlessly keeping millions of documents secret, or worse, is destroying them without ever admitting to.

The constitution needs amending to end this endless and needless secrecy. If American troops in Afghanistan are forced to reveal what they are doing then maybe they will think twice before dropping bombs on civilians and torturing people, and if they aren't killing civilians or to torturing people then there won't be any documents to reveal

Take the names of informants out by all means, but leave in the rest. If the government is spending tax payers money bribing the Taliban, or compensating the families of dead civilians, then the tax payer should be informed

Jackal novelist blames NSA for wife's laptop hack

PerfectBlue

Reality check

Let's take a brief reality check.

It's an open secret that the FBI, CIA, NSA and a whole load of other agencies have been spying on people like Forsyth since the day that they were founded.

It's not new, it's not secret, and it's most certainly not surprising. Agencies have spied on everybody from foreign ambasadors to the Beatles. The only part of this story that is surprising would be the idea that they'd botched the hack. They'd usually be in and out without being noticed.

This story could well be 100% true. The feds spying on the wife of a dissident author who's in the midst of a delicate political situation in an unstable yet stragetically important country. The feds and/or the Pentagon does this kind of thing on a daily basis.

It's already been proved that the NSA has done a lot worse. Remember back in 2003 when they were found to have bugged meetings at the UN.

Hacking a laptop is nothing compared to that.

Woman sues to force exposure of YouTube bullies

PerfectBlue

Suing?

So, is she suing for libel/slander, or for copyright infringement?

PerfectBlue

Yes

In some countries you do. Korea brought in a law a few years back forbidding anonymous post in order to stop people from anonymously critisizing politicians after some people posted comments on a website saying that .

For this reason some companies refuse to accept web postings from Korea. Korean users must select a different country of origin in order to be able to upload content.

PerfectBlue

It's only libel if it's not true.

Legally speaking, it's only libel if it's not true. Otherwise it's protected speech with the full weight of the constitution behind it.

I haven't actually read what was written about her so I can only speak in general terms, but if she actually was in a low budget independent movie, and she actaully did what they are saying that she did, then it's not libel. It's free speech.

She would also probably have to prove that they impuned her character and caused her damage by doing so. This can be quite hard to prove. For example, if a person takes a part in a low budget adult movie as a student, and that movie is sold with their knowledge and consent, then they cannot sue if this information is posted on a website later on when that person is high profile lawyer or something as they actually did what they were said to have done.

US gov proves ISPs lie about bandwidth

PerfectBlue

Is it actually possible?

Sorry, but is it actually possible for an ISP to advertize accurate bandwidth?

I'm not defending shady advertizing (Or outright lying, for that matter), but is it actually possible for a US ISP to advertize accurate bandwidth statistics?

I live in a small town. When an ISP advertizes here it uses the same ad for the entire town, yet if you live in one part of town you can get a 6-7 meg connection, but if you live in another part of town you can only get 2-3. All of the phone cables are with one company, all of the exchanges are with one company (It's a very small town), but the the bandwidth rates vary wildly even with the same ISP because of all kinds of street level factors, like some of the junction boxes on each block dating back to the 1970s, or some streets having people on them who use poorly configured P2P systems that flood the local circuits with millions of ultra small packets and jam everything up.

Some steets are wired for cable and are right on top of the local exchange, so there are like 3 or 4 people people on ADSL on those streets who get pretty much full speed as they virtually have a private line straight to the exchange.

Then there are factors inside people's homes like electrical equipment putting interference on the lines, or badly wired telephone connections.

ISPs can hardly be blamed for some of this stuff (Only 1 ISP in my town actually owns infrastructure, and they are a cable company). There's a lot that they can be blamed for, but unless they measure the speed on every street and produce custom ads for them then they can't actually advertize acurrate speeds.

Personally, I'm on cable. I get the advertized speed. Which is significantly faster than even the best ADSL. ADSL is NOT the future of internet access. It's a stop gap that is reliant on a legacy system.

If we want to be able to compete with countries like Japan and Korea we need to do what Japan and Korea are doing. They are wiring up everywhere possible with cable access.

I realize that this is n't practical everywhere, especially not in small towns, but it's way forward. If you want reliable and high bandwidth you need to get cable.

Independent bigs up the 'Wanky Balls festival'

PerfectBlue

Two halves?

"Whom can one trust now half the media is owned by Murdoch and other half have been proven to be idiots, liars or both??"

Didn't you just describe the same "half" twice?

Wikipedia is probably more reliable than most of Murdoch's rags. At least it occasionally cites its sources, which is one step beyond Murdoch's crew.

Ofcom prepares to open up on emissions

PerfectBlue

Seriously?

Oh come on, jamming is probably the silliest thing that a terrorist could do.

You jam a signal either by broadcasting interference or by broadcasting a more powerful signal over the top. Both of these not only give away the fact that you're up to something, but they also give away your location (The military could triangulate your signal in minutes then drop a couple of Apache attack helicopters on your head).

Plus, it's not all that easy to do. Especially not with a cell based system like cellphones use (It's why they are called cellphones, their masts form a cellar structure). If they jam one antennae the other local ones take over. You'd have to jam multiple masts to do any real damage.

PerfectBlue

Who jams these days?

If a terrorist wanted to do damage they wouldn't jam a mast, they'd blow it up. Or cut the power lines.

What the companies are really afraid of it the rest of us knowing just how many masts there are around the place.

Social-engineering contest reveals secret BP info

PerfectBlue

Fuss over nothing

"The information included what model laptops BP used and the specific operating system, browser, anti-virus and virtual private network software the company used."

Oh come on, that's barely anything. A good hacker could find that out in minutes through electronic means, and a bad one wouldn't be able to use it anyway. Not if the company configured it properly.

In my experience that kind of information is not considered important. It's given out to suppliers and potential suppliers on a daily basis, and it saves thousands of pounds a year by getting you a better price form companies that want you to switch to their products, or which are doing deals on certain products, and if you tell a software supplier then you might as well tell the world.

As I said, if the hacker is skilled knowing this information in advance will save them about 5 minutes, and if they are not skilled then they won't be able to do much with it. What matters is whether the company has properly set up the software at their end. If they've left holes in the system a hacker can exploit them without any real difficulty.

Pirate Party storms out of uber-secret ACTA negotiations

PerfectBlue

Democracy

Unlike most of you who've only ever know life in a democracy, I've spent a notable chunk of my life languishing in a brutal totalitarian police state (No, not the US under Bush, something worse).

I know all to well that you should be very afraid when leaders get together to make laws without public consultation and without public accountability.

Be prepared to kiss goodbye to your rights, and to being innocent until proved guilty, because that's what's going to happen. Oh, and be prepared to kiss goodbye to the concept of ownership. Once this treaty is signed you will own the plastic that your CDs are stamped on, but nothing more. You may not even be allowed to make a play list to listen to tracks in a different order. They movie companies have already pulled that one with DVDs. You used to be able to buy DVD players that would time skip over curse words or nudity, but you can't any more.

PerfectBlue

why?

Because they'd throw him out of the next meeting.

By walking out he highlighted the issue in a way that he could not be punished for doing so.

It was the smart thing to do.

Nipper's naked arse provokes Street View outrage

PerfectBlue

Not so

Ah, but in most parts of the UK (Where this picture was taken), it's actually a legal requirement (Local bylaw, rather than national criminal law) for all fences at the front of a property to be kept below a certain height (Usually around 1 meter) or to be of an open slat design so that you can easily see through them.

You can have higher fences at the sides of properties or at the backs, or you can have a higher hedge, but in a significant portion of the UK it's not permitted to have a front fence that's high enough to have blocked a view of that child from the street by average hight adult.

Even if that fence had been 10 feet high the child would have still been in plain sight for any sex offender with a ladder or in a helicopter, or even one with x-ray vision.

PerfectBlue

Paranoid?

"I would never dream of letting my children run around the front of the house butt naked."

Really? Well I'd never dream of stopping mine form doing that. I trust my neighbors and I know that there are actually very few sex offenders on the streets. Most sexual abuse is committed by close family members or friends of the family. Stranger abuse is quite rare.

You're children are more likely to be molested by the mother's boyfriend/their step father, than by a stranger. So keeping them inside would actually be more dangerous than letting them out as you'd potentially be keeping them in the house with their abuser.

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