Posts by streaky
271 posts • joined Monday 5th July 2010 03:44 GMT
This patent...
*isn't* two-factor auth so much as a method of achieving it, but it's not really two-factor auth, because there device *connects* to the thing you're authing with so really it's one-factor. Certainly doesn't describe anything like how google authenticator works if that's what he's claiming. His argument is that the thing you know in the patent is the access to the device itself (phone pin) as opposed to your actual normal login, which is precisely why it *isn't* two factors - the "second factor" is really just the security of the first factor, which does not actually make a second factor at all.
Also not for nothing, but it's clear nobody bothered to proof-read the document because it's full of typos that change the actual meaning of the patent. Why anybody would cite it is beyond me.
"establishing a connection between the data input apparatus and a receiver unit upon verification of the validity of the authorization signal." - if anything this is just plain old fashioned login. Think there's a few patents that predate this.
Re: Its not very anonymous is it..
"We've heard it before with Phorm"
That's what the IPCC is supposed to be for. With Phorm the person concerned didn't push it far enough, got some wishy-washy response about data protection act. Completely missed the boat.
I wasn't a victim of that crime so I wasn't in a position to do anything about it.
Re: This is all entirely legal ?
The only traffic data relevent to the communication system is IP addresses, and there's no requirement to *store* it for the purposes of transmitting it. A postal worker can read the name/address off the front of a letter. They don't open the letter to see where it needs to go then record that information for all customers and try to flog it to the Met.
You do see the difference right? A system needs to see telephone numbers to route calls, it doesn't need to know who you're specifically calling at the other end, and what about.
Not for nothing but this stuff is all copy/pasted from the telecommunications act, the same intent applies. Criminal complaint update: looking for more proof this happened and a police force that isn't the Met near London.
Re: This is all entirely legal ?
Sorry I replied to somebody else pointing out that under RIPA a criminal offence has apparently been committed. There's no contract terms that get them out of this. You can't write contract terms that absolve you things like this - RIPA exceptions are on a per-communication basis, they don't work with whole-scale data mining of communications over a public network. It's illegal, nothing more to it.
Put it this way, the police need a warrant, and so do MI5, think of a reason some random company wouldn't given that the government could just farm this crap out to ISPs.
Put it another way. If they recorded all your phone calls, and had some small print that said "we may record all your phone calls" - do you think it would be legal? RIPA treats phone calls the same as internet traffic, emails, snail mail etc.
Re: Its not very anonymous is it..
Don't bother with civil court. By "legal" people mean under the DP act, but under section 1 of RIPA they have committed a criminal offence punishable by time in prison. As an EE customer, I'm a victim of this crime and will make this known to the police when I've collected enough evidence.
Re: And if 8 isn't enough...
Or even better still, LMDE.
Re: Good!
Any company should be able to not do business with whoever they feel like not doing business.
I'm just wondering how much business Visa actually do in Iceland and if they've considered withdrawing all services. i.e. who needs who more.
"does anyone still believe in large top-down centrally architected IT solutions?"
Well-built ones, sure? The problem seems to be related to the fact the NHS has no clue about IT and they'll pay any invoice levelled at them. In principle a national system for the NHS is a Good Thing (TM). Actually there's an argument that this is a government cluelessness problem, but one that's easily fixed.
Re: Patent 01
The Apple rectangle patent is real though =) USD670286S1 makes me rofl every time I see it, which happens often to remind myself never to buy an Apple device.
Re: We need this in the UK
How do you define "specifically target" on the internet? Not for nothing but anything that even smells like what the article discusses is bad bad everybody everywhere in the first world - certainly isn't something to be emulated.
Re: The lady doth protest too much.
"if he stopped to think about it would be ridiculously hard to implement"
It's not that it would be hard to implement so much as it'd eat power for fun and profit. GPS being totally passive (unless you're dealing with the crypted signals) doesn't use much power, so you can put it in say, a mobile phone..
Point?
"Over 50 percent are still on software that is two years old"
And what, the old versions don't totally fail like old version of iOS - hell, they have multitasking n' everything. Because people aren't stupid enough to think they need a new phone every year (which apple customers will soon tire of) that doesn't make Apple super awesome.
Re: Trying to catch up with the Leap
"This to me looks like an attempt to at least partially head off the Leap Motion"
Doubful. They do completely different things, there isn't even a drop of overlap.
Re: It's also a bit shit ...
Yeah I noticed they make really horrific routing decisions. Hopefully they'll patch it. Avoid busy roads - not massively complex. Maybe it's an american thing? :)
Re: Plenty of hardware available.
"Doesn't seem like a microsoft move to do something that won't make them money or help with consumer/developer lock-in"
Please. People always say that. Yet Microsoft are involved in stacks of open source projects both in benevolence and making it work better on windows fashion (the latter isn't evil, it's just what any sane company would do, but Apple don't - I know people who work on Open Source projects that Apple have said "sure" and then said it'll cost $XX,XXX for their time).
Re: Will it really?
Nah, because it's an issue that can and will go to court - the other party would have to prove that they took reasonable steps and the burden of proof is on them. There's nothing implied or explicit regarding dumping of rights just because it's on the internet. If you produce content and you can't afford to fight in court then you're already stuffed, the new laws will change nothing on that front for good or bad.
Actually if anything it might be a good opportunity to bring some sort of arbitration into UK copyright law. Now I think about it, I need to email my MP sharpish..
Nope. The SSL stack in windows XP is outdated and broken. There's no fixes coming, Microsoft have said so. End of.
XP is an outdated OS and the day that it goes EOL people will start sorting out their support for it on servers, i.e. that is - removing it.
Anything <= WinXP is affected by it.
Votedowns for truth, or why the reg is becoming like youtube.
Seriously, you vote down but neglect to provide a counter-argument? Grow up.
Re: Not taking sides but if, IF
Also not for nothing but HP's due diligence should have spotted everything they're alleging anyway. Can't figure out what it is HP are trying to achieve with the allegations they're making.
Stave off the inevitable board firings for a little while longer?
Re: Not taking sides but if, IF
"the SFO are duty bound to investigate any formal complaint that is made."
Not really, they can call the FSA and ask for a dirty opinion and tell HP to piss off beyond that. Also isn't much stopping the government taking them to court on behalf of the taxpayer either in the end.
Autonomy's profits before the purchase are a matter of public record and weren't very high. If HP failed to do due diligence or simply care they should look to recovering the money from the CEO at the time.
"That's what they said about Windows 2000 and it's still a solid operating system"
Yeah, no, it isn't.
XP has a broken SSL stack which will mean very shortly the internet will stop working for you. Windows 2000 I don't even know wtf is going on there. That's ignoring the endless list of sploits that outpost won't ever save you from.
Can't teach some people.
There's no open source products that would even consider supporting code that old, why Microsoft feels it needs to baby dumbness is anybody's guess.
Re: The customer defines value
"You might think my house is worth 20p; it doesn't mean I'm obliged to sell it to you for that"
Yeah but you can't download a house off the internet so the model doesn't actually work.
Re: Disagreed
"Morons like streaky are why screen resolutions haven't increased in 10 years"
Actually I believe you misread what I actually said. I want an ~8K 16:10/30" monitor like yesterday. Apparently I belong to a small group that knows it's already possible and the panel cartels are the ones stopping it.
I was arguing against a tiny screen being useful for everything ever. When Torvalds has RSI and is part-blind in 10 years and is bitching about it on the kernel lists we'll be having words. I remember these sorts of things.
Tiny screens aren't really useful for much, unless you really really need them. Anybody who writes lots of code and things they're super-useful patently needs their head testing.
Also not for nothing but when a government does an IT consultation it implicitly looks for people to consult who are lacking clue. Seems to be looking for Google to answer the question again.
Certainly as far as development goes it's usually managers and directors that set the *pace* of development to leave little time for the unit testing, code reviews etc that are fairly normal in say Open Source. If that's the case and they're to blame (in this special circumstance) they should be prosecutable and prosecuted in a situation where they negligent and put the public in some way at risk. But then again so should bankers have been so that's going nowhere...
It's not absurd for government to be legislating, and making rules, and attempt to protect the public - sometimes from themselves - it's actually what they're elected to do. The question is if they know what they're doing.
The problem with security standards from basically anywhere - they're usually all obvious anyway, cover work in unnecessary bureaucracy and generally aren't fit for purpose. PCI-DSS for example..
It should probably be easier to whistle-blow security failings in the UK when companies fail to report compromises, that would accomplish more in the area of data security than any standards because overnight it will make managers think twice about corner-cutting.
Re: This is just part of a trend
They're talking nonsense anyway, they're obviously not going to get any love from Apple nor Google so Microsoft are probably laughing themselves out of their chairs.
Dunno, not needing a microscope to see your screen is a good one. I'm sure you can get lots of pixels in a few microns if you're that dumb.
Some of us work at a desk and play.. games.. the last one being a novel idea to Linux kernel people I know. I'm sure Valve are super-chuffed by his machinations for one.
"Others have mentioned amounts in the low hundreds of millions of dollars being recognised as revenue incorrectly"
Which could get you to 5.2Bn if HP are one of these stupid companies that value stuff on revenues (which bears no actual relationship to shareholder value). Which is possible.
How profitable were Autonomy claiming to be when HP bought them, that's the real question. Basically everything else is irrelevant.
Cheating here because I know that their profit in 2011 was $282m so they weren't worth a fraction of what HP *wrote down* much less what they paid in total. But then some people are stupid. My guess is they thought they were buying the technology and I guess patents, but here's the thing - you have no valid area of questioning when you ignore how much money the company is actually making and buy "at any price" to acquire it's tech.
Posted in SimCity Classic
"Part of me thinks that EA does it on purpose so that 'little' companies like Maxis go under and can be bought out cheaply for the copyrights"
EA already has ownership of Maxis and they're not little.
The good news, EA have behaved in a standard publisher fashion with the reboot as far as I can tell, expect much DLC but don't implicitly expect a nerfed, broken game like the new MoH.
Re: Or, you could, y'know, design you pages right?
Can't tell if OP is being sarcastic or not, but basically everything he said is junk. It's hard to even see where the problem actually is. XSLT is proven worthless so.....
If you have a problem with an automated system reading your pages for whatever reason, firstly don't use the internet, at all. Secondly this is what SSL is and third, they don't give a damn what's in your pages :)
P.S. I actually just always figured railgun was just riverbed kit by another name?
VISA
Need to be more proactive in telling banks to get of their collective arses and ship contactless for a start.
Literally fighting with my bank to give me one. Basically the only option is to move to the worst bank of them all (Barclays) who are the only ones bothering with proper rollout. Complete joke the payments industry in this country is.
Posted in SimCity Classic
SimCopter
SimCopter was pure bone fide epicness. Import your city, fly around putting out fires and stuff? Come on, how can you beat that?
Fault Tollerance
I see it another way - in future the smart people will build their infrastructure to be "abandonable" i.e. if it goes down it doesn't matter because it's all replicated in 4 other continents and they can pick up the traffic instantly. You know - what the "cloud" is supposed to be, and how companies like Google amongst many others do it.
Conflicts..
"an ultimate spin-off of AWS is inevitable due to its channel conflicts and the need to gain scale"
Psshttt, nonsense. This is all.
I really don't see where they get this stuff from - Amazon probably doesn't actually give a damn, and the fact that it's linked to a site like Amazon probably gets them 10x more customers than web shops they lose.
Re: Well
Oh, and Dataplex on the consumer end (it's just software but they only sell to OEMs? Get out..)
Well
There's a huge list of companies that want you to buy their hardware when all you want is their software (destroying a huge potential market), Nutanix and Riverbed are two that spring to mind. So nothing new really.
Self-inflicted harm regardless, I don't see how they'd have any legal redress.
I disagree, because now she'll be back to bitching about things people say to her on twitter to any TV station stupid enough to let her on.
Re: All true
"Should we make 2013 the year of the British Mobile Phone?"
No. Answered. Easy.
Re: Genuine question
"You will pry the IP for Intel's core processor designs out of the cold dead hands of their CEO and the members of the board"
And what, it's their IP to hang on to. Not for nothing but it ARM were half as smart as Intel they'd make quite a lot more than 160m while we're at it.
Re: Top work
We need more women in compsci. Genuinely don't understand why women don't find it interesting. Engineering not so much, complete waste of time. I say this as a male who used to be an engineer. Any women getting into engineering in the UK right now is going to be spending the rest of her life dodging redundancy and competing with Chinese engineers to the floor as regards to low pay.
Don't do it.
Ignore Dyson too. There are plenty of great engineers in this country and there's no work for them because of people like Dyson who want you to work for 10p/hour, so they send all the work to Asia instead because obviously you're not going to do that.
Re: Excellent
"The CAA might be inclined to allow it if suitably NOTAMed etc"
Doubtful they'd care, even if an aircraft hit it, which the odds are extremely small - shouldn't be a big deal. I used to do rockets and very high altitude kites, the main deal is not near airports. It's fairly easy to find the main aviation routes anyway if you really want to avoid air traffic. Big chunk of the country doesn't have much air traffic anyway, even at the worst of times - but you can always do it on something like Christmas Day and weekends you get no military aviation at all hardly.
Re: Windows 8 FAIL
"a fair portion of the existing market for office migrated to libreoffice or openoffice"
Not the paying market.
Re: This whole story - Microsoft seem to have missed the fundamental point that not everybody wants or needs a tablet. If I can't play BF3 @1920x1200 and spend all day writing code on a device it's probably no use to me, and it is a market that makes up maybe 90% of windows' desktop market that isn't enterprise. And the enterprise hates it. So that's tablets done. The OS? Too much touch - waiting for Leap.
iPad is for casuals and people who haven't realised it yet - and it doesn't have legs. People need to stop trying to copy it.
"Yes but all big company bosses have these fundamental character traits, or may be I should call them flaws?"
Not all. Quite a few though. They're psychopaths (I'm not using hyperbole, I mean it literally, the personality disorder) that boards would do well to get rid of. Ignoring that I don't understand how Ballmer is top dog just based on company performance anyways.
Banks, DDoS, Kettle, Black
It's because a) the world hates them and b) they're fairly incompetent when it comes to anything IT related and c) most of their jobs are outsourced to India.
Trust me; a, b and c are *completely unrelated*.
Seriously though they have to slavishly follow security rules where they can't get access to copious bandwidth at reasonable price - they have to overpay for very little bandwidth - very much like the government, so they're very easy targets. Being a publicly known name and an easy target is the end of you.
"other factors held down revenues, and therefore net income. A shortage of iMacs, for example"
Yeah and bad management pisses off the market, go figure. I'm probably the world's biggest Apple hater (they and their customers literally aggravate me to rage despite knowing several past and current employees) - but I know their share price is irrelevant in the same way it was irrelevant when it was at it's high.
Share price fanboys need to get a grip.
The government isn't turning tax screws it's just pretending to for the cameras (no court cases or bills sent yet) and also, in a situation where classical economics is useful - you might be right.
Re: 2Why £1bn?
"Self-fuelling, exponential value growth for something that in the end has only finite practical value... you literally see the air in that"
It isn't finite though - London's population will always grow no matter what the financial situation (indeed in recessions it seems to grow faster due to people coming to find work) but there's a legal block making it impossible to grow the city horizontally so there'll always be increasing demand for space and thus higher prices. It's the ultimate property scam.
RSA
Everybody who works in anything related to security and the internet has known about this for years. You couldn't even patent it because non-obviousness goes *well* out the window.
Now RSA have discovered it, it's an important story now though! Good job following the BBC into this press release reading idiocy there 'reg hacks :)
Re: Why £1bn?
Because it's in London - which has this awesome green belt or "appreciation belt" as I like to call it that means buildings can never lose value. It's literally impossible. It's a self-fuelling fire too because as soon as people realise it attracts even more buyers because it's a safe bet, guaranteed profits.
