* Posts by SamCrawford

12 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2011

Keith McMahon, tech analyst, dies at 50

SamCrawford

Blimey, very sorry to hear this, spoke with Keith a number of times over the years, and he was always very perceptive, very encouraging of others' work and an all round decent guy. Condolences to the family and his friends.

Missiles-on-rooftops Brit spy Farr: UK gov can slurp your Facebook, Twitter ... What of it?

SamCrawford

Re: Where are the Register's servers located?

Actually they appear to have hosting at Rackspace in both the UK and US (one of their US IPs is 50.57.15.204), and it's reasonable to assume that they have the database replicated between those regions for redundancy too.

Linksys's über-hackable WRT wireless router REBORN with 802.11ac

SamCrawford

Re: I would recommend a look at the TP-Link TD-W8980 N600.

This new Linksys one is ethernet only - the one you suggested includes a DSL modem. A closer TP-Link comparison would be the Archer C7 (http://www.tp-link.com/lk/products/details/?model=Archer+C7). I'd personally go for the TL-WDR4900 though - fantastic CPU and OpenWrt support, just lacking 802.11ac.

It would be great if this Linksys one did include a modem too, as that would mean they'd most likely be publishing the source for the modem drivers too (which is very rare), but sadly that's not the case.

Guardian lets UK spooks trash 'Snowden files' PCs to make them feel better

SamCrawford

Re: "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more.”

The D-Notice was two months ago... http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/defence-d-bbc-media-censor-surveillance-security

Google engineer finds British spyware on PCs and smartphones

SamCrawford

Re: British spyware?

The German company is the subsidiary. It is owned by Gamma Group, which is a British company based in Andover.

Google unleashes BigQuery analytics tool

SamCrawford

Uploading data

Uploading of data is covered in the documentation from the link provided in the article. For example, using the "bq" tool: https://developers.google.com/bigquery/docs/hello_bigquery#createtable

BT fattens fibre customer pipes for free - with a contract extension

SamCrawford

Re: SKY FTTC Launch today?

Tomorrow apparently. Detailed on Sky.com at https://fibre.sky.com/shop/broadband-talk/broadband-options/sky-fibre-broadband/

Global server sales shrivel as EMEA leads retreat

SamCrawford

Not hard to believe

It's not hard to believe they're slipping based upon my experience this past 10 days. I needed to order 8 new servers on short-ish notice, so naturally contacted Dell and HP (amongst others). Dell promised us the world and we ordered with them, but have failed to meet any of their promises so far and have been repeatedly caught out lying. By far the worst sales experience I've ever had (and continue to have, in fact). That said, HP didn't even respond repeated requests for a quote, so I don't know which is worse.

Councils tout £1.2bn for IT whizkid to grab their backend

SamCrawford

"Simple tasks, such as help desks"

I suspect the above phrase will earn the ire of some readers here who have been on the receiving end of such 'simple' tasks!

Google promises 0.001 of revenue to free the slaves

SamCrawford

Wow, this is awfully snide, and with a misleading title too. Why present the headline figure as a decimal (0.001) and then the percentage in the first sentence? Who would use a decimal like that for any reason other than to belittle the number? You'd never see a headline like "ACME CORP PROMISES 0.99 OF REVENUE TO FREE THE SLAVES" - they'd use 99%.

Google shamed by Apple in race to HTML5

SamCrawford

The constant anti-Google rhetoric from this author is becoming tiresome. The facts stated in this article and every other may well be true, but subconscious doubts are immediately raised when I read the byline and anti-Google tone.

Please can we have some more balance!

MAJOR HACK: Voda femtocells open phones up to intercept

SamCrawford

Not a modified firmware

Methodology is at http://wiki.thc.org/vodafone.

It doesn't use a modified firmware, and the Femtocell doesn't check with VF prior to the call being made that the phone is authorised. Instead, it relies on a local list of authorised phones (that I assume are pushed to it from VF upon updates). As discussed in section 8.2.1 of the methodology, you can completely disable checking of this list anyway, which effectively allows the device to run promiscuously.