Posts by Old Handle
527 posts • joined Friday 4th March 2011 04:56 GMT
Okay, so there's a workaround. But still, wow. TIFKAM not only displays less information, it requires more pixels to do it. Brilliant. How could something so obviously based on a phone interface have that limitation?
Posted in Anonymous threat shutters Gitmo WiFi
To Subtle
I fear some people thought you were serious. Try making it more explicit that what you're suggesting is that regular criminal courts should be allowed to use confessions extracted under torture as evidence.
Posted in Amazon launches own currency
bank-level regulation
It's a shame they can't apply the same to Paypal.
Posted in Bing uncloaks Klingon translator
Qap nIS
It's great that Bing supports Klingon. Now I can talk to all my Klingon friends without having to learn their language. → 'oH Dun tlhIngan ngaq bing. DaH laH jIjatlhpu' Hoch tlhIngan jupwI' Hutlh vay' Holchaj ghoj. →
the Klingon is a Wonderful support bing. Now you can all Klingons speak a friend Without anyone in their Language.
Heh, imagine trying to use a tablet application that's designed to keep the image upright no matter how you cold it while in zero-g.
Re: Upload
Presumably it's "cloudy" in the same way as the new SimCity game. i.e. not. It's just heavy-handed DRM in a thin disguise. I can imagine little bits of online integration. Like say downloading filters or textures on the fly, but the bulk of the work must still be done locally.
Re: Well its a proof of concept.
I don't know how much the gun actually weighs. But a 1kg spool of ABS typically goes for about $32. In an interesting coincidence, this is apparently the same price as original Liberator, adjusted for inflation.
Re: Pathetic Journalism
Fox is the company that successfully argued that it's A-OK for them to lie to the public. (I even found you a link to the story on a conservative site.) So yeah, I think it's pretty fair to hold them out as an example of inaccuracy when even they admit they're lying to people.
Re: McCormick, who still insists he hasn't had customer complaints about the efficacy of the devices
And neither do embarrassed government officials.
Re: 60 MILLION?!!!
A dowsing rod "works" by amplifying uncontentious movements of the user. So it's possible it did appear to work when tested by an independent party, as long as it wasn't a blind test.
Re: Sentence much too light
The risk was there, to be sure, but is there any evidence anyone really died because of this? Conning or bribing the guy in charge of buying tech for a government is one thing, but I suspect in many if not all cases somewhere between that guy and the guy whose life is actually in danger, someone had enough sense to quietly stick it on a shelf.
Now I want to sue him too
For infecting Firefox with that minimal UI nonsense.
Re: Happens all the time...
It almost sounds like you're implying both of those are unethical. But surely if one is a scam the other is the expected result.
Since when to human heads uspport NFC?
:Looks at El Reg—English dictionary in confusion:
Re: Decent
I didn't see anything in the description of BitTorrent Sync to imply that you trade storage with other people, at least not in the sense I think you mean. That sounds more like Freenet.
I'm left a little bit confused by that article. I'm not sure if it's due to the translation or because of the technological cluelessness of the original request. But I didn't get the impression they were necessarily asking ISPs to block access to the Tor network by users. It sounded like they were mainly concerned with blocking exit nodes ("the third in a chain"), but the details remain fuzzy. To give them the benefit of the doubt, some possible interpretations are not that unreasonable (though not anything I could personally get behind).
Re: Typical government response
Speaking of which, the largest Bitcoin exchange happens to be located in Japan...
I don't pretend to completely understand myself, but it sounds like the lower court initially dismissed lawsuit completely, then the appeals court said they have to consider it fully, which they did, only to reach the same conclusion. And now Viacom is appealing the ruling instead of the dismissal. I don't know if there's a theoretical maximum number of times a case can be sent back down and appealed again, but they've definitely got at least one more appeal coming since it hasn't hit the supreme court yet.
Uh-Oh
I bet all those queries you made about where to hide a body don't seem quite so funny now.
Re: Mmmmmm
You can look at it that way, and wouldn't be entirely wrong. But you also have to look at the technical side. A Certificate Authority is only as good as their word. Giving their word is their only job in fact. They say "Yep this website is the real deal" or "This other guy can also be trusted to tell you whats legit". Now I haven't read any details about exactly what sort of surveillance tech they're accused of selling, but my suspicion is that it involved interception devices certified as a legitimate source for everything (i.e. *.com, *.org, *.uk, etc). If true, that would completely destroy they credibility as a Certificate Authority in my book.
And distrusting them in the future is really the only remedy for something like that. It's not the same as blocking certain domains because their governments are bad. In fact you'd still be able to go to sites they certify, you'd just have to click through some (admittedly very aggressive) warnings that Firefox doesn't consider the certificate trustworthy.
Why is the DoJ involved in this?
I can't say I disagree with them (for once), but it strikes me as an odd thing for the department in charge of enforcing criminal law to even have an opinion about.
Re: self-declared capitalist endorses evident misallocation of resources as a good thing
I think the point was that it can be bad for the people who invest in it, but good for the rest of us. For another example, putting up the Iridium satellites was financially a failure, but they're still up their relaying phone calls and distress signals for people in exotic locations.
Re: Anonymity ?
No, it's not 100% true. However there are Bitcoin laundering services. These work by taking coins from a bunch of different people, and giving them back the same amount, but not the same coins. This breaks the direct trail in the public Bitcoin ledger (block chain). Of course one would have to trust the "laundry" not to keep their own records, and even more importantly to give you coins coins back at all.
You're completely correct about the delays being the major drawback to Bitcoin. And it's worse than what you said, it's 10 minute cycle on average. It can easily take significantly more than that.
But I'm not so sure this has much at all to do with the volatility. Most people trade Bitcoin in exchanges like Mt. Gox. Once you put cash or bitcoins in, they keep it on account for you and (barring their frequent technical problems) can instantly execute a trade simply by raising the BTC credit in one account and lowering it in another, while doing the reverse to USD credit.
Re: Great timing
Could be a confidence, but it wouldn't surprise me if they hoped coming forward as large investors would help restore a bit of confidence. Hard to say if it helped though.
Re: WTF
Flash drives in a bank vault. And probably encrypted as well. None the less, it's scary concept. No doubt about that.
New TLDs
The only new TLD that struck me as a genuinely good idea was .xxx and the company that actually bought that one STILL used it in a completely cynical and horrible way.
Save Blink!
Personally I think it should be preserved as a historical artifact. And perhaps a warning to future generations. Surely it doesn't require more than a few lines of code, and it's not like it hurts anything to have it in there since nobody ever uses it, except as a demonstration of how horrible it is.
Posted in Mali to give away .ML domains for free
A free domain is all well and good, but if it's anything like .tk I advise everyone to stay away. I see .tk domains fairly often in various hobbyist circles like game modding, and they're nothing but trouble. They work at first, but inevitably stop working when you least expect it.
Good start
Now if they can make it affordable enough for home use they really will have something interesting.
Re: An important detail is not clear...
To answer my own question, this article by Sophos seems to confirm that they were the ones who censored it. That being the case I'm surprised more hasn't been made of how much trouble this could get the victim in if any traces of those images left on the computer. They imply some doubt about the girls really being underage, so presumably these aren't the worst sort of pictures imaginable, but still.
An important detail is not clear...
Does the malware actually show child porn, or is that "censored" version what it really looks like? There's a big difference and it wasn't made clear at all, as far as I could tell.
Can you destroy Bitcoins?
Yes, this is quite easy actually. Bitcoin does use a checksum prevent sending coins to a mistyped address, but if you know how it works it would be easy enough to create a fake address for which no private key exists. Or you could just create the address the normal way and then delete the key of course. Either way, any coins sent there would be unrecoverable.
Not sure why you'd want to do that, but you could.
Based on the lack of shoes and the messed up belt, it appears leather is the way to do. The faces and (mostly hidden) hands a quite poor to, so going naked might also be an option.
Us freetards run the Bitcoin software on our own machines and were not affected.
It's a shame about Instawallet, though. It was handy service. Security was not its strong point, and they were up front about that, but obviously it turned out to be even less secure than they thought.
I just did it (sold some) for the first time a couple of days ago. It really wasn't too bad, I gave the exchange (I used BitFloor) my bank account number and a scan of an ID and within a couple days they set it up so I could send money directly to my bank. I sold ~2 BTC for ~200 USD, the same price I bought around 30 for originally. So I'm quite happy. I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone who couldn't afford to lose their money though. I just look at it as a fun experiment.
Re: But Will It Explode People?
I assume the goal here is to be able read the minds of prisoners of w enemy combatants and thus skip the torture business that has caused so much bad press.
I wish I was certain if I'm joking.
Re: LOL fired
Actually I agree with that part. Double entendres are funny, single entendres aren't. If you can simultaneously make a sex joke and a valid comment about the topic at hand, that not only shows a little wit, it also gives anyone who might be uncomfortable an easy out, just pretend they took your comment at face value.
Posted in Bitcoin prices spike on Euro woes
Bitcoin banks
It seems most people don't actually use it this way, but one of the most interesting aspects of bitcoin is that you don't need a bank, or a payment processor, or any of that. You can just run the software locally and keep, send or receive bitcoins yourself.
I do agree completely that the instability makes it a risky investment though.
Obviously they're still experimental, but at least one "real" company (Namecheap) has decided accepting them make business sense. I think it would be a mistake to discount them entirely when considering payment options.
Re: Hasn't he heard of SFTP?
He was going to use a VPN, but it kept getting rejected at the other end for some reason.
Re: What about forums on news related web sites?
Does this mean El Reg will have to stop publishing non IT-related news to avoid losing that exemption?
Re: New Airport Policy
That raises an interesting question. I wonder how well this copes with dark skin tones. Or how about heavy makeup?
Stuxnet
Stuxnet was aimed at a working nuclear or radiological facility. Not an actual nuclear reactor of course, but surely uranium enrichment still fits the definition.
This is a rare example of a situation where security by obscurity really works well. Because each spam posted is of marginal benefit, it's only worth doing if they can post thousands with minimal effort. So when a small site implements a novel CAPTCHA, they're as good as bulletproof as far as the spammers are concerned. They could write a bot capable of beating it, but why bother? Of course if lots of sites started using it, or a big player like Google, it would become worth doing.
In other words the chess puzzle itself isn't really that good, but since no one else is using it, no bot in the wild will have the faintest clue how to deal with it.
Re: Sure hope the driver is wearing leaden knickers...
Even though, as another response pointed out, the driver wouldn't be in danger, why send one? This seems like a perfect opportunity to find out just how good the autonomous mode is on those things.
Good job, Google.
Great way to boost confidence right there. But at least they managed to kiss the government's ass while they were at it, so I guess it wasn't a complete waste.
Nice
Shame I live smack in the middle of the biggest black zone on the map.
Re: About Investing, not Investors
The main barrier to polygamy is sorting out the legal ramifications. The system was designed for two people, so it can easily be extended to any two people. Just cross out "husband" and "wife" on the form and write "partner 1" and "partner 2". Done. Add more people and it gets confusing. Dealing with child custody and splitting property after a three-way divorce sounds particularly nightmarish. As for your dog, I'll support you when you can prove it understands what it's agreeing to when it says "rye roo!" One could argue that animals which mate for life do inherently understand, but these are mostly birds, so I don't think too many people would be interested.
Re: Equality?
What puzzles me even more is why anti-gay marriage people make this argument and then claim that same sex couples want preferential treatment, even though their own argument refutes this. Straight people wold be allowed to enter same-sex marriages too.
