Posts by Richard Kay

X forwarding over SSH

This is much easier to setup, both on server and client. It only needs installing Linux on both and having a domain name for the server or knowing its IP address. Any linux distro seems to come with an SSH server and client as part of the standard install these days. So from your client you establish an X forwarding session using:

ssh -X fred@bloggs.dyndns.org

Assuming your user name on the server is fred and your domainname of the server is bloggs.dyndns.org . You can then run any application e.g. Firefox, Konqueror on the server displaying the window/s on the client just by typing its name and running it in background if you want the remote shell to be able to run more than one application, e.g. using

konqueror &

Konqueror or nautilus can then open any file on the server using the appropriate application based on the file type using point and click, displaying the windows on the client.

Chances are if you are a Linux user you can already do all this without having to install anything new. If you can only use Windows then I guess your life has to be a lot more complicated.

Virgin Media

1. 194.168.8.110 (winn-dnsbep-2.server.virginmedia.net) appears to have POOR source port randomness and GREAT transaction ID randomness.

2. 194.168.8.109 (winn-dnsbep-1.server.virginmedia.net) appears to have POOR source port randomness and GREAT transaction ID randomness.

Looking at the scatter plots it appears the source ports are randomised but within a very narrow range of 200 or so as opposed to the range of 65,000 or so which should be used. So the source port randomisation combined with the transaction ID randomness gives 8 + 16 = 24 bits of entropy compared to the 32 bits maximum possible. It is possible that Virgin Media may have other defences, e.g. against domains showing suspicious UDP packet storms involving many subdomains over a short duration.

regulation

Considering how long it's taken for anti-trust regulators to get to grips with the consumer operating-systems market, the problem for regulators is going to be trying to make legal processes work as fast as the evolution of the game being regulated. Trying to regulate last year's anti-competitive behaviour is ineffective remedy for this year's crimes. It's true that nothing lasts for ever. It's taken 20 years for Microsoft's near absolute monopoly power to corrupt Microsoft's own products almost absolutely. I don't think we want to wait that long with Google.

The only solution I can see to either monopoly is legally to force visibility of monopolistic algorithms and the only effective way to do that isn't to demand masses of inaccurate and inconsistent documentation of today's system in a few year's time but to require the offending monopolist to publish source code and test cases as these are developed, on non-discriminatory terms i.e. systems which create monopolies of over a certain size, scale and influence should only legally be tolerated to the extent these are compliant with open-source development methodologies.

ISPs identifying zombies

Will be made easier when the smaller routers interfacing customer sites block packets with invalid source addresses ( RFC2267 ) and ISPs receiving DOS attacks share the source addresses with ISPs from which these originate, in a manner enabling originating ISPs automatically to monitor alleged sources (to confirm reports) and limit the source connections. This requires all ISPs to implement RFC2267 before this can become fully effective. ISPs who don't should be charged more for access and eventually denied access to transit and backbone networks.

@Anonymous Coward

"But then I'm still not sold on virtualisation of critical production systems anyway."

I am. I have been using a paid for virtual server for a production system for a few years now and more recently have a few more. They have been rock solid and the technology brings root servers to the price point where many new networked applications become possible that previously wouldn't have been affordable. The production systems use user-mode Linux and I recently started using VirtualBox for development and experimental purposes.

under development

No mention of this on Bytemark's website yet. The cheapest hosted server (not including virtual machines, one of which I use) Bytemark offer is £60/month. The hardware picture doesn't look finished to me either, I suspect when it is the packaging density will be greater to make good use of rackspace.

backwards API compatibility

Is for wimps. Real men fix the application source and get on with life. Seriously though a system gets full of cruft if it has to be developed by a dominant company terrified of offending customers who will never obtain access to source code for software they need to use from vendors whom the dominant company drove into bankruptcy years ago.

As to arguments about how develop GTK, if the developers of it can't agree they will have to fork it, in which case either its market is wide enough for both forks successfully to differentiate or the better fork wins and the worse one loses. In another context this is called evolution. Better to let the users choose between forks. When developers with monopoly control over source code make the wrong choices in a world determined to keep all APIs including the mistakes backwards compatible, this stymies the product for years to come.

Article read and responded to using Linux on the desktop. Oh heck ! that means I must be a time traveller (;-).

@yes

"but can it beat Kasparov? " .

Almost certainly. But if you are interested in a pure-skill no-luck game where moderately skilled humans can still beat a computer you might want to have a look at the board game known as go (Japanese), or wéiqí (Chinese). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(board_game) . That said, It took me a year and a half of playing this game before I could beat a computer go program on a Pentium 4 more often than not. I'd certainly be interested to see how a massively parallel go program using simulated annealing on this machine would play against someone a few handicap stones stronger than me.

@lIsRT

"I wondered if a rigid airship containing *nothing* (no air, no helium, no hydrogen - just vacuum) would be feasible. I had it pointed out to me that no materials could withstand the pressures that would result. BUT if some sort of fabric could be made out of carbon nanotube fibres then that might work."

Materials do exist from which you can construct a vacuum chamber capable of withstanding the outside atmospheric pressure. But these are too heavy and metals tend to be required. Carbon fibres are useful in high tension applications, not in withstanding the high compression needed for a vacuum chamber. So the compressed air powered car being developed uses carbon fibre tanks, but with these the pressure to be withstood is inside the stretched tank, not outside the compressed tank. If you want your airship structure to be lightweight you have a better chance if internal and external pressures match or nearly match, hence the use of lighter than air gasses. The ideal shape for a vacuum chamber is a sphere, but as the size of the sphere increases the thickness needs to increase to reduce the risk of instability and inward collapse.

Good move for those who want to progress

Beyond the plateau where Windows users tend to stop learning that is. 60 days support is about right for the average smartness Windows user who wants to learn new tricks while transitioning to community support.

My 88 year old dad had to transition to Ubuntu from Windows 98 because his new hardware didn't support the Vista it was supplied with and I didn't really want to support his use of XP or 98 on it and he didn't want to send the HW back when he could see what Ubuntu could do on it booted from a CD. He has had few problems despite his great age and finding it difficult to see small details.

Personally I did find 8.04 Hardy slightly more buggy than usual for a couple of months. A bit beta, but pretty much ironed out for prime time now. I guess those that didn't want cutting edge should have stayed with Gutsy or Dapper until now. There again Hardy is a long-term support version, so Canonical had to make sure the programs included were a bit on the cutting edge on release in April so they could be supported until after the next LTS release which I think is in a couple of years.

very sad

Personally I doubt there is an ounce of compassion in the man. If there is any regret for what he has done this is probably only in the consequences his actions have had upon himself. From what I had read, the circumstantial evidence against him seemed compelling and I thought the jury had probably arrived at the correct verdict - now confirmed as correct by this turn of events. The reason this may result in a reduction in his sentence is because this gives his victim's family the ability to conduct a proper burial and funeral and to finally know with certainty what happened to their daughter and mother. I think under the circumstances there should be a reduction in his sentence, but he should still be imprisoned for very many years for what he did.

@Solomon Grundy

"Like most law enforcement tech, it will probably be illegal to include the police Trojans in AV libraries."

Sorry but how on earth do you imagine that the AV companies are supposed to know when they find malware whether or not it was planted by police/MI5/MI6/GCHQ etc. or the equivalent organisations in 100 different countries ? You imagine that said law-enforcement organisations are all going to provide copies of trojan software or a software suite with regular updates to identify law enforcement zero day exploits to every Tom, Dick and Harry of an AV or pentesting company whether based in the same jurisdiction or not ? Perhaps you think AV companies would be willing to delay releasing new malware signatures while the spooks decide whether to approve these ? Well it would certainly defeat their imagined security by obscurity of their malware techniques if they could approve or reject any AV software release.

Besides which, many criminals now have access to expert malware systems analytical and reverse engineering expertise themselves. This is how bot herders keep up with their competitors. It's also not as if it's that difficult automatically to image systems before and after a trojan/virus or worm installation to identify the differences resulting from malware installation - which gives you the malware those interested are looking for. Use of virtual machines and a few scripts cut out most of the effort this kind of thing used to involve. Some of my second year undergraduate security systems students are well up to this.

Your premise is based on a deeply flawed assumption: that there are sufficiently few IT security specialists with the capability to detect and analyse malware that all these specialists are inherently state- controllable.

@Richard Gray

"This seems rather like a solution looking for a problem."

The problem from ICANNs perspective is that if all they manage is a name to address lookup list of a measly couple of hundred TLDs so those using this list can find the DNS servers authoritative for said TLDs, their function could be replaced overnight by an association of TLD DNS operators. Multiply this to a highly complex set of contractual relationships to tens of thousands of customers with tens of thousands of TLDs and you have a house of cards which only ICANN can easily manage.

What ICANN want to do here is to create a large enough lobby of TLD private tenants to prevent the development of Internet governance based on a framework of international law and to keep their operation within their own private domain. The question to ask is do we want the Internet governed by a private company or through the framework of international law. A more legitimate way to exercise ICANNs powers would be to bring these under the ITU:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union .

All very well for ICANN to talk about deregulation as with the Thatcherite telecoms liberalisation, but in this case there is no OFFCOM and only one company selling TLDs.

@Solomon

"At this point open source is still a fad. Sure there might be some uptake, like with any fad, but it's going to take more than a dozen or so success stories to change decades of industry maturation and business operations."

Having been a senior decision maker for over a decade cuts little ice with those who do understand technology. Proprietary licensed software packages may still be dominant on standalone desktop applications to an extent, (does anyone still care about these ?) but this software methodology never went far into the wide area network. As a concept, cloud computing is clearly more closely aligned with the WAN than the standalone desktop.

As to open source being a fad, the reason the Internet protocols were more successful in the nineteen eighties than the then more heavily invested-in competing and proprietary OSI stack was because the IETF specifications and most of the implementations were always freely distributable and anyone interested could participate, i.e. the core Internet is open source. To get copies of the OSI specs without even any software implementing these, someone in my shoes would have had to get a budget sign off from a senior decision maker (who wouldn't have understand why we needed these) for the proprietary OSI specs printed and bound from a single monopoly printer in Switzerland, which were always many months out of date. It was always going to be easier to download the RFCs with a modem and the open source implementations of them which we could contribute towards without having senior-decision makers obstruct the development process.

For someone who was in telecoms in the seventies and eighties and since then became more concerned with the Net, open systems became dominant in telecoms in the eighties to be replaced by open source in the nineties and later, with the same pattern repeating itself shifted a few years later with the development of the Internet/ISP business. I don't hear many of the software engineers who are taking salaries in either the telecom or Internet sector worrying about whether they will be paid from a sale of software packages model that never existed within this industry. There's no shortage of punters willing to pay monthly fees for phone and Internet services provided through open source though. You might as well try to argue that telecom engineers earn less because they are open rather than secretive about standards which determine how equipment from different companies communicate, as if one single company could own the entire world's communications.

So the natural development of cloud computing using open source doesn't threaten the salaries of programmers and technologists in the slightest. You very clearly just don't get the role open source in developing network infrastructure, something which I have rather more than a single decade's experience in. But open source, from this perspective, does make the role of senior decision makers who don't understand how to enable technologists in their employ to be technology leaders somewhat redundant to the process of developing network infrastructure doesn't it ?

need for new filesystems

Well when my home Linux desktop/server gets powercutted ext3 seems to recover its journal as part of the bootup without ever having to go into a long fsck self repair cycle, which is what ext2 used to do. I think someone calculated that when you go to multi TB disks you could have ended up with a fsck time after boot, or every X boots which would take upwards of an hour without journalling. That and the need to handle increasingly multi-core and SMP CPUs etc. Can't see development ending, and there aint no monopoly in Linux so we will see filesystem options for some time to come - though most Linux users won't notice because you accept the install program default unless you know why you need otherwise.

Interesting that all cameras and pen drives use ancient DOS based FAT, though for how long once people want to run multi-threading code on them without them grinding to a slow almost halt or have them blowing up ? It means you can go out and buy something that talks USB though and generally expect it to just work on Linux, which has to be a good thing.

Full Support

For Davis on this one, even though as a LibDem I would normally want to take his seat in any byelection. But not this byelection, based on his reason for calling it. Labour has no such excuse for failing to contest it, but they clearly want to avoid a humiliating defeat on an issue on which they claim to be in line with public opinion, but don't have the guts to stand and fight on whatever principles they still claim to have.

Davis is supporting LibDem policy on the issue of internment, and we can't afford to return to what this policy did in Northern Ireland. If public opinion polls say Davis will lose, then having a proper debate on internment initiated by someone with the guts to risk losing his job in order to lead public opinion on why internment is a very bad idea can only be a good thing.

cable attachments and the strength of madmen

For anyone behaving that crazily he would have barely noticed the minimal resistance likely to have been offered by the cable screws, which really wouldn't have stopped him. The cable connections would have disconnected at the weakest point - in my view either threads stripped or bolts sheared right off, whichever goes first - if not ripping the wires and sheath right out of the connector. Come on folks - someone prepared to fling heavy CRT monitors around the office at co-workers ain't going to be stopped by a couple of little 3mm screws.

@anonymous coward

"See, opensource is great, but we are giving it lip service in many areas, and I personally would like to see some commercial benefit for developers of opensource code, ie. I think that monetary recompense to the developer for code, would actually create better opensource applications, and that's what we should be working on."

The overwhelming majority of work on open source software (OSS) is paid work, as demonstrated by extensive automated analysis of contributions to Linux based on source code line-count and copyright signoff, see

http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/

The motivations for creating software are various. In my case this research supports teaching I am paid for. Some software creation is motivated by the sale of packages which might be harmed by opensourcing them, but package sales are a minority interest amongst programmers.

When looking at the benefits of OSS to its creators the greatest is the reduction in transaction costs in a world where a useful system has to be integrated from contributions by hundreds of thousands of programmers working for tens of thousands of independent organisations, for which sale of the software could never be our main line of business because the transaction costs would be greater than the sales value.

Creators of this code do want your lip service to support our viral method of distribution, but we value your custom when you buy one of our courses, consultancy services, software publications or hardware in which OSS is embedded or which is sold on the back of OSS even more. If you can help identify and fix a bug or contribute a useful patch that works for you and which benefits you by having it included in the upstream version even better.

@JonB

"I have noticed that her in blighty you could take out the grid with an enthusiastic use of spanners. Maybe an angle grinder if you like sparks."

You might be able to take out a small part of the electric grid this way if you didn't get electrocuted or caught. Unless all you wanted to do is blackout a few hundred premises around a small local transformer or chose your timing very carefully, the part you attacked would probably be adequately backed up by the redundancy of the grid as a whole. During the miners' strike in the eighties a couple of miners trying to prevent the delivery of coal energy via the use of the high voltage grid got arrested for trying to cut down a pylon. It didn't work then, even with thousands of angry, strong and practical people potentially on the case. Wannabe scrap metal thieves have been interested in this for years. In practice doubling the voltage of line plant cuts losses two ways, by halving the current and so quartering the resistive losses and by ensuring physical disruption to the network is likely to involve a short life expectancy for those who try.

@spleen

"There's no belief or knowing involved. There's an absence of evidence. That's it. It's about evidence. That's all we ask for. And don't forget that God used to provide it, in the form of burning bushes etc. He just suddenly decided to stop proving his existence a convenient period before today."

He sometimes appears to people to do just what you claim he does not do. He appeared to St Paul on the road to Damascus pretty much as He appeared to me 25 years ago. Either that or I am or was quite mad, but as my behaviour in the 29 years prior to this astonishing event qualified for the loony bin rather more than my behaviour since, I have to draw my own conclusions from the evidence of my own experience. I wouldn't expect my personal evidence to work for those who don't know me, but I'm not the only one offering similar accounts.

Why anyone with an unprejudiced mind should ignore observations simply because they were recorded in the past beats me, but if you are looking for more recent independently-verifiable evidence, it seems generally agreed that if any of the very many fundamental physical constants of the universe were different, conditions for intelligent life would not be possible. For a system as complex as biological evolution to be sustained, more simple physical and chemical systems had to precede this. These prior systems could not have had the capacity to store and transmit information, and without information storage and transmission evolution is not possible. So there is evidence of design here, but in a different place from where some naive Christians have claimed it to be. To avoid this evidence, atheists who understand it are forced either to abandon their faith in the non-existence of God or to postulate the existence of an infinite number of universes with varying laws so that one universe is just right to enable observed life to be sustained.

But this is as unacceptable as to claim that one of an infinite number of monkeys typed the works of Shakespeare. Atheists also seem to have an arbitrary faith in the unprovable idea of randomness as being a fundamental as opposed to as an emergent property of the universe. Albert Einstein claimed that "God does not play with dice" but atheists believe in the randomness of fundamental physical events and the non-existence of God. Where is their evidence for either assertion ? Just saying "I can't see a pattern" isn't evidence that there are no patterns when other people including Albert Einstein can perceive deep patterns at a greater and deeper level of organisation than science alone is capable of considering. Analytical science is extremely good at observing very small and narrowly defined and understood things, but is a very limited tool used on its own when it comes to integrating and understanding the bigger picture.

@JonB

"What's non-commercial copying? You mean they don't charge for it? It still erodes the value of the work."

Work only has value based on the commerce that can occur around it. Buggy whip manufacturing ceased to have commercial value with the invention of the car and music distribution is ceasing to have value due to the existence of the Internet. The moral posturing of buggy whip manufacturers didn't change the economic realities on the ground either. This doesn't mean music has no commercial value, because various other rights (e.g. use of music played on the radio, in live performances and in shopping malls etc.) are still capable of being packaged and sold.

"Now you're in a hole, there is a time period, you just feel that it should be shorter."

It's not me that's in the hole. It isn't musicians if Eric Clapton's belief in the future of music is worth listening to. Those who are in the hole are the recording companies who are no longer needed to distribute what the musicians choose to record. No-one is arguing for free entry to live performances and those with exceptional talent who create content many people enjoy will continue to find a way to make a living doing what they do best.

"Why even your 5 years? Why not 5 minutes?"

5 minutes would not be long enough an incentive to encourage anyone to create new work. No artist ever chose to create new work because of sales they expected to make more than 5 years after publication. Few artistic works are of any commercial interest more than 5 years after publication. The few creators of works which are of interest for more than 5 years are in an exceptionally privileged position. They will have consequently earned enough so that the public who gives them this privilege by tolerating limited copyright in law can expect something in return for forgoing their ancient right to copy when the copyright period is over.

Copyrights have no existence outside law. This law only affected the behavior of a tiny minority until a few years ago. All law is a political compromise reflecting the balance of power between those who have an interest in the matter as opposed to a moral absolute. Since when did the majority who used to have to pay for content which they can now very easily distribute for themselves have no interest in the form this law takes?

"Your argument is selfish, you attach no value to the work of others despite the fact that you obviously want them to make it, you don't want them to make money from it."

If you intend to enforce the disputed rights you claim to exist by spying upon other people's private communications your argument is despotic. If you don't then you are howling at the moon. Why should being an artist give someone a right to make a living independently of the market conditions surrounding their work and balanced rights granted by democratically acceptable laws ? And In what sense does being granted a special legal privilege give the minority beneficiaries of this privilege the right to spy on the computer and network connections of the majority to enforce special privilege granted by politicians to the minority ?

Answers on a postcard please - obviously if you use an envelope it's because you must have something to hide.

@BKB

"So your attitude is that these people who've connected to thousands of PCs running the Kraken botnet should be arrested, or something?"

Depends on who connected to what and why. If someone is attempting access to a system unauthorised by it's owner this is a Computer Misuse Act section 1 offence, which is the digital equivalent of picking someones lock and going around their house and opening drawers and looking at files, uninvited, but without taking anything away or doing any damage. This is how Daniel Cuthbert's actions were interpreted. Personally I don't see that scanning an address range for a port known to be left open by a particular worm is much different from walking down a road and observing how many ground floor windows are visibly open and reporting on that, which would be perfectly legal, though some might find it annoying if you published their street addresses in the process so others could break in.

"I'm not sure what your opinion is on the point under discussion. "

I was responding earlier to your remarks concerning what happened to someone caught trying out a ../../ directory traversal attack, which was a different incident. Personally I think the researchers who decided not to modify the computers which were part of the Kraken botnet stayed on the right side of a difficult line. I think it is up to the ISPs in a situation where a botnet host is detected within their network to limit the damage a bot within their network is allowed to do in line with the acceptable usage agreement they have with their customers.

I think also that better standards are needed for collaborative reporting of security incidents concerning particular IP addresses and actions required by owners of affected address space. The Internet needs a more standards-coordinated abuse reporting system and abuse handling standards.

The tone I used was in response to your statement:

"Considering the sad cases of people who've been arrested and even punished just for pointing out security holes, the idea of taking over these PCs is not wise. Does anyone remember the case of a security expert getting arrested over typing ../../.. into a web server?"

The issue here in connection with Cuthbert (whom I think I reasonably assumed you were referring to) wasn't to do with him pointing out security holes. It was to do with his illegal probing for security holes on systems where it wasn't his legitimate business to find them, when he claimed his motivation for doing this was to point these out if they existed. He didn't actually point out security holes, and it seems to me reasonable for others to suspect that his claim, that this was his motivation, was a mitigation strategy which helped him to avoid being charged under a more serious section of the computer misuse act. Probably better for him that he was given a fine to encourage him to understand the line the Kraken researchers seem to have demonstrated a somewhat better understanding of.

"My point is that it's better to tread very carefully legally speaking before trying to control other people's computers, on which point you seem to be in agreement with me, although your tone is rather unpleasant."

I agree with the first part of this sentence. The reason for my tone is because Cuthbert wasn't arrested or punished for "pointing out security holes" but for trying to find these by attempting to gain unauthorised access to a system whose owner hadn't asked him to pentest it. As Mandy Rice-Davies famously said about the government minister's (Lord Astor) denial of his affair with her, "well he would wouldn't he ?"

@david wilson

"If the missing person/victim wasn't an angel, and the prosecutor avoided mentioning that, wouldn't it be up to the defence to do so, if they thought it would help?"

The defence has to decide whether to go for a not-guilty verdict or for a lesser conviction. (The UK offence of manslaughter e.g. based on temporary insanity of the killer, is I think the same as the US one of second degree murder.) They can't logically go for both, because to go for the lesser offence they have to first admit that he did it.

A form of photo ID

The problem with fraud over the last few years in the UK hasn't been with those bothered to turn out to vote or those counting, it has been with manipulation of postal ballots. Requiring photo ID will decrease turnout. In practice impersonation is a much bigger risk for those voting in person claiming to be someone else than doing this postally, given that the real voter is likely to attend later and object strongly if told they have already voted.

If, where and when there are such complaints, it would make more sense to use discreet CCTV at polling stations affected next time around than put granny off from voting because she didn't renew her passport, uses one of those old driving licenses or never had a passport or driving license in the first place.

So reverting postal voting to those who have a good reason for not being able to turn out in person is a more sensible approach to minimising fraud than requiring photo ID. In parts of Africa they use indelible ink on the fingers of those who have voted which takes more than a day to remove.

Ancient right to copy

People used to excercise this right using pen on parchment. They didn't have to ask authors who were far away or maybe dead and untraceable for permission because permission wasn't needed and was implicit because the right to copy existed universally.

As recently as a couple of hundred years ago, this right was taken away for a short period (20 years) in respect of some of the more technical copying which a then tiny group of people (those who owned printing presses) could do. At that time the right manually to copy using pen on paper for non-commercial purposes wasn't taken away.

Everyone now has the ability to create perfect copies almost effortlessly. But some want to take away our ancient right to use this ability and some want to defend continuation of this perceived right.

It isn't those who are concerned with maintaining the ancient rights of everyone to copy, as opposed those who would have these rights restricted to a privileged group, who are introducing increasingly inflammatory ad-hominem insults towards their opponents in this debate. Firstly we were accused of being "pirates" and then "thieves" and now "retards". When one side is losing the moral argument, it is the losers who resort to insults first - because the weakest argument cannot be defended by other means.

Politicians will clearly take the side of mass media because they can't be elected without mass media support. But the public have not so far been persuaded enough to cease copying, though a few may have been persuaded enough to feel slightly guilty without being persuaded enough to stop copying in practice. So how can the public be persuaded by copy preventers that extending the initially minor legal restrictions imposed a mere couple of hundred years ago upon a small, select and privileged group, by using police-state type controls on everyone i.e. through mass surveillance upon private communications and individual private activites, can be in any sense moral? The way to achieve acceptance of totalitarian controls is of course through propaganda. The mass media are not about to present more than one side of this debate any sooner than turkeys will vote for Christmas. And by using the approach of demagogues who would rather insult their enemies and control the press than have the inherent weakness of their arguments exposed through rational debate.

A PDF viewer that can't display PDFs correctly

Acrobat doesn't display PDFs correctly if it helps content creators to force document readers to hand type copied text rather than use the normal operating system copy and paste facility. See http://www.jerrybrito.com/tag/drm/ for a screenshot of how you can be denied access to copy and paste if you are a Microsoft/Adobe user and http://copsewood.net/tic/sectheory/drm/content_protection.html for a screenshot showing that Linux/Evince users are not restricted in this way.

CBL reliability

I got onto the CBL list myself for a few hours on account of an unfixed Sendmail bug in Debian which also affects Ubuntu see: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sendmail/+bug/99459

I don't think having an erroneous HELO string due to a Sendmail boot problem should get you blacklisted. It's not as if this means you are sending any spam.

Don't the EU judges have a say in this ?

"Between now and June it will garner feedback from the developer community. Then, at the end of June, Microsoft will publish the final versions of technical documentation – along with definitive patent licensing terms.

The definitions will be crucial to third parties who want to play with Microsoft code. We shall find out soon enough if Redmond will let them play ball."

Funny the assumption that it is always Microsoft that gets to decide what to divulge and on which terms. I'd always thought this was something to do with the European Court. Silly me.

My coat is the one with the penguin on the back.

@spleen

"The purpose of this database is to whack money extorted from the taxpayer back into the economy in a way that expands government power and patronage. Same as all government spending. It's perfectly fit for purpose, it's just that the purpose isn't what they're telling us it is."

In that case you might be interested in my modest proposal: http://copsewood.net/writings/kaytax.html . This thin end of a long wedge doesn't deny funding to hospitals and schools, just progressively changes who directs the way taxes are spent from mainly by "them" to mainly by taxpayers.

"all political parties are entirely composed of career politicians, and for a career politician to argue for less tax and more freedom to any meaningful extent would be like an entrepreneur arguing his business needs less revenue."

If this were entirely rather than mainly true ( s/all/most/ ; s/entirely/mainly/ ), my proposal would have zero chance of getting through. Actually it could be got through by a few MPs from a minority party with the balance of power in exchange for giving one of the other parties a lot of what they wanted, as it doesn't immediately impinge on the interests of most of the career politicians out there who tend to become as you claim they all are, and because of this tend to take a pretty short-term view. This weakness could well turn out to be their undoing.

@Shabble - Reality vs Judeo-Christian heritage

It says nowhere in the bible that everyone gets born male or female in every sense, just that we get born male or female. I guess the fact that people tend to think of themselves one way or the other makes this true enough. The fact that some people feel the need to switch they way they think of themselves makes this true only up to a point.

For those of us who are secure enough in our own sexuality, letting others switch theirs without feeling threatened isn't an issue. Making infants endure potentially life-limiting surgery to fit the prejudices of insecure parents doesn't make any sense. Hopefully transgendered children will be happy with the way they are born enough not to want surgery, but if sufficienty mature persons of mixed gender making informed decisions about their own surgery persuade doctors acting ethically that surgery would improve their lives sufficiently to justify whatever reduction in future options the proposed surgery involves, then we shouldn't oppose surgery. But ethical doctors need to be sure that any reduction of future options to change back should never be undertaken without extremely good justification. Removal of wombs and ovaries from men or penises from girls limits the future options of the individuals concerned. This should not be done simply because society is ignorant and prejudiced against variation, only because it makes a happy and contented life more possible for the individual concerned who is capable of deciding what they want for themselves.

As a Christian who worships someone with no biological father I celebrate life in all its diversity, single or transgendered, as a gift from God. As we are all made in God's image we have no business looking down on anyone created by God as less valid in their being or gender than anyone else.

Eliminating subsidies

"No, pure free markets (and remember, I'm the man from the Adam Smith Institute) don't deal well with externalities"

Which is why the government should be involved in taxing externalities to make economic activity reflect genuine costs. There is no such thing as a "free market" because markets only exist within the rule of law (particularly contract and tax laws) enacted and enforced by government, based on infrastructure e.g. education and roads, provided directly by the government. This article suggests the government is trying to correct one subsidy (that provided by everyone to greenhouse gas polluters) with another (to biofuel production). Not the way to go - better to eliminate all subsidies and then greener energy will find its own competitive place.

If governments are primarily about appeasing interest groups then the better educated the green lobby (which includes all of us in one sense or another) the harder this lobby will be to appease with greenwashing policies such as the one this article exposes.

@pAnoNymous

"I respect people's right to hold their religious beliefs but please don't try to impose them on me trough (sic) the legal system."

You certainly are not respecting my religious rights by wanting my convictions excluded from the democratic process. Where do you imagine current laws on murder and theft first come from anyway? Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal - both are from the 10 commandments. Where democracy decides law, every kind of philosophy has to compete for votes, based on rational debate including from religious and non religious philosophical positions. The desire that religion can be somehow castrated into private space and kept out of public life understands the basis of neither religion nor democratic public life.

Clearly you feel threatened by the convictions which those with religious beliefs hold. What is so weak about the basis of your own convictions that you can't bear to have the convictions of those with religious views expressed and considered as part of the democratic debate ?

Government by soundbite

Civil Serf has exposed a great evil. Our government isn't interested in governing nearly as much as they are in managing this week's news headlines. All the operational departments are struggling to continually rebuild systems disrupted by the mishmash of incompatible weekly policies and initiatives resulting from ill-considered political reactions to previous crises. Eventually the excessive rate of change overwhelms the ability of sensible public servants to cope. Consequently records get lost, foreign prisoners who should be deported are released to reoffend and competent head teachers are resigning in droves because they are prevented from doing their jobs by incompatible and inconsistent targets.

The civil servants who get promoted are the self servers who spend their time praising their masters, blaming all the problems on the competent and evangelising the latest knee jerk initiatives. The price of emporer's clothing includes the cost of sacking those who speak what they see.

@Steve Evans

The reason voting has to take place on one day is the cost of supervision by and of those looking after the ballot boxes. Many local authority employees have to spend a very long day staffing the polling booths and conducting the count, and can't do anything else all day. With the system as it stands it is very difficult for someone to cheat much in connection with polling booth and counting activity (as a candidate and agent I've helped supervise a number of counts). Postal ballots are another matter as these have to hang around for days, and there is no guarantee of anonymous voting with postal ballots.

You don't need biometrics for those voting in person, as the risk of being caught for the minor amount of cheating any one person or small group could do is too great to make it worth the risk. The cost, in terms of putting voters off voting and their resulting loss of trust and respect for the system, would be very much greater.

Useful for student assessment

I get second year programming students to flowchart algorithms for an assessment. It tells me pretty quickly whether they understand their own code or not. They are invited to use pseudo code as an alternative.

In practice flowcharts and pseudocodes should stay small, each to describe a single module. I also don't expect programmers to continue using flowcharts once they understand how to design something, but when they are learning this it helps them focus on the logic behind what they are doing before trying to implement the logic in working detail.

@highlander

Theft deprives the owner of what they had before and copying doesn't. The b'tards are those who want to turn others into slavetards by selling software that creates heroin-like dependencies upon a single supplier (1), and retards by selling software that the end user isn't allowed to study. I'll have mine free as in freedom thanks. Freedom to study, modify and redistribute.

1. Bill Gates, speaking in 1998 at the University of Washington: "About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

Incandescents modern ?

"Four years ago, GE demo'd a 60 x 60cm OLED panel capable of producing as much light as a modern incandescent bulb."

Do many people still use Victorian incandescent bulbs ? I changed all mine over to fluorescents years ago. Given how old and indefensible these energy wasters are and the fact they should now be banned, I'm a bit surprised incandescents are called "modern" in this article.

Python will be around for a while

As someone who has programmed in at least 15 different languages and taught 6 of these to students, I havn't found a more productive tool and environment to teach and work with than Python. It is possible if I knew Ruby as well as Python I would feel the same about Ruby. I doubt Ruby is as mature as Python, though it is probably not far behind.

Python is excellent for teaching programming to beginners and more advanced students, for making the logic of applications of moderate size readable and maintainable and for making very large projects feasible. It is getting into a growing range of environments including web applications, embedded systems, GUI applications and mobile phones. I can think of very good reasons for Sun to support it, but they can't afford to be a one language company. Java will be used by large banks and finance houses for some time to come and 'C' will continue be used for high performance operating systems and system tools, incuding Java and Python compilers and virtual machines.

An interesting trend exemplified by Jython and IronPython is for one language to be compiled into the bytecode of another, e.g. so that a Python application can access .NET or Java library code.

@paul

>>If the ancient right freely to copy

>Where did you read that Richard, the Ten Commandments? It's not in my version.

Most systems of law make something not specifically legislated about legal by default. Copyright is a legislative invention going back a mere 300 years or so at most. No legislation from ancient times covers this so copying is an ancient right by default of no known ancient legislation preventing it QED.

The 10 commandments were formulated between 3500 and 4000 years ago. "Thou shalt not steal", the seventh commandment, very clearly concerns illegally depriving someone of something they legally owned so they no longer have it. This commandment does not cover copying something because copying does not deprive the original owner of anything they already have and every child copies what they see around them naturally from birth.

Nobody is above the law

But what else can judges do with a company that acts as if its directors imagine it is, other than to keep hitting it with bigger and bigger fines until it affects the bottom line ? If using a monopoly in one area (e.g. OS) to create another one elsewhere (e.g. office software) is not a criminal matter then judges can't put directors behind bars, so fines just have to get larger until the company shareholders take notice.

Suitable recompense must include forced publication of source code test cases as public domain code compatible with any open source or proprietary product, usable to test use of and compatibility with all relevant APIs and protocols from both directions. If the company products do not then comply in any respect with the published test cases further fines are then in order.

Aircraft have to be maintained too

Modern wind turbine blades are similar to aircraft wing technology. Given the number of these turbines now installed in various parts of the world it's almost inevitable that a few are tested to destruction by human nature being what it is - in this case the apparent neglect of basic maintenance.

Consider how the air travel industry made it less likely that aircraft would fall out of the sky. A crash investigation and maintenance quality assurance culture was developed over a number of decades, such that one engineer can not tighten a bolt without another signing a form to say they had checked what the first engineer has done. The wind energy industry is at a similar stage of development to the aircraft operations industry in the nineteen thirties - they had proven the concept 20 years before, ironed out some of the worst problems in the first couple of decades and gone into mass production but without developing a QA bureacracy sufficient to keep adequate checks on the maintenance of many potentially dangerous engineering structures.

Large windfarms are more likely to be maintained properly than isolated turbines operated by amateurs whose main income come from other sources. I suspect that in the larger windfarms the machines are sited far enough apart that cascade failures are inherently unlikely but can't state this with any certainty. It's an interesting question, though the degree of neglect needed for this to happen seems much less likely in a big windfarm.

Coventry Damage @ Rich Bee

The gable wall that fell down in Shakespeare Street started cracking hours before the quake. Cracks appeared at 21.40 and the collapse occurred at 23:30 an hour and a half before the quake, so this incident seems unrelated to the quake.

http://iccoventry.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100localnews/tm_headline=people-evacuated-as-coventry-home-collapses&method=full&objectid=20530374&siteid=92746-name_page.html