Re: Get yourself issued with two notices for two different car parks at the same time

Thats not the same thing at all.

You got tickets for 2 seperate vehicles breaking the law, in the case where a driver can not be identified the owner of the vehicle is charged instead.

Re: Why?

Why do Google's accountants have anything to explain?

*****

The whole point of the original hearings was to work out how such huge companies with very large turnover were paying so little tax, it wasn't trying to establish whether the companies were acting illegally but to work out which loopholes were being exploited in an attempt to close those holes at a later date through changes to the law.

Google said they keep all their sales staff in Ireland specifically to take advantage of the lower Corporation Tax in that country (completely legal) and that the UK staff weren't sales staff, if they are just support staff they don't generate any turnover and are only a cost center and hence generate no profit to be taxed.

When the PAC asked the accountants whether they checked Googles offices to make sure what Google said about it's staff was true they said (and I'm paraphrasing alot) "Yes, Google sales are all based in Ireland, take our word for it".

Google and Ernst & Young have been summoned back because of a report by a US newspaper has evidence that Google's London Office is teeming with sales staff. Both Google and Ernst & Young are not being called back because of their tax arrangements but because everything they said to the PAC first time around now smells a little bit fishy.

Re: Is not the legal first duty of a company to its shareholders?

Having a responsibililty to work in the shareholders best interest does not mean it has to maximise profit at all costs.

For example

1) Company shafts customers with corner cutting and poor service (e.g. Tesco's)

2) Customers get annoyed and boycott the company or the government changes

The company's net profit margin is higher until Step 2, at which point turnover drops, profit margins drop etc.

In the short term the directors were working to the idea of first duty to the shareholders, but those business decisions are not working towards the interests of the shareholders once step 2 is reached.

Re: Asimo...

I thought that was learning a specific objects , based on colour and shape, it was good, but if you taught it to recognise a picture of a Mini, and then showed it a picture of a BMW, it wouldn't recognise the BMW as being like a Mini.

Re: Didn't have a telly for many years

I'm in a similar position, haven't had a TV License since the Analogue signal switch off for our area, then I get a girlfriend and now there are constant comments about getting a new TV cos they are really cheap.

Re: Faraday cage

Faraday cage might help with stopping getting signals back into the room to prevent the guy at the table from learning how to bet at each hand but you'll note that the CCTV camera feed is going offsite to the Gambling Commision... and also presumably out of the room for the in house survailance team (i.e. I doubt the CCTV monitoring station is in the same room).

That means all the CCTV feeds are already being shipped at the very least around the hotel and probably offsite to a different building. Hopefully the camera's probably have a some sort of basic encryption and I would hope that the feed going off site is getting additional more beef encryption.

Sounds like someone somewhere managed to get physical access the the network equipment and either the feed decryption keys or the feed at that point wasn't even encrypted which is possible if the hotel thought no one would have access to the network hardware.

Re: I keep looking at Feedly

@ Frank ly

If I go to the Feedly Android App's homepage there are 3 possible login options, Android Login (which immediately asks for permission to connect to Google Reader), Google Login or Connect to Google Reader.

Using the client, I can search for a feed, click on it to see the article list which gives me a + symbol at the top to subscribe.

When I click on that + button it asks me for a Google OAuth login or gives me a cancel button. There doesn't seem to be anyway to subscribe to the feed on the Android client without explictly using Google OAuth login credentials, obviously this is to provide a user account which can be sync'd between devices and the Feedly web service so the feedly folk don't need to write their own authentication service but it doesn't change the fact to use Feedly, I'm forced to use Google more, not less which one of my aims.

@David W.

The fact that all the competitors are having to modify their service suggests they might be in the same application domain as Reader was in, but aren't direct competitors... yet.

In particular, all of the services I've looked at have been trying to reduce the prettiness of how they display the feeds in favour of massively increasing the speed at which users can skim the information looking for the 1 article in 100 thats is of interest.

I suspect that at least part of the reason there weren't any competing services around was because Reader was so good at what it did there was no need/room for a direct competitor and so all the other services tried to be pretty rather than functional, now there is a gap in the market I think we'll see new services and modifications to existing services.

Re: At least 15 years ago

I remember the show, the original idea (IIRC) was that you would supply 4 face shots of people you know and the system would use image recognition to find photos others had submitted which were as close to your four pictures as possible (a nan who was a white women with blue tinged hair would be shown with 8 other old white women with blue tinged hair etc).

When you enter your PIN, you had to choose the right four faces one after the other each presented with 8 other similar faces where the correct face was in a random position each time. It worked on the idea that we are keyed to recognise a face we know very quickly, far faster than someone could memorize the right picture of in a grid of nine similar faces.

I suspect the problem was as you mention, partly screen technology and cost but also bandwith/storage, if you had to deliver 36 faces (9 faces x 4) everytime someone needed to use a PIN you would have had to have sent those images via the network since at the time we were all using magstrip cards which meant no offline transactions, or even transactions in places with limited bandwith or high latency. These days I suppose you could store the images on the chip.

Guessing the pattern

guessing the correct pattern from one viewing is probably not easy given that the same number appears lots of times in the same grid.

The exception being ridiculosly simple patterns such as a straight lines, if the one time login comes out as 142432 and the top line reads 142432, then even if there are 12 other possible combinations on that grid attackers are going to try the straight line first.

Personally I would hope patterns like that would be blocked by the application when first setting up the pattern.

Re: robots.txt is bollocks

"but can you give a concrete example of a website that has blocked Google that is invisible to Google?"

****

My old blog was blocked to Google using robots.txt and the log data showed I only ever got the occasional hit by the google bot hitting the robots.txt file.

Of course, my blog just had a few personal notes which weren't really private but weren't really public either. Maybe Google wouldn't have respected robots.txt if I had anything interesting there and getting lots of hits.

recorded programs on the PVR.

If your recording programs to watch later, you still need the licence.

Re: Buffering?

Thats what I was thinking.

A big stack of car batteries and an inverter to gvie you a bit of extra peak capacity juice

Re: Where does the heat go?

Same place it goes with a thermocouple RTG - Those black fin radiator cylinders

*****

But as mentioned in the article, those things are weedy.

According to http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/rps/rtg.cfm the current generation of RTG produce a nominal 110 Watts (it's more at the start of the mission but that is what it's expected for most of it's operating life).

If you try to scale this up you are going to run out of surface area to radiate the heat with. Maybe not with the 1kw battery being discussed in this article but you aren't going to be running the propulsion units of manned space craft like this in the future.

You think that Apple would give a flying f*** what messages apps shove out over Tw@ter why exactly?

*****

The whole point of a walled garden approach from the consumers point of view is meant to be that the apps have been vetted to by experts so that they know apps can't do anything harmful to them.

Of course, that's not what is actually happening but that is still cited as one of the benefits of the system.

Re: That was the easiest up-vote in a while

I'd imagine the EE paid a hefty sum for the rights and they might be hoping that the a single vendor makes the phone exclusive and thus desirable.

It's bollocks of course, but that's probably what they are hoping.

Re: @NomNomNom -- If files are not property...

You can't give someone a file anyway

*****

No, but you can give them the data within the file, or at least an exact bit for bit copy of that data which given information's incorporal form is the same thing.

Re: What's the point?

@velv

have a manly virtual hug, sounds like you need it.

Re: Everyone panic and-oh wait. This is Linux.

"sudo echo "127.0.0.1 amazon.com # I also have root, Mark" >> /etc/hosts"

*****

That shouldn't work because the requests are going to Canonical first, and then being forwarded. Supposedly with any identifying data removed.

Trouble is, we have no way to confirm that. There must be some identifying data sent to canonical and we just have to trust it's removed before Amazon see it. Even if the data stream from canonical to Amazon was audited tomorrow and shown no identifying information was forwarded to Amazon, they could flip a switch and send that data the day after tomorrow.

There would be no way for us to tell the if data is stripped of identifying information except maybe if Amazon screw up and send back ads which are related to you personally rather than just the most recent search results. For example, having an ad based on previous shopping done outside of the Ubuntu installation you are using the seach lens on.

Software Only?

Can anyone explain how the data bought from TOMTOM is so bad

****

Maybe they only brought the software rather than the content? i.e. the server code that sews tiles together to form the scrollable map from GIS db queries.

Re: "Passwords are encrypted: HTTPS"

Would the use of https protect against / prevent a CSRF attack?

*****

Short Anwser... No

Long Anwser... No, but would stop packet sniffers from seeing what the attacker was doing :)

Not everything is illegal on torrent sites and since you aren't logging the details of the file that I am actually downloading you don't have a leg to stand on.

******

The article doesn't say they aren't logging details of the file.

They are joining the swarm of clients associated with a particular torrent and making a note of every IP address which is part of that swarm, presumably they are targetting torrents which are already flagged in someway as likely to be infringing copyrights. For example, torrents which have the name of a recent movie release would be very high on the list of torrents to check.

They could also be downloading the torrent file as evidence seperately just to be sure what is actually being made available, they just aren't attempting to prove you are uploading parts of the torrent in the passive snooping mode and as such I doubt any legal proceeding would follow the passive mode evidence with the exception maybe of a boiler plate letter asking for money or bad things will happen.

I suspect that in passive mode they aren't looking for legal come back, it's more likely they are looking for stats about numbers of downloaders, locations, times etc which can be used for reports to government about how they are being bled dry by evil pirates, possibly looking for the really heavy users who can be targetted later with the active snooping mode.

Re: Doesn't look that useful for adults

So no muscles-in-a-pill from this research

*****

No, but 16 years from now, Russia and China are going to have some extraordinary athletes who, when given genetic tests, all seem to have Grb10 set to an unusual state, purely from good selective breeding by previous generations of athletes and nothing to do with genetic manipulation.

Not so much a guide

... but I've cut a strip just above the chip & pin chip and I definately severed some wires which I assumed are the induction coil for the RFID chip.

The Chip & Pin still works but I have weakened the card and I've found a high than usual read failure rate when using the card which I've put down to the chip not being seated properly in the card reader now the chip can bend out of position slightly.

I've never tried the Wireless Payment since making the cut but I doubt it would work.

I assume the induction coil makes a few loops around the edge of the card so taking a nick out of the edge might be a better way to sever the wires without structurally weakening the card like I have.

Re: And this has what to do with the actual secrets theft?

He can't have expected to do this and then get a slap on the wrist followed by an interview by Oprah

***

Doesn't that go to the heart of his mental state at the time of the alleged leak by Manning?

He was sent to discharge 6 weeks after enlisting because those working closest to him didn't consider him stable. Once in Iraq he had violent outbursts, was recommended for discharge by the psychologist and had the bolt removed from his weapon because those working around him didn't trust him.

Seems the leaking of Intel to a news organisation, not even the enemy directly, was a pretty good outcome given he had access to a lot of weaponry and which his own colleagues feared he might use.

Re: Thats funny

Possibly, but once I blacklist a company, they don't tend to get off the list because I stop paying any attention to them, they could be the paragon of virtue right now and I wouldn't have a clue.

Beside, the blacklist is there for 2 things

1) to protect myself against people who've proven they can't be trusted

2) punishment

With regard to 2, the punishment isn't about trying to make them change their behaviour, and so it's not about to be lifted even if they started behaving well, it's about giving the money they may have earned from me to their competition until such time as their competition do something stupid as well.

Re: Yeah ... riiight

Step 1: Work out how much profit you can make and still undercut the competition by 25%

***

Step 1: Work out how much profit you can make taking on the unemployed, giving them a minimal training, cos all they are really expected to do is stand in the doorways wearing a uniform to give the appearance of security and pay them as little as possible, workfare saps would be better for profits.

Step 2: Watch as public opinion turns against that sort of exploitation after the Jubilee rubbish to the point you can't even hire the saps anymore.

Step 3: Implement plan B, which is really there is no plan B, let the government make up the short fall.

Re: Valuable stuff?

The most valuable stuff they could get access to would be materials to produce/refine rocket fuel/water in depots floating around in strategic locations in the near earth orbit and further out in the solar system.

Returning material to earth, although perhaps important from a PR point of view probably doesn't have a very good economic basis.

Re: So let's get this straight

Me thinks you might have missed a "2" that came just before those other Numbers.

***

No, MS know this is going to be a really hard sell which is vital to their future, they are pricing it according to their need to make sure people start using it.

Re: Hmmm..

and how would that be useful when you're at work?

I use Tasker on my phone which I can set to run various commands as it enters certain locations, you could have your phone contact the website with the kettle on command as you arrive at the end of your street.

Of course it's still hard to justify because you would need to have the coffee machine already filled with water and beans in the hopper ready and if you are going to do that before you leave the house in the morning, then it's ready for you to just hit the start button as you walk in the house, it will be ready before you get the coat and shoes off.

Re: Scientists ar eon the lookout

Mega Maid

"suck suck suck"