Posts by My Alter Ego
281 posts • joined Wednesday 16th September 2009 21:06 GMT
Re: Hmmmmm Rogue Waves......
Sounds like a good plan, though personally I find that the Virgin Mary doesn't exactly <ahem> do it for me. Each to their own.
Re: What will they do with the overseas assets?
"God I hate that type of statement, isn't it truly amazing that some people really think that rich people simply stash all their money in a big safe to keep it away from all the grubby poor people?"
Isn't that exactly what Apple are doing here?
telnet
Good luck using that on Windows Vista and above. Microsoft in their wisdom removed it, apparently to reduce bloat (it's a couple of 100kB) and for security reasons (confusing a client with a server that was never enabled by default).
It's quicker to google PuTTY, download, install and run than it is to install the telnet client.
Re: The blog
Well, it can be quite difficult to avoid the biker who suddenly plants himself in front of your car - if the traffic is already doing 80, there's no need to filter. I also got overtaken by a bunch of bikers pulling wheelies past me last Sunday week. They wouldn't have been doing that if they'd seen the biker being lifted off the A34 into an air ambulance earlier that day.
I'm not trying to tar all with the same brush, but I've come across far too many lunatics in the last two weekends - probably because it's the first "nice" weather we've had.
Re: France Telecom - Pah!
Just in case you were being serious, it's because the cell and intnet often tends to go back to the county of origin of the ship. Doing an IP geo location when on free WiFi on Irish ferries will tell you you're in Norway.
What I don't get is that when the ship is within reach of 3g cells it continues to use the slow and incredibly expensive satellite connection.
OS speed
I really hope that the amount of time it takes for Solitaire and Minesweeper to load is not indicative of the OS speed and responsiveness.
Or just use a smaller ISP - AAISP, Xilo, etc. I've just tried on our backup ADSL line - not blocked, whereas our Leased Line is. Actually that surprises me as the previous bans didn't affect us.
Re: We'd better send another sattelite...
Not unless you want to be sued by Games Workshop.
Re: Maybe he read Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion"
Quite the opposite.
If I didn't have such a strong belief that there is no god, that book would have put me off atheism. Richard Dawkins comes across as an arrogant asshole. In fact, I describe him as a Fundamental Atheist - his way is the only way, and anyone with an opposite view is an idiot.
Re: "pillow biting"
Hmm, never heard that phrase - I just read it as a reference to being shafted. Maybe I've just led a sheltered life. Then again, I didn't understand the whole American outrage at the KFC advert in Australia that had fain placating Windies supporters by giving them some KFC - I'd never heard about the whole Black, fried chicken stereotype.
I suppose some people just enjoy being offended and announcing it to the world.
Self signed certs are the way forward
Putting my tinfoil hat on, using self signed certs and PGP appears to be the only way to have some privacy anymore. CAs can't be trusted (mainly due to incompetence, not malice). Ironically, the more the security services* push snooping, the sooner everyone starts encrypting all their traffic.
* Every person who becomes home secretary seems to be turned into a crazed maniac that would put the head of the Stasi to shame. Either there's something in the water in Marsham Street, or [every day] they get told that the next 9/11 * 1000000 is imminent.
Re: Daniel Palmer
Completely agree. I've sat there optimising the hell out of code to get it to run decently on the emulator when developing (doubles to floats, caching variables in lists, etc), only to find that it runs perfectly on my Nexus 1. The emulator runs like a dog, and I now try to avoid it as much as possible.
Re: Never mind the nuke angle, there are more important questions:
Persionauts? Not to be confused with a French car manufacturer.
Re: US State Department is concerned?
I also don't understand how it can "probably" violate Resolution 1929. It achieved orbit (not sub-orbital or ballistic) and if they've managed to launch satellites before they already have the capability to launch a ballistic missile. To get to 100km you only need 1.4km/s Δv, to get into LEO, 9.4km/s Δv is needed.
The words Horse, Stable and Door spring to mind when I saw that quote.
Re: Muslims in Space
Not as complicated as for Jewish astronauts. An Israeli who was on a Shuttle mission had the problem that the Sabbath is every 7 days (or 7 sunsets on earth), unfortunately the Shuttle was orbiting every 90 minutes, meaning a Sabbath comes around every 10.5 hours, which would have been quite distracting. They resolved it by deciding that he could observe the Sabbath as if he were at Cape Canaveral.
Re: I put my foot through my cornflakes
Absolutely, it's much safer to pretend that he never existed - a bit like the book "A complete history of German politics - 1946 to present"*
* I told my [German] Mum this one, and she did laugh - who says that they don't have a sense of humour.
Posted in Mega launches with mega FAIL
It happens when you activate your account. Bit bloody slow uploading some (non-critical) test files though.
Posted in Mega launches with mega FAIL
Re: Fail
Don't understand the whole password thing. I [ would have] thought that Mega hold the encryption keys, but they are encrypted themselves with your password. When you log in, they send your keys to you which is then decrypted client-side using your password, and can be used for uploading new files. If you wanted to change your password, all that needs to be done is to for the client-side script to re-encrypt your keys and send them back for storage. Encrypting using your password as the key is just plain stupid, as your password will hit Mega's servers when you log in.
At least, that's they way I'd hope it to be. Please feel free to pick holes in this.
In addition, I'd hope that when you login your password never hits Mega's servers (if it were used for encrypting your keys), but is hashed and then sent to authenticate (this hash in turn is hashed and compared to the credentials database). That would mean that could still authenticate you, but would never be even able to sniff what your password is. Of course, it would rely on you completely trusting their client-side scripts, so that will fail the tin foil hat test.
Re: Beef
"All the beef is British or Irish with no fillies."
Fixed that for you.
Reduce customer data usage.
Does that mean that data downloaded from Google doesn't count towards a customer's usage, seeing as it's already been paid for? Thought not.
Re: Alps
I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill.
Re: Strewth,
Indeed, my sister used to use slide film a great deal. Some of her photos, especially the black & white ones were stunning. Then again, it helps if you're capable of taking a decent photo in the first place! The best photos I've ever taken have been purely by chance.
Completely agreee
My niece and nephew are impossible to buy Christmas and birthday presents for because my sister just buys them things when ever she wants. I've just gotten into the habit of basically buying a present from her stock pile (no really) and give that to them. Basically, they've been trained that they can get stuff when they want, and not have to wait.
To sound like and old-fogey (I'm only 31), be glad of what you're given you bunch of ingrates. The only items I've ever received a receipt with were clothes, in case they didn't fit.
You can
That's pretty much what BT will charge to install a leased line.
US or Blighty
What's the difference? He'll end up in the US either way.
Posted in Google defames Reg columnist Verity Stob
Used to be the same for Margaret Moran
I should have taken a screen grab of the MP who was feeling too poorly to face trial for fraud (but was chipper enough to visit the local boozer 5 days after the trial ended). Anyhow, I digress - her Google biography photo had her sporting a [very badly] photo-shopped snout. It's still there (bottom right), but sadly not the primary photo.
Re: Meh
Another bonus with Dropbox is that if you've got several machines using the same Dropbox account on the same LAN, they'll sync with each other, Google Drive [when I checked last] insists on uploading everything to Google and the downloading it on the other machine.
Toshiba have always had this capability
It's just that it now happens at the click of a button rather that when you're least expecting it.
Re: He did however pretend to be other than who he was
"... because what weev and GoatSec did is clearly not the same as a burglar walking into an open house ..."
No, what he did was the equivalent of selecting a house at random, opening the door to determine who the occupant is, then moving on to the next house and so on. The server wasn't just handing out the data, he had to send requests (brute force) to get the data.
"If it turns out that I am going to get prosecuted for finding and reporting/exposing a vulnerability, then I won't disclose it."
No, you'll get prosecuted for publishing private data after exposing a vulnerability. Was it really necessary to fetch 120,000 email addresses and provide them to Gawker? It's great that he informed AT&T, but he was an idiot for handing out the collected data just because he could. AT&T were definitely negligent here, but it didn't warrant divulging the data as well as the method.
Sounds a bit like BMW (or any other marque)
A colleague of mine dealt with a BMW franchised dealer in the South of England. About four years ago the MD was informed that he'd have to have the showroom rebuilt - estimated cost about £1.2 million. He baulked at the idea and said there was no way his sales would improve enough to cover the cost and asked what would happen if he refused. He was told "you'll lose your franchise", his reply was "take it then".
Ten years ago nobody would ever have to BMW to stuff it, but the marques have become so arrogant that sometimes there's no option.
That said, while I'm not surprised to see that Apple is so arrogant, I am slightly surprised to see they to this long to hop on the bandwagon of stiffing your resllers and making a quick buck by forcing them to buy from certain people - you've got to be incredibly naive to believe that Apple isn't getting a massive kickback for sending business their way.
Posted in Ten Linux apps you must install
Re: Grok
"Mine's the one with that copy of Stranger in a Strange Land that I still haven't read in the pocket " - Wouldn't bother either, I really enjoy his short stories, but couldn't get into it.
Never got the point of grok either - anyone who says they understand intuitively the CLI probably doesn't as much as they believe they do. I spend half my life in it and it still sometimes turns around and whacks me over the head.
Re: How strong is their package PKI ?
What I took from the advisory was
"We have also verified that the most recently-available portsnap(8) snapshot matches the ports Subversion repository, and so can be fully trusted"
which I read as the current portsnap is valid, however [there's a miniscule possibility that] anything retrieved using portsnap fetch in the given timeframe may not have been trustworthy.
Of course, maybe I'm just being completely paranoid, but as you say, I'm not very used to seeing FreeBSD and vulnerability in the same sentence.
Re: How strong is their package PKI ?
The problem is that I install from the ports tree (compile each package, not install a binary package), so there was a possibility that the attacker could have modified ports (by adding custom patches). The ports tree has a Makefile that will download the source (usually from the project, not FreeBSD) and then applies a set of patches. It does check the downloaded source file against an SHA256 hash however the we expect the patches to be trusted if they come from portsnap.freebsd.org
Seeing as the attacker had developer access, even if each port was signed, there still could have been an issue. It's not like the attacker just had access to an FTP server or mirror - [as far as I can tell] it would be like having access to Debian's build environment - changes could be made to the source, tarball checksums could be recomputed, and malicious binaries could be built.
Any ports I installed/updated during the timeframe may have contained malicious patches, so I've spent an enjoyable morning determining what changes I've made in the last while, and reinstalling everything that could be possibly compromised.
Not everyone's a loser
It's amazing how often administrator's fees tend to equal the assets of the company they're stripping down restructuring. I'm sure Deloitte won't be breaking that tradition.
Re: Tiscali will rue the day...
I'm still trying to get my head around the reason why Talk Talk have jumped at the chance of implementing the "filter thingy". It's got to cost them, so unless their CEO or board are a bunch of prudes.
If you have so little interest in monitoring your children's internet activity that you need Talk Talk (a company not renowned for their efficiency) to do it for you, then you're not a very good parent. I imagine Claire Perry would be incredulous if you couldn't be arsed to tell your children to not to take lifts from strangers.
I'm going to raise the same argument with my MP and see what his reaction is.
Re: The Morality Police
"After all, sex is how we all got here! All violence leads to is death."
Not quite, for some people violence leads to sex. I was going to make a joke of it, and then realised that it could refer to non-consensual sex too.
Anyhow, if young people learn about sex from porn, odds are that it'll be a [relatively] disappointing experience the first time round, so much so that they make an effort to improve themselves - Everybody's a winner!
To quote George Carlin
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Re: BBC
They don't advertise their next program using an annoying overlay at the bottom of the screen, nor do they insert their adverts into the middle of programs.
Mostly intermediate waste
However there are still bulidings B30 & B38 - apparently the two most hazardous industrial buildings in Western Europe, and that was according to Sellafield's deputy MD.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that volume is a pretty rubbish metric when dealing with nuclear waste, but Sellafield will take a metric fucktonne (that's 1.1 imperial fucktons) of work to clean up.
It's actually quite impressive.
If I want an Android phone, I've got a massive choice of handsets, however if I want an iOS phone, I've got a grand total of 3 choices - 4, 4s & 5, so the fact that any one Android phone can top the iPhone's sales is impressive.
The suspect hasn't been named
That's because he's Dutch and they [tend to] have their rights respected. Granted, in this case it was probably a Dutchie that ratted him out.
A Dutch friend of my is always appalled by how somebody here is publicly named and plastered over the front page in relation to a murder, abduction, etc. Apparently over there they're only named once found guilty. He asked me what would happen to the bloke named (later arrested) in relation to the April Jones abduction - my response was "his life is fucked, whether or not he's guilty"
I've always had a soft spot for the Dutch.
Posted in Apple is Superman's digital Kryptonite
Re: So the news is
More like, Amazon updated their Kindle app for iOS, but it's been rejected because the person testing it found questionable content in one of the cartoons, and now it's been reclassified as an adult app.
Re: Pathetic..
Yup, apart from the fact that is says Samsung on the front, doesn't have any buttons on the front, is a different shape and has a rounded edge on the front of the bezel, they're exactly the same.
Damnit, have to get this hook out of my mouth.
Definitely not an Apple fan, but ...
I feel I should point out that the US site appears to be the only one that doesn't do the Javascript resizing - Oz, German, French sites do the resizing too.
If course, I'm sure it's just a coincidence that Apple decided to roll out this change just now.
</sarcasm>
It's also pretty blatant that's it's been done on purpose - create a very tall thin window, and it'll still hide the footer, but still increase the iPad mini advert so that you need to scroll right - that's not ideal UI design.
Flames - I'm sure I'll be voted down for pointing this out.
Re: Licence to FAIL
Where in the article does it mention either of Dalton's films? I can't find anything, but then maybe my brain has knocked off early for Friday.
Re: hopefully unleaded
I love the idea of being concerned about unleaded petrol when it comes to stuffing large amounts of Bolivian marching powder up your nose.
