Posts by NumptyScrub

Re: No passwords = jail

Yes, under UK law (RIPA section 49) refusal to provide an encryption key (or indeed just failure to provide an encryption key, when the officer "has reason to believe the key is in your posession") is an offense which carries a custodial sentence. The UK does not have a 5th amendment, we are fully expected and indeed required by law to incriminate ourselves, and do not have the right to remain silent :)

Should you end up in possession of encrypted data to which you do not have the key, and are in or passing through UK held territory, you had better hope you can convince the authorities that you honestly cannot decrypt it for them. I suspect the only way you'll be able to do that is to provide another name or names of people they can get access to, and tell them those people are in posession of the key(s).

Depending on who you talk to, they may put forward the suggestion that the terrorists are winning so easily because they are in fact working for the authorities, providing them the excuse to erode yet more of our civil liberties. It seems the current crop may have taken 1984 to be a handbook, rather than a warning :'(

quote: "Were you never taught that two wrongs don't make a right? Committing a crime in response to another crime is still a crime, e.g. vigilante mobs."

Or the systematic torture* of suspected terrorists, or people in military prison charged with treason and aiding the enemy?

Or invading another sovereign nation (ostensibly) because they are commiting a crime like developing WMDs in brach of treaty?

Hate to point this out, but if nations commit crimes in response to other crimes (and are allowed to continue to do so without sanction), then expecting more of citizens is a little disingenuous.

*Torture being prohibited by both the UDHR (article 5) and also the UN Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (see Article 2 Clause 2)

Re: The fossil fuel industry relies on this hysteria

quote: "to totally change the atmosphere past the point of no return"

Source? IIRC from paleoclimate estimations, we've had far higher greenhouse gas percentages (especially CO₂) around before now; if it is truly a "point of no return" we would not be in the atmospheric position we are today, because we could not have "returned" from it all those millions of years ago.

Not that I'm disagreeing with your other points, but that quote seems an awful lot like the (unfounded) sensationalism we've seen wielded against nuclear power.

Re: They do this everywhere

quote: "But I found that I was usually being bypassed on decisions, my staff were being given jobs directly without any discussion with me and my working day slowly became turned into an excercise in applying for other roles, reading El Reg and other sites. Very occasionally, I'd have something to do, but may be only once a week. It was clear that they wanted me gone, but weren't prepared to pay me off."

I'm pretty sure that under UK (and EU?) employment law that is referred to as "constructive dismissal", and enough evidence laid before a tribunal will get you your severance pay anyway; the company doesn't save anything in the long run. In my experience, UK companies are far more likely to make your role redundant, wave you goodbye with a smile on their face, and then re-introduce the role under a different name a week later so they can hire a new person to do it once you are gone.

My experience may well be skewed though...

To rephrase an earlier post:

"Government is not a group of people who are called "secretary of state for this or of that" and that is headed by the President. Government is the sum of all powers and influences held by both the elected and unelected officials who work in the name of that government."

Can't remember the last time I voted for a General, or for the people who run the secret services. In fact, if I recall correctly, they are the same people no matter which party gets elected! How would one go about getting them replaced, in a democracy where the "voice of the people" is a respected and potent tool?

Re: Whatever.

quote: "(can't do much about 3G, but that's another story)"

Setup a femtocell for the relevant network(s) in the house routed through your firewall; I suspect that you'd need further messing around in order to make sense of the data (if it is not encrypted it bloody should be), but it would technically be capturing UMTS traffic from devices and routing it through your gateway ready for logging and analysis.

Whether you can actually be bothered is of course a whole different story, and of course it's only governments and TLAs that believe they have the right to do that to citizens with impunity. YMMV ;)

Re: Disproportionate

quote: "Do you really think that people still buy the iPhone because of the name, or manufacturer / "badge"?"

Yes (sample size: quite a lot). The corporate entity I work for has been supplying blackberries for years, and when we get the inevitable "I don't actually want that, can you support device X instead?" over 90% of the requests I've heard of involve the words iPhone or iPad.

Staff who just want a device appear to be fine with the blackberry, it seems that only those people who want to be able to show others an iDevice are the ones asking for something different (most of whom are upper management, or Marketing). At least in my experience, YMMV of course.

Re: Just an illusion

quote: "These talking heads know full well that surveillance is necessary for national security"

As written, I agree. However update it to read "know full well that blanket surveillance with 24/7 monitoring of all citizens is necessary for national security" and I'll take exception to that.

Which is what this argument is all about, basically. We were under the impression that government surveillance was in specific cases, which were being requested based upon prior evidence and had to be approved prior to enactment. Apparently that is not the case though, and people are getting a little jumpy to find that out.

These general public know full well that blanket 24/7 surveillance of citizens with no oversight required is necessary for a police state. It seems like they have no interest living in a police state.

Hacks which only require sending a deliberately malformed SMS to (random?) phone numbers, on the other hand, are exactly quite dangerous in the real world. Especially if they can be subsequently used to sign an OS update which you then send to the phone in question. From the article:

"The most common Class 2 message contains changes to the list of preferred roaming partners, to reflect new deals between operators, but the Global Platform standard permits anything, even the entire operating system, to be changed using signed Class 2 messages.

Such radical updates are rare, but they have happened and are secured using that shared secret, so knowledge of the key confers significant power."

Re: Is it April 1st?

quote: "We can't currently repair damaged nerves in humans. It would a Nobel prize level achievement if you worked out how to do it. So head transplants are just nonsense."

From the article: "Last month, researchers at Cleveland University managed to heal rats with broken spines, allowing them to control their bladders once again. The doctors successfully encouraged nerves to grow between two fractured sections of spine."

Dunno about you, but that sounds like being able to encourage the growth of nerve tissue between 2 sections of spine in a human is potentially acheivable to me. For head transplants, you just have the tissue rejection issue inherent in all transplants, and also the issue that you cannot guarantee that nerves are going to reconnect in the right places. Do human spines really have identically placed nerve clusters so that your brain impulses that used to control your left arm, will still control your left arm post-transplant?

Sadly I do not think this will be the case, and that you'll end up thrashing like a newborn until you relearn how to send the correct messages to your new body parts. Assuming that you can get the heart and lung nerves correctly connected, of course... IIRC heart and lung function are usually considered critical for continued function of any body ;)

Re: Dropping XBox

quote: "Sony are hardly angels, witness the rootkits they included with music CDs not so long ago. But until they start charging for the privelege of accessing content you've already paid for using a broadband service you've also paid for, I will stick with their products."

To play devil's advocate for a second, none of the XBox titles I have ever purchased have required me to be online just to play them. None. (maybe I just haven't bought the right ones though)

Yes, you need to be online to play Black Ops 2 against potty-mouthed, 12 year old Americans, but there is a single player campaign as well BTW ;)

So while I understand your point above, it's just a little too sweeping, and a little too generalised, for me to just let it lie. Yes MS charge for XBox Live Gold (which is required for online play), but they are not charging you to access the content. They are charging you to access the other XBL users via their hosted matchmaking + VOIP + social networking service. A petty distinction, but a distinction nonetheless.

Compare that with, say, Blizzard charging you a monthly fee to access content (i.e. World of Warcraft) over a broadband connection you have already paid for. How does that compare to Microsoft, and at what point are you deciding that the content counts as "already paid for" versus "this content requires an ongoing payment or we will terminate your access"?

I'm not saying either way is right, but an awful lot of people seem happy to pay monthly to play a single game online, via equipment and infrastructure they have already purchased and pay for. I don't see that model disappearing any time soon, unless every gamer migrated en masse to the free to play platforms.

Re: Why not use a helicopter?

quote: "They normally fly into Nepal, then go by truck or whatever to base camp which is 20 something thousand feet up. Then they just walk the last bit."

As long as they state the frame of reference in the claim (climbed Everest from the base camp), I have absolutely no problem with it.

It's all relative, whether you claim the start is the base camp, or should be sea level, or some other arbitrary point. A "proper" zero reference would need to be from the centre of the planet; good luck starting a climb from there ;)

quote: "or you could just access the site. Youtube does HTML5.Apps are no longer needed."

Unless the target video is still in Flash, which "for technical reasons" is all the ones that want to show interstitial ads and provide proper behavioural tracking. Strange how many videos off Youtube don't work in Firefox (missing plugin required) until you install / allow Flash player.

As long as people want to make money off their Youtube channels (and Google want to make money off their advertising partners), you will have Flash videos instead of proper HTML5 ones. At least until HTML5 includes the same persistent cookies and other tracking features currently provided by Flash, so they can provide a fully HTML5 compliant advertising feature.

Cynical? Moi? ^^;

Re: User beware…

quote: "The next thing I noticed once I had set everything up was not only was my Gmail account open at the click of an app, without the need of logging in the same way you would on a computer, but when using it on the web for the first time all my historic search’s using Chrome on my laptop was automatically populated, including the website for my bank."

So, you're ok with Google having all of that information from your PC, but you don't like them letting you get to it from the phone? I'm assuming that you didn't create a new Google account specifically for the phone then?

Strangely enough most of my friends consider the behaviour you are lambasting to be a good feature. Never underestimate what the average person will agree to in the name of convenience; they actively want one account across all the devices which has all the info available at the touch of a screen (or button).

I'll leave it to you to work out what the manufacturers think of this consumer trend, and therefore how much effort they are spending to ensure they get all that tasty behavioural info themselves their devices "just work" with other devices and apps.

instantaneous vs frames of reference

I r confuseded:

quote: "- At 12:00 on a particular day, Earth sends a message to the spaceship.

- Does it work symmetrically, so the reply arrives two hours earlier, at 8:00?"

I would have said it arrives just after 12:00? You know, because of the instantaneous part.

Send message, gets received. Time taken to reply - 5 seconds. Check time dilation due to speed of spaceship into account; reply gets received more than 5 seconds after 12:00 (5 seconds on ship is more than 5 seconds in the Earth frame of reference, assuming ship is still at .5c relative to Earth).

You can't state a transmission is instantaneous and then state that the transmission takes a negative or positive time to travel. It makes no sense to do so. If we have a universal frame of reference, we would be able to define that 12:00 Earth local is 10:00 ship local, so that 5 seconds later 10:05 ship local (when the reply is sent) is 12:08 Earth local (go go time dilation). No time travel, no paradox, causality is unbroken.

Where am I going wrong here? Because the explanation above seems obvious to me, however proper scientists always refer to the time paradoxes and causality issues for FTL anything (transmission or travel), so I must be missing something. Something fundamental, probably.

quote: "In the UK it would be illegal to operate a drone (if it is taking aerial photos or video) without a license"

What license is required, and what laws would be contravened if a license is not sought first?

Serious question, I'm interested to see if and how this is different to just taking photographs with a camera in a public place. I do know in the UK there is no expectation of privacy when in public, however I'm not familiar with the nuances of photography and what specific lines have been drawn on what you can and cannot photograph in various circumstances.

The only ones I do actually know are the (lack of) expectation of privacy one, and the usual test in court being the ubiquitous "reasonable person".

Re: WHAT!

quote: "And the inclusion of the PS3 is laughable, as that's not even a computer in the most traditional sense."

I'd have to disagree, it has all the same bits, doing the same functions (CPU, GPU, IO, volatile and non-volatile storage). It runs a base operating system with a GUI, from which you can start seperate programs based on the task you wish to perform. You are, I'd hazard, equating the OS with "not computer" rather than the hardware, in response to an article about hardware design.

Even then, console OSs these days have web browsers, IM clients, streaming media services and many other applications that grace the default "computer" OSs. They don't have productivity suites, however that's because nobody [i]has[/i] written one, not because nobody could; the PS3 will recognise USB keyboards ok, and the controller has analogue input that can mimic a mouse / trackpad ;)

Also before Sony nerfed it, you could install Linux on a PS3. I'm pretty sure most people would agree that "hardware running Linux" = computer in that sense ;)

Re: You almost had me...

quote: "Would you like to tell me and the rest of my family how inane, uninteresting, incredibly dull and self-important the birth of my first child is?"

Depends, I have another 369,999 parents to congratulate for the birth of their children on the exact same day (and a similar number for the previous day, and for the following day, e.g. more than one million in 72 hours). I'm sure your news was much more intelligent, interesting, incredibly keen and modest than any of those hundreds of thousands of similar births, though :)

Disclaimer: I do have a facebook account, but rarely log on more than once a month, if that. All the stuff my friends post tends to be full of inane drivel, sprinkled with the odd meetup request that I'd already heard about face to face. When IRL conversations regularly contain the words "did you see X on facebook?" you have to wonder what has happened to the art of conversation... :/

Re: Ok, lets get this clear for people...

You are Eadon and I claim my £5 :P

I'm going to spend it on smoked back bacon :)

Re: UK: Cyclists already pay for the upkeep of roads, as do pedestrians

quote: "*** Paying VED grants you no more rights to use the road than paying excise duty on a bottle of whisky. ***"

Not quite true. Not paying VED for a vehicle that requires it, means you are not allowed to use the public roads. Any registered vehicle is required by law to have a valid VED disc or be declared SORN, and driving a vehicle that is declared SORN on the public road is an offence.

Whilst correlation is not causation, I would feel perfectly comfortable claiming that, in the UK, paying VED (along with insurance and having a valid MOT) is what grants you the right to use the public roads.

Also:

quote: "To save having to listen to the ill educated whiners going on about "oh cyclists don't pay tax"...I propose that VED version 1.0 is scrapped, and VED version 2.0 taxes applied to all road using vehicles, based on the vehicle's kerb weight x by the number of wheels (as weight is what damages roads).

So my 8kg bike will pay...40p. It's a fair cop. Apart from the bit where it will probably cost the Government at least £1 to process every application and it's payment..."

You seem to be forgetting that your bicycle does not self-navigate; when it is on the roads, it also has you riding it. EU regs on "kerb weight" for cars includes a driver at 75kg, so this would make the "kerb weight" of your 8kg bicycle 83kg, or a VED of £4.15 (not £0.40). Still peanuts, but a significant increase.

I'd welcome this sort of change too, as my 350kg motorcycle+me would pay £17.50 instead of the current £76 :)

Anyone with a Band A, B, or C hybrid / electric will hate you for it though, as they pretty much all weigh over a tonne (revised VED £100+), but currently pay £0-£30.

Also note that the contact patch for a bicycle is significantly smaller than the contact patch for a car due to difference in tyre size; a VED targeted at "amount of weight applied to the roads during use" would need to also factor tyre width in there as well somewhere, and would need to divide weight by number of wheels (you provide less downward force per wheel when using more than one wheel for the same weight). In that sense, an 83kg monocycle would technically do more damage than an 83kg tricycle using the same tyres, as the total downward force due to weight would be distributed between wheels / tyres ;)

Re: @NumptyScrub

If friends of mine weren't so set on breaking any system they come across, I'd still be playing it. Gun bunny is one thing, but a 19-dice rifle pool on a starting character (and<5 dice everything else)? That's barely even 1-dimensional :(

Still, it means I get to try out quite a few different systems and see just how breakable (or not) they are... ;)

Re: If Samsung did this...

quote: "If Samsung did this...

...it would be seen as the holy-grail to all cabling problems."

Samsung already do do a limited version of this. There is 1 (one) headphone socket and 1 (one) micro USB / MHL socket on the Galaxy S3 I am currently looking at. Since iDevices usually have a headphone socket on them, there is in total exactly the same number of ports.

The main difference is that microUSB and MHL are standards (although in the case of the S3, not-quite MHL pin standard), but only deal with 3 things; charging, data transfer (USB bus) and video transfer (MHL). Note that these only require passive cables, which makes it cheap for the end user. Lightning is a generic data bus, so you will need active adapters (i.e. a cable with a computer in it) but gives as many options for output as, err... there are options for output.

The fact that they are selling it as a single cable, rather than a box with a multitude of output cables, is slightly more telling. If it were me I'd be marketing it as the one-size-fits-all solution and have HDMI, Ethernet, USB, eSATA, RS232 and any other serial output already on it (or as plugin cables to a proprietary connector on the box, if that is more your thing), with the caveat that apps will need to have the firmware available to be able to use it. Having an ARM-based active adapter for a single use-case seems like it's being artificially limited; if you are already adding a computer with infintely updateable "firmware" (it's more like a software download every time you connect it) then why only have one type of output hardwired in? To make people have to buy a second cable for a second output type?

Re: Been looking for a waterproof phone for a couple of years

JCB do some fairly ugly ones that claim IP67 or similar ingress resistance

JCB's phone range

You can pick several of them up at the Carphone Whorehouse on a variety of tariffs

Re: People used to laugh at the size of my smart phone.

quote: "Everyone thought it was large. Now, as you say, everyone wants a brick."

Actually, what they want is a massive screen; what they will put up with to have one is a big phone (as long as it is light). If they can make a 3" phone with a fold-out 7" screen it'll outsell everything, IMO.

I'm thinking that Asus should do a companion PadPhone with a smaller phone (3"ish) and a 7" plugin (plugout?) screen... I can see a lot of people accepting that as a viable tradeoff of easy to carry phone vs decent screen size when you want it. The phablet equivalent of the laptop docking station and 23" monitor ;)