* Posts by redxine

33 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Mar 2011

Fearful of the drone-filled skies? Get some protection

redxine

Re: This isn't PROtection... it's just DEtection...

or the wrong side of everyone trying to use WiFi, and Bluetooth, and mobes in general for that matter. If you think you're out of reach from enforcement, just remember Florida Man's expensive grudge against people driving with phones on:

http://transition.fcc.gov/eb/News_Releases/DOC-326778A1.html

Google Glassholes, GET OFF our ROADS, thunder lawmakers in seven US states

redxine

Issues aside

There's research into smart devices being adapted to notice when you're not paying attention while driving, potentially preventing all distracted driving accidents:

http://myweb.csuchico.edu/~haldarwish/

Texas schoolgirl loses case over RFID tag suspension

redxine
Meh

If she carries a mobile phone

then I wonder how it'd be any different than this specialized, power-not-included radio transmitter.

It's incidentally capable of being used for tracking in the same way your mobile reports which base stations it's in range of (and their geographic location) to your provider.

I'd be interested to know if she carries one of these condemned tracking devices.

Users: 'Personalized internet? Fuggedaboutit!'

redxine

Re: Adverts?!?

The difference, of course, being that they aren't stopping you from getting information through something else. No, you didn't chose what would go up on that huge sign outside your flat, or what advert they might show on TV, but you also have the choice to ignore it.

Need I remind you there are some countries who have no choice at all.

Microsoft stumps up titsup Azure cloud compo

redxine

Microsoft-

You give us a leap day, we give you seven hours of downtime.

Death to Office or to Windows - choose wisely, Microsoft

redxine
Linux

Re: Linux in its current form will never be mainstream

> Linux remains about as far from user friendly as it's probably possible to achieve for an OS. And it's intended to be this way.

Yes. Thousands of hours of research into user interfaces for enough DE's to suit anyone, sure. Android has obviously faced a huge problem in this area.

> A box of delights with which to tinker - if you have infinite time on your hands to do so. In the face of all the global industrial-political corruption we're seeing in recent years, a little voice inside of me is crying out for a genuinely usable open-source OS.

Terribly unusable. I mean it can't even run internet exploder 9! And dear heavens what will we all do without our outlook and having the ability to install executables with a wizard! Where the hell is the C: drive and where's the defrag utility!? There's no start button. I can't use this.

> All it will take is the buy-in of either the Linux dev community (not going to happen, they like the exclusivity too much),

You mean IBM, Intel, SuSE, Redhat, Canonical, Epson..... then yes. I'm sure embedded manufacturers enjoy exclusively using Linux in their products also.

> or some new organisation to grab the kernel sources and put an awesome UI on top.

Kind of like Redhat? (read: Gnome).

> Tie a DirectX emulator in

No. You do not solve the problem by making a new implementation of the similar system. You of all people must have seen how far silverlight has gotten in this world.

Microsoft code not the security sieve sysadmins should be worried about

redxine

Re: Re: poor businesses

> To me, the only thing windows really got right was printing.

If I had a £1 for every time I had to repeatedly empty the print spool (or is it even called a spool on NT.... a cue?) in windows.....

redxine

Re: Re: What Corporations Should Do

Four months later.....

Windows 8 on ARM: Microsoft bets on Office 15 and IE10

redxine
Linux

Maleware knows no processing bounds

As far as I'm concerned there are very few, if any boot-sector viruses that exist today. Exploits in IE10 will still be a vector to exploit. Software viruses really won't care about the hardware they run on. If it proves to be otherwise then I'm certain no AV vendor will be happy about this, but then again I seriously doubt that everyone is going to shift to ARM with UEFI secure-boot overnight. As far as anyone knows it's still making use of NT kernel, and it's still hybrid, meaning the same kernel-level vectors can be expected in both the ARM and the x86 hardware.

The anti-competitive behaviour came to mind, but then again that's to be expected.

redxine

Doesn't that mean no netflix?

Sinofsky shows off Windows 8 on ARM and Office15

redxine

Thanks to the works of MSFT

anything with the "Windows 8 Approved" sticker will, by mandate from the Kaiser of Redmond, have no option to disable secureboot. As much as we'd love to install Cent over a win8 fondleslab, we won't be able to. Otherwise, you can do it very soon with this guy: http://devworks.thinkdigit.com/Tablets/KDE-Plasma-Active-Coming-in-its-Very_8645.html

An NT-powered Windows Phone? Not so fast...

redxine
Linux

Windows phone 8

Now compatible with all your favourite windows 8 malware.

Mother charged with selling fake Facebook stock

redxine

Somehow though

keeping £10,000+ in your home doesn't seem like a rational idea either. Money that's idling and not gaining interest is criminal also! Lucky for us we've got a little insurance to go with banks. The downside to the modern economy is that 97% of all money in the UK are just numbers in a computer. So honestly I'm not surprised at this story.

Cash is great, but let's be reasonable. The banks aren't out to get you..... mostly.

Berkeley boffins crack brain wave code

redxine

I'm surprised no one's mentioned it yet.

We're just one step closer to making it easier for the singularity to push us into the Matrix.

MasterCard joins Visa in pushing PINs into America

redxine
Big Brother

Forget PIN's

I want to be able to use a whole fracking passphrase.

Microsoft ad campaign savages Google over privacy

redxine

Putting people first - given that people are also our advertisers

"Join the hundreds of millions of people who enjoy not worrying about the content of their private emails being used to serve ads," is what the infographic cries out. So we could assume that all ads that show up in Hotmail are selected at random, with no account of what kind of user would view them, right?

http://advertising.microsoft.com/windows-live-hotmail?tab=profile

that seems to tell me otherwise, and the interesting thing is they got their demographics from two statistics companies. They still know your gender, age, marital status, income, and online shopping habits. How is that respecting privacy?

Jackpot: astronomers tag Goldilocks planet

redxine

Might have to dial in a ninth chevron for this one.

Beam me up, Scotty.

Thailand can't wait to wield Twitter censorship hammer

redxine

There goes all the Thai-based El Reg readers.

Millions face Megaupload data deletion by Thursday

redxine

Correct me if I'm wrong but

"Now that the lawyers have served the warrants and taken the data they wanted, they can't continue to search the servers and have handed control of them back to Carpathia and Cogent, they said in a letter to the court filed on Friday."

Doesn't that mean the actual act of deleting the hosted content is in the hands of Carpathia and Cogent? The FBI has no obligation to stop the erasure since the warrants have been served... and if you seriously only have copies of your most precious memories hosted on a site with flash-based adverts galore and an all-you-can-execute malware buffet.... no. Just no.

US lawmakers question Google over privacy policy

redxine

Why I'm not worried about Google.

http://xkcd.com/792/

EPIC asks FTC to probe Google's search biz tweak

redxine

Except the problem with that is

Searches without basic "signals" from a client are usually completely useless. If I happen to have my laptop in France, for instance, and my browser sends nil signals about my system (or the search engine doesn't query for them [duckduckgo]) then I will get google all in French, which I don't speak. Instead, my browser knows my preference for UK English, and google will see that and show me instead the contents of google.fr in English. Similarly, I would expect to see different results if I searched for "window system" from a Linux box rather than a mobile or a windos machine. Because google knows my operating system, it can connect the dots and know that I don't want to install new insulated windows in my house with automatic blinds, but want to find out more about the X Windowing system.

In a search for "football" duckduckgo will show me 11 meanings of the word "football", and it still presents an embedded mapquest for "Montesquieu-Lauragais" in France.

That being said, I really don't think google's doing evil things to my search results with knowing my operating system, browser, language preference, or physical location. Facebook, on the other hand, does use these signals to edit out MY OWN social interaction and sort posts to show what I want to see, and not what I need to see.

Symantec downplays source-code trophy theft

redxine

You might however notice that ClamAV

protects proprietary boxes from harm. It's looking for windows executables and takes it out of potentially malicious emails to protect _WINDOWS_ boxes. Given the way that Linux/*NIX has evolved, the security relies on the system itself having fewer and in-exploitable vectors of attack. ClamAV is used on mail servers because it's good at sifting through emails quickly, and protecting those poor NT bastards from their own medicine.

Year of the Penguin - el Reg's 2011 Linux-land roundup

redxine
Linux

Since most distros use CUPS (pretty much Apple's only useful contribution to this world), it's usually safe to say that if the printer is advertised to work with OS X, it'll work in Linux. Although this of course is not always the case, it's a pretty safe bet.

Samsung was always good about putting a penguin on their laser printers, and whatever you do DO NOT buy from Lexmark. They have always been a tool of Microsoft, and although a select few models do work in Linux, they involve some sort of badly written Java-based [shudders] driver and installer. Epson is a good one - in fact most of their modern all in ones, like the Artisan 810 that I have actually use embedded Linux behind the scenes. I've yet to find an HP that didn't work (aside from hardware issues).

Printers are practically the easiest Linux hardware to buy as far as compatibility. Just for god's sake don't buy Lexmark, no matter how cheap they are.

Homeland Sec., RIAA Torrent lists published

redxine

Skype

it does a good job of associating a name with an IP address. Did anyone think to mention it also uses peer to peer technology?

Sure there's ways around it, but the people the RIAA, et. al are interested don't think twice when putting their name in a form. I still think there could be a way to exploit this, even given it's inherent instability. Given the number of torrent peers in the world, etc..... it seems that they're deriving their database directly from a tracker under their control. For example, I was unable to find any legitimate torrents along the lines of oovoo (of which I've downloaded from in the past few days) or Linux torrents, all of which use their own tracker.

Mineral oil, GPUs and thousands of cores

redxine
Joke

Open source must have reminded Team Russia too much of communism, so they got their friendly neighbourhood software vendor to spare them the $925 license fee.

Hard-up OpenOffice whips out begging-cap website

redxine

The day Microsoft uses ODF exclusively

is the same day they ditch the DOS drive letter convention, and switch completely to a *NIX-like kernel. I just don't see it happening. After all, they have a 90%+ market share to maintain, and giving people the option to switch to another office suite just isn't in their shareholder's interests.

Linux.com pwned in fresh round of cyber break-ins

redxine

Because obviously users can't read the dialogue with a clear description of what is required to run as root.

http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/687/tmpfkunfi.png

What's worse, the windows API for their privilege escalation prompt allows the name and description to be changed to anything.

'Devastating' Apache bug leaves servers exposed

redxine

Couldn't help but do it

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/2219/tcompressthestreams.jpg

Feds declare victory over notorious Coreflood botnet

redxine
Big Brother

"Who says what's malware"

"Who says what's malware" == the issue that is trusted computing.

The fact of the matter is that control of this decision is moving far away from the users and into the hands of the big spenders.

Microsoft waves CentOS club at Red Hat

redxine

They did once

It's called Xenix, and you see how far that got.

Microsoft is still stuck in the FAT32 and NTFS era, whilst much more efficient filesystems have whipped by [ext3, ext4, etc.]. I don't see them ditching their precious DOS-based hierarchy any time soon.

Note to Mozilla: We don't get the Firefox billboards

redxine

This day in age

you don't even need computers anymore. It's been expanded to include a variety of devices that can fit in your hand, or connect to your television (read: Wii, smartphones, etc.). In which case you're pretty much stuck using one browser (Opera, Android, etc. [with a few exceptions of course]).

Windows 7 customers hit by service pack 1 install 'fatal error' flaws

redxine

Maybe not in 5 mb....

... but I know that tinycore linux can get you a working desktop with firefox in under 10.

http://www.tinycorelinux.com/

Linux has the advantage of being monolithic, and is therefore pretty fast.

I don't think that resorting to something like Amiga would be the long term answer.