* Posts by gnufrontier

125 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Mar 2013

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Facebook to forcefeed you web ads, whether you like it or not: Ad blocker? Get the Zuck out!

gnufrontier

Embrace the futility

Not really being a person who shares much of anything and thinks that if there is something important fro me to know then those who are important to me will contact me, FB offers nothing I want. I will hand it to Zuck though, it is a lemmings magnet.

$10bn Oracle v Google copyright jury verdict: Google wins, Java APIs in Android are Fair Use

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It's all just King Kong versus Godzilla

One may prefer our primate cousin for totally irrational reasons but in the end they are both giant foot stomping creatures. All the hyperbole about protecting consumers, economic growth or America as a hotbed of innovation is all just public relations aka propaganda. In the end these are arguments based on metaphor and the winner happens to be whatever metaphor resonates with the brains sitting in judgment. Spin. Spin. Spin. Turning flax into gold.

Microsoft force-feeds Win10

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Re: @Microsoft

Choice ? Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop due to wholesale enterprise adoption eliminated choice as did their capacity to squelch any application software that would compete with their offerings or to simply buy whatever started to become popular (ie. Frontpage).

As far as Microsoft is concerned, there is still no choice when it comes to the desktop not because there aren't alternatives but because corporate users will simply not retrain their personal or put themselves in a position where there is not an ample supply of labor that has familiarity with alternative application software.

I am not surprised by Microsoft's behavior. They have been this way for 25 years. They don't know any other way to be.

Choice ? There was never any stinkin' choice.

Bangladesh government domain turned into toxic phishing hole

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Re: Bangladesh - a toxic label

Has nothing to do with the people. It's one of many countries which due to corruption, lack of education and exploitation is unable to shake off a negative image. You did notice that a Bangladesh hosting company was not used for the site didn't you ? Would you buy a car made in Bangladesh ?

In fact would you buy any product that required skilled manufacturing that was made in Bangladesh ?

The same could be said of Nigeria, Afghanistan, Haiti.

Is Bangladesh at the top of your list of places you want to go as a tourist ? I didn't think so.

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Bangladesh - a toxic label

Associate anything with Bangladesh and the desirability quotient falls off a cliff.

You wanted innovation? We gave you Clippy the Paperclip in your IM client

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Silicon Valley is a misnomer. Madison Valley more like it.

Silicon Valley targets consumers with its apps in order to sell targeted advertising.

Not much different from commercial TV really. One wants to keep you clicking the other wants to keep you watching.

Same old vinegar in a different bottle.

SEC warns cybersecurity is biggest threat to financial system

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Transcript

"Blah, blah, blah,blah, cybersecurity blah, blah, blah.

Inside Project Loon – Google's megaplan to build a global internet

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Pulling money out of thin air

The real business of Google and Facebook is surveillance and there are places that are still not under their watchful eyes There are those who will always pay money to know what is being seen.

Android Lollipop sucks at security, says researcher

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Promotional hack for security "researcher".

"Some applications, notably those security-related and for lost devices, request accessibility, draw-over-app, and root features."

My suggestion is don't download those kind of apps from a play store. Most of the article is about gaining access to accessibility features which doesn't really get the hacker anything. Yeh, if you download an app that is security related it's going to require you to give it permission to get into the guts of your system.

People download all kinds of crap and that is what happens. Phones may be smarter but people aren't.

If you are doing social media you already have compromised your "security" and the government has no road blocks to your stuff. This whole security business reminds me of all the health scares one sees on the evening local news shows where they twist some study in order to come up with catchy headline spouted by some smiling empty headed teleprompter reader and keep you watching through the ads for the next "news segment".

Security is a joke just about everywhere for any connected device.

Apple, AT&T, Verizon named in $7bn VoIP patent claim

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"You think that's air you're breathing ?"

Hard to see how this is news of any kind. When it comes to articles like this on patent trolls it's like listening to the traffic report during the morning commute. Most of the time there is no point to the report since all the usual jams are on all the usual roads.

Let me know when they win such a suit, that is news.

Adjust your Facebook, Twitter privacy settings, judge tells jurors in Oracle-Google Java trial

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The technical bits

Jurors may be ignorant of technology but they are also ignorant of what necessarily constitutes copyright. Apparently this is also the case with lawyers well versed in copyright law otherwise this case would not be necessary in the first place. We could have saved years of negotiating with the Iranians if we have simply put together 10 people who didn't know Isaac Newton from a Fig Newton and let them decide if the Iranians had a nuclear weapons program or not.

What is often forgotten is that a trial by jury is a jury of one's peers. Our legal system has somehow made a corporation a person and created the fiction that the person holding the stop sign during roadwork is part of the peer group of advanced technologists.

The doors to the courthouse have become a rabbit hole to Wonderland.

'Bitcoin creator' Craig Yeah Wright in meltdown

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Quipping boy

There really isn't anything more to this story than a man with a brain disorder. Such people may not be common but they are hardly unique.

UK govt admits it pulled 10-year file-sharing jail sentence out of its arse

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It's all arse

Just about everything inside most people's heads is just made up stuff. If it isn't science or mathematics it's just a pile self serving crap that keeps people in line, helps sell products and make the school tie set look like they earned their place rather than having it be just a vaginal legacy.

Google AI gains access to 1.2m confidential NHS patient records

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The spotting of another iceberg tip

Not to bring everybody down but we are already in the end game. All that is left is for the Privacy king to resign. He had a good run but nothing lasts forever. Technology is not neutral and privacy is a moving target. The roots of privacy are in shame avoidance and not a political right that acts as an antidote to totalitarianism. Just to make the whole stew even more foul tasting let's throw in some political utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number - a ridiculous notion but one held by many an apparatchik I'm sure) and top it off with the ever present promotion of "big data" as somehow being the new mechanism that will hasten the utopian future (forever chased and always receding) that gives purpose to the starry eyed technologists raised on science fiction and the notion that somehow our the past accomplishments have been something more than dumb luck, the right time, right place events that make up the contingencies of all history. Privacy will be one of those values that is still given lip service but in effect is already being moved to the the shelf to take its place among those other concepts that have become little more than sentimental artifacts like self sufficiency and rugged independence. We can dig in our heels but eventually our shoes will wear out.

FBI spies on how many?

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Not worth the screen space

This is not news. It's just another picture of the hot dog factory.

BOFH: Thermo-electric funeral

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Interchangeable part

These little BOFH writings are obviously fantasy. Any boss worth his salt in America would simply point you to the exit not because you couldn't retrieve the data but because you have an inflated sense of your own worth. Snarky geeks are a dime a dozen, cheaper than the USB stick. This being an English site however it is probably the case that both the boss and you are government employees and so immune to the harsh realities of economic warfare amid the resurgence of the American gilded age.

UK web host 123-Reg goes TITSUP, customer servers evaporate

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The National Enquirer of Technology

Your reading it.

Swedish air controllers debunk cyber attack disruption theory

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We control the vertical, we control the horizontal

"It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you know that ain’t so.”

And we don't know how much of what we know this quote applies to

Facts are more difficult to mine than diamonds and are worth significantly less, they get in the way of perception management..

Job ad promises 'Meaningless Repetitive Work on the .NET Stack'

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Visa versa

Can one be as honest when being interviewed for the job ?

The world has tacitly agreed that everything works only because of corruption and deceit but this can never be acknowledged as being true. One is expected to keep up with the jargon that shows one is on the team.

Flaw-finding Ruby on Rails bot steams past humans

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Re: People still use Ruby On Rails?

There are probably mainframe COBOL jobs going unfulfilled too.

gnufrontier

Re: People still use Ruby On Rails?

We all know there were no computer languages before the "birth of the Internet".

Yahoo! sale woes

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There's dumb all over

Fail big and go home richer. Marissa should get together with Philippe Pierre Dauman over at Viacom. They have much in common except Marissa doesn't have some demented billionaire wrapped around her finger.

It's amazing how such cretins can appear on the scene even without any royal in-breeding - products of culture rather than intercourse.

But then it has always been so. The faces have changed, the robes and crowns have gone but the sense of untouchable elevation remains: the sense of entitlement, that which is their due regardless of outcome. Who remembers Roger Smith, GM's CEO who presided over a precipitous decline in market share and wasted billions on acquisitions only to have his pension doubled upon retirement because the board said they needed to do that in order to attract talent. Where have we heard that before ? Or was the board saying if they had done it earlier they wouldn't have ended up with such a crappy CEO in the first place.

It is a fact that there is no correlation between CEO compensation and performance.

I would take any job where that would be the case. Anybody hiring CEO material who is willing to be in the trenches ? I'm your man.

You won't believe this, but… nothing useful found on Farook iPhone

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On the "stupiidity" of people

For those who are not intelligent design/creationists, it would be a good time to revisit the principles of evolutionary theory. Just as we were not created neither were societies. Our future as a species is not dependent on smartness. Which of our individual biological functions is controlled by us ? Yes, we do get toilet trained but our control is quite limited in that area. If allowed to eat as much as we want in a single sitting , we also would quickly come up against a limit beyond our control and the same can be said for holding our breath. Just as evolution has resulted in our biological systems being mostly autonomic, the same can be said for that adaptation we call society. Most humans are born with a brain that prefers conformity to society. This must be the case because without that preference societies could not exist. In a real sense, conformity is much more important than what we like to think of as intelligence. For reasons that have nothing to do with concern for the masses, leadership through inheritance passed from the scene. This meant that an alternate mechanism had to come into existence for leadership to be determined. If to be a leader one must marshal a following, it is self-evident that those who are best at marshaling a following will end up leading. One would do better to realize that democracy is really a form closer to marketing than the myth of a well informed citizenry choosing a leader from among their own.

Bundling ZFS and Linux is impossible says Richard Stallman

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Re: Question

One thing we do know about law as evidenced by the judges of the supreme court, there is no right interpretation. It all relative to time, culture and geography. Law is totally fungible over time.

gnufrontier

Re: Question

what you have said has nothing to do with the issue in question. but thanks for sharing your rather philistine approach.

gnufrontier

Re: Question

it's not about the money fool I'm guessing you have grown up with Linux and have no idea what it was like before the gpl.

gnufrontier

Re: Question

i don't think you understand what the gpl is. there would be no mass adoption of a single linux kernel without it. the gpl is actually a more important contribution of stallman than all the code he has written

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Re: Question

nothing to do with purity. the license dictates what can be done not the users nor Linus. Linus works on the code. He settled the direction legally when he put the kernel under the gpl.

Half of Facebook's Free Basics users ditch the freebie web-lite service for the paid-for real deal

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Just because my band is broad doesn't mean your web site has to be fat.

"It has been tremendously useful for us," said Jack Herrick, CEO of how-to website wikiHow. "We slimmed down images and took out most of the Javascript, which makes our site run a lot faster – and now people stay longer as a result."

There is a message in this for more than just those trying to reach the developing world. I wonder if they still downloaded the trackers.

Adobe preps emergency Flash patch for bug hackers are exploiting

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Another in a long line

Seems like there are more points of attack these days than a porcupine with inverted quills. The digital world is untrustworthy but we have to keep on pretending that it is. What choice do we really have anymore ? El Reg readers are more aware than most people but all that means is the odds are in the favor of the bad actors.

WhatsApp at BlackBerry? For one thing, BBM's now free

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FAcebook, the Stazi of social media.

A billion informers and still growing.

Telstra hauls in Cisco, Ericsson, Juniper to explain TITSUPs

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Tell the truth now

They probably have a list of excuses they trot out. Who know what the real story is on this. If they are having a come to Jesus meeting with the big three it's got to be more than what they are saying.

Trump carded again: Hotel security aced

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Not a fan but

First, it's irrelevant that it is Trump. One may as well be saying the same thing in regards to Home Depot or TJ Max or any number of other hacks. It will give Trump haters some pleasure though.

Pretty soon there will be list of those who haven't been hacked yet. It will be the shorter list.

Nest bricks Revolv home automation hubs, because evolution

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Wake up Neo

Look. I'm sorry you had your head up the nether regions and bought into this whole automation, IoT BS. The bottom line is this: people are volunteering themselves to become part of the 1984/Brave New World/Matrix because they are as innocent as the native Americans who took beads for land that they thought wasn't theirs to be sold in the first place. Unfortunately for them, the buyers had a notion of property rights. Pink Floyd did Welcome to the Machine a long time ago. What? Did you think they were only talking about the music business ?

Waiting for your Oculus to arrive? Yeah, it's going to be some time

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The sucker birth rate

It used to be there was one born every minute but there were less people then.

Some people see all this as evidence of how advanced we are others (you know who you are) see it as evidence of something else altogether.

Fortunately I am a totally insignificant organism whose life span relative to the universe is so short it can only be measured by a not as yet invented quantum clock. That's the good news. The bad news is that most of what I have to do in life is incredibly boring. No wonder people want those damn goggles. I guess it beats adopting ideologies, religious conversions, political involvement, various drugs and the host of other things people do to pass the time, maybe.

Memory and storage boundary changes

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HPT

We do need to shave off as many milliseconds as possible so we can get those arbitrage opportunities down to the 1/1000 of a cent level.

There is always overhead. Flying time may be 45 minutes but the overhead is 2 hours minimum even if one lives next door to the airport.

Internet users don't understand security or privacy, says survey

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Survey on surveys

Take a survey of 24000 people and ask them whether they respond to surveys and 74% will say no.

Is iOS 9.3 Apple's worst ever update? First it bricks iThings, now Safari is busted

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Don't update

Face it, most updates aren't that important. If your system is working, leave it alone. If there aren't a bunch of new features who needs it? If it isn't at least noticeably faster who needs it ?

I haven't updated Windows 7 in years (I never go with X.0 of any version of software, it has be at least .1 or above). Haven't missed a thing. And spare me the security issues.

Most security issues with users are because they are ignorant of what they clicking on or downloading.

I don't use Apple but my wife does and I have turned off updates for her since an update from a year and a half ago messed up her email.

These guys fix one bug and introduce two more. This is not news, it is an axiom in software development since the complexity far exceeds the ability of the human brain to contain all the interactions of all the components.

Tired of Windows 10 phoning home? Maybe the special Chinese govt version is for you

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Inside info

I presume that the Chinese government has been given a greater insight into Windows 10 source code and all updates in order to satisfy them that what they get will be what they are buying. This is a great ruse in order to get a better handle on how to hack into Windows 10. It will save them time.

And given that this will be the last version of Windows, what an opportune time to decide that it is time for such a partnership.

1.5M Verizon Enterprise customer records selling on forum after breach

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You call that a heist ?

Who knows what information they took ? From what Verizon says, it doesn't sound like much more than a customer list. It's easy to know how valuable it is. Check the price. Consider a drug dealer who breaks into a pharmacy and makes off with 10 cartons only to find out they are full of prescription stool softener. Thief makes off with 10 cartons of prescription medication as a headline hardly tells the story.

US govt says it has cracked killer's iPhone, legs it from Apple fight

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Ignore the man behind the curtain, ignore the curtain.

There is no security issue here for the masses. No one cares about the crap on your phone and if you lose it the chances are slim to none that the person who finds it has the expertise and equipment to break into it and see your playlist and pictures of your dog.

Of course if you are using your phone as a debit card that's another story but still the odds are that whoever finds it won't be able to do anything with it.

If you are concerned about security, you should worry less about Apple's OS and more about the apps you download and the websites you visit. Of course you may also be a real dummy and open up all kinds of phishing emails and click away in which case you deserve everything you get. You are too stupid to own a smart phone.

You don't need to lose your wallet or have the mailbox outside your house rifled through in order to have identity theft. No one cares about that, the name of the game as in everything else is volume. Hackers go after oceans of data, not your puddle.

People would do well not to worry to much about all this for a simple reason, you are insignificant and nobody really cares about you at all. Turn off the news and go fishing, golfing or whatever.

As for the government, believe me, if they want to know anything about you they will find it out whether they have a backdoor or not but I would bet money that no readers of the Register are even the smallest of blips on government radar. If you are on their radar you probably put yourself there in which case it's time to come up with plan B.

Large scale societies already give one the best possible defense: anonymity.

Glum, depressed ... and addicted to Facebook, Twitter? There's a link, say medical eggheads

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Mediated living

I don't do social media. I'm just depressed by the fact that the term exists and one has to hear it a thousand times a day. All these companies are a crock of some very nasty stuff and it is depressing that these superficial always on marketing engines are the best that these geniuses can come up with.

It's like Einstein being happy that he created a big mass mailing company and robo call center.

Yeh, I know they are rich. And maybe that's all there is to everything anyway.

I just can't be bothered to care.

Ever wondered what the worst TV show in the world would be? Apple just commissioned it

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Incomprehensible

Something else to add to my list of evidence that I must be a complete moron for not understanding what the hell is going on with all this stuff and a great deal of other stuff as well. What a long bad dream it's been.

Pebble axes quarter of its workers after fitness pivot

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Law of diminishing returns

Most of these devices will end up in the closet with the slideshow picture frames. Remember them ?

The low hanging fruit has been picked. Consumer electronics now is just about goofy niche gadgets.

IBM has to give Indiana some pocket change after $1.3bn web fiasco

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Re: It's almost like

The government trough has always attracted the large corporate pigs. The really depressing thing is the length of time it took to get to a final decision in the suit and I still doubt that they got to the bottom of anything.

FBI backs down against Apple: Feds may be able to crack killer's iPhone without iGiant's help

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Phone in hand.

People do not seem to understand that their is a huge difference between cracking all phones and cracking a single phone that one has in hand in a lab. What is so hard to understand about this ?

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Re: Not a win for Apple

Easily ? Hardly. Let's call your post another win for those who having read something about the case (maybe) but still do not understand what it is they have read.

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Re: Rattling Apples cage !!!!

Maybe I missed something but I don't think it was ever the case that Apple said the phone could not be hacked into which was the pragmatic basis if not the ideological basic for them not providing something special for the FBI. Apple knew that the FBI didn't need what they were requesting from Apple. If you have the device itself odds are you can get at the data. The data of course may be encrypted but that is a different issue.

gnufrontier

Re: precedent

It is easier to break into the phone than it is to make sense of what you are saying.

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