Posts by Alan Brown 15079 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"I wasn't talking about an "ad-free" internet for everyone.
Just for me."
If you go to places like Thorpe park, you'll find that so many people are now paying to skip the queues that there's a substantial queue in the queue skipping queue, so they're offering a premium service to skip the queue skipping queue.
"I tolerate their presence if they are tolerable, much like I used to tolerate newspaper ads (don't read newspapers any more, but same principle)."
Interestingly, I found a Punch cartoon from around 1905 which showed complaints about advertising plastering every available surface were around even then.
Perhaps we had a Golden Age of reduced ads in the latter half of the 20th century.
"Two working days later and they still hadn't disabled the account of a sysadmin. *rolleyes*"
As a sysadmin, I've sat down with management and ensured they disabled that all my accounts and access codes before I went out the door.
For the simple reason that if anything goes wrong later on, I do not want to be covered in any splattering shit. If they want to call me back in, then they can rehire me.
I've only had one employer who actually thought to change equipment administrative passwords. Most simply leave them alone for decades.
"over here you can be fired with several weeks notice, and can be expected to continue doing your job and set your house in order for a smooth transition"
The difference is that here, if you're being made redundant (vs "fired") you're going to be given a severance package and a reference which are both at risk if you do anything stupid.
If there's a hint that you won't play nice then your notice period will be spent at home, gardening, with all access codes having been changed before you were told about it.
The USA in particular has this peculiar concept of "at will" employment (which the tories keep trying to introduce here) which means that noone's job is secure from one day to the next - and one of the favourite manglement tactics when firing a lot of people is to parachute XYZ inept manager into the location with promises of long term upgrade to start sacking people ("hoorah", he thinks), and then push him out the door with no compensation when the dirty work is done.
"As for the so called dangerous white tail spider, that one's a myth."
Whitetails are aggressive (most spiders try and run away, white tails attack) and whilst not particularly venomous seem to have pretty filthy fangs which lead to a high chance of infection when they bite.
A friend in New Zealand lost a finger (actually the entire metatarsal back to the wrist) after being bitten by one. Apparently it still aches 20 years later.
"but the charge would be skipping bail. This seems to carry a penalty of 3 to 12 months inside. "
Not for a first offence and certainly not for charges which no longer exist, especially as he's not been found guilty of anything. Causing the state to spend shedloads of money staking out the embassy isn't grounds for a harsher penalty.
Local habitual bail breachers get a £100 fine and told not to do it again.
If he got more than a suspended sentence or an afternoon in the cells he'd have grounds for an appeal.
"My clever Fritz!Box router handles all my telephone calls. "
So does mine. The good part is that it has a seamless SIP facility that will link into various providers.
I have a 070 number with charge rate set to £1.50/minute that forwards to a SIP account that forwards to Fritz. For the most part if businesses insist on a contact number, that's the one they get.
If I get an unwanted marketing call coming in on that SIP account, its gets strung out as long as possible. I don't get any income from it, but I'm an evil bastard. The 070 providers laughed when I explained why I wanted it set to the maximum charge.
> It's a question, are fingerprints infallible?
No
More specifically whilst they're believed to be unique this has never been fully tested and the number of loci used for generating a match doesn't scale to the number of fingerprints now being stored.
It was much easier when you only kept prints of the crims and were only matching against known baddies or direct suspects.
It's the same problem with "DNA matching" - the actual levels of match have been vastly exaggerated in courts and led to juries being misled. DNA and fingerprints are great for eliminating suspects but when it comes to generating matches you're in a different ballgame.
> Could you get arrested for a crime you didn't commit?
It's happened on a bunch of occasions
> How would you feel if it happened to you?
How would you feel?
"for the unlikely event that a copper (or someone else) might object to me taking a photo."
In my experience the "objector" is usually either a PCSO or someone caught doing something naughty.
They object even more vehemntly when being told they're actually being videoed and "I can, I have, I will continue to do so and you have no power to stop me" - once at which point the smirking policeman standing next to the now-fuming PCSO burst out laughing and said "He's absolutely right, now stop being a twat"
"There is no requirement to carry your driving licence with you."
No, but if you don't then you must produce it at a station within 7 days if asked to do so (and that's despite them being able to bring up a copy of it in the car to verify you are who you say you are)
It's usually easier to have it.
"A quick finger print check and ten minutes later, and the subject is issued with a summons for three offences"
The way the system is currently setup the fingerprint check will only tell that the person is not already in the system (ie: Known and wanted.)
About the best use for this is dealing with people who give false names/IDs when questioned at the roadside because they're wanted for other things (there are some locations/situations you must provide ID to the police - a wharf, when driving a car and a few others. For the rest you're legally allowed to decline to do so)
At best it's an elimination tool (which may be useful in any case). There are too many false positives to work the other way around.
I'm not entirely sure why this is a news story. These things have been in use by traffic police for over a decade. The bigger deal is how secured they are and what they're actually comparing, which isn't gone into at all.
" I can't tell how many stories i've hear of musicians getting their guitar back in splinters here in the US."
The applicable song is "United breaks Guitars"
And the response to that was to get "Untied.com" shut down for trademark infringement - Only in the USA (actually, only in canada)
"Fingerprints, or more correctly the methods and algorithms used to compare, are not that unique"
Exactly - and this has been known for some time.
Then there are people like my wife whose fingerprints simply do not register in scanners (She has them, but the ridges are so slight they don't get detected). This raises merry hell at immigration.
"If you create a system that is based on the premise of "swap processor time for currency" then there are going to be a lot of people who will try to find ways to grab time on other people's processors, for their own gain. "
This was one of the biggest worries of the camram-spam mailing list around 20 years ago - and in that case the currency (hashcash) was "merely" the ability to deliver email.
"The other non-first party resources are frequently trackers which don't belong on a true public/gov't site."
Yup.
Google analytics might be "cool" in terms of the statistics it can generate but there are standard stats packages for that which don't use JS, don't slurp up all your personal details to Google - and don't miss people like me who block that website.
It would be interesting to see the ICO asked why they expect visitors to run JS from Twitter and Google, given their focus on data security and personal information privacy.
"Another good demonstration of why ad blockers and script blockers are essential."
Until someone pops a miner into one of the adblockers - which happened to one of the Chrome youtube adblockers about two weeks ago.
Noscript caught it - but it was difficult to trace as it only attempted activation on some (but not all) non-https sites and never on the popular ones, pointing the finger at those sites instead of the adblocker.
"the first stage may achieve enough velocity and altitude for a sub-orbital trajectory"
Suborbital is trivial. In fact you want to avoid too much velocity.
If falcon9 and stage2 went straight up and straight down I wouldn't be at all surprised if they could reach 15-25,000 miles out.
"BFR is far too loud to get near a city"
Taking a boat or whatever to get to a place where a _minimum_ 24 hours of being airborne (usually more like 2 days end to end) can be whittled down to less than 4 hours is a win for me, even if the whole trip is 12 hours door to door.
"The book by Arthur C. Clarke wasn't all that great but the movie sure was!"
You guys _do_ realise that the book and the film were written at the same time don't you? (Clark and Kubrick collaborated fully on both)
It was one of the earliest examples of a book spinning off as part of a movie project (as was the Star Wars book), Clarke write quite a bit about the creation of both (and the visual gags in 2001 that few people spotted, such as the PanAm shuttle toilet)
Agree on the headline. Well played.
"All Rightscorp knows first hand is IP addresses."
And in order to "know" those it has to participate in the sharing swarms - which means uploading as well as downloading.
It was that kind of thing that got Prenda Law and friends into trouble and there are some links between Rightscorp and Guardaley that both entities were kicked under the carpet.
" but also on radiation from nearby and faraway sources in space."
Correct to a point, that's why a nearby supernova would make for a bad day on earth.
Even without that risk, our own star will make the surface uninhabitable in less than 500 million years (it's getting hotter as it gets older), and this tendency of stars makes the window for evolution of intelligent life that can get itself space-faring before extinction in any given system even smaller than we might think.
"But yeah, the religious battle between MIT/BSD and GPL and a few of the other licenses are kinda pointless. "
There are a lot of DVRs out there which are using Linux OSes, and GPL-derived sources for the actual DVR functionality, which are full of holes due to shitty security prcatices by the people who put it together and whose manufacturers and distributors _refuse_ to comply with GPL requirements.
Yes, they're made in China, Yes they're the primary pool of Mirai infections and YES those who sell them in the EU/USA are exposing themselves to litigation by an unfriendly author of iptables/busybox/fatfs tools.
The primary culprit is Huawai's Hisilicon chipmaking subsidiary as primary distributors of the SDK for their SoC chipsets, aided and abetted by Hangzhou Xioangmai Technology(*) - who created the SDK and have the chuntzpah to accuse 3rd parties of stealing their intellectual property.
(*) Anything listed as XMeye and related code is XiaongMai. Their code is used in Hikvision, Dahua and most other chinese DVRs. The primary binary containing the DVR functionality and vulnerable xc-httpd webserver is stripped but still riddled with GPL symbols.
Perhaps forcing these things to be open might enhance security by allowing the things to be fixed.
This is a good example of the failure of opensource: The market for these devices runs into hundreds of millions of dollars (if not billions), they're full of stupid security holes and yet no GPL enforcement action has been taken.
The standard response I get from chinese entities when bringing up free software is that "GPL is public domain" and they can do what they want with it. We've seen this notion disabused in courts on this side of the bamboo firewall. It needs to happen on the other side (Registering a copyright is required to enforce in China. That costs about $50. Until that happens, chinese entities are pretty much correct about what they're doing. Why isn't the FSF empowering its chinese version?)
"so someone clearly didn't calibrate them properly."
In which case you should be griping about it. There are a couple of speed signs around here that used to go off at 26mph until complaints were made.
It's also worth noting that when multiple vehicles are in a radar beam you'll get heterodyne effects (retruns for both vehicle speeds AND their additive speeds AND the difference speeds as returns either side of the primary speeds AND if there's a static reflective surface you'll get odd returns from that too (especially corrugated fencing).
On top of that, the radar frontal area of most post-1985 cars is so small that the return from the back end of a truck 1 mile down the road will be "louder" than the return from such a car less than 300 yards away (almost all vehicles have larger rear radar returns than frontal ones).
That's why the UK police rely extensively on portable lasers to keep only the target illuminated and why speed cameras have to take two photos against calibrated road markings to prove the vehicle being photographed really is the one that was speeding.
"....and places in Montana where there's no limit"
Not since 1999 - and even when it didn't have a _daytime_ speed limit there were night time limits to prevent people outdriving their headlight range (safe stopping distances). It still has reduced night time speeds, see below.
It's worth noting that during the period Montana didn't have daytime speed limits, if you were ticketed for driving at an unsafe speed the police assessment was never struck down in court - and that could mean "too fast for the conditions - where conditions means presence of other vehicles as well as road state, visibility and weather conditions" OR "too fast for your vehicle" (the marine concept of hull speed regarding controllability also applies to cars, but for the most part we don't go anywhere near those speeds and unlike boats, cars can't start "planing" over the surface to change the rules.)
That kind of ticket wasn't just an infraction and fine either. It was a fairly serious charge. I know a couple of people who ended up in court for it.
http://www.mdt.mt.gov/visionzero/roads/speedlimits.shtml
"If all the speedsters on UK motorways were appropriately fined"
If the speed limits were set according to actual motorway _design_ then very few people would be pinged for speeding on them and _perhaps_ posted speed limits set for actual safety reasons would be respected.
Pinging people for travelling 80mph on a road designed for 100mph in clear conditions isn't going to make ablind bit of difference to the crash rate on the same stretch of road in heavy fog when the safe speed is under 20mph and people still barrel along at 50+ - this gets classified as an "excess speed" crash and used as justification for enforcement, but people who travel at excess speed in fog tend not to be the ones who travel above the speed limit in clear conditions and vice versa.
(In just about every country on earth, the "speed limit" on any given road is the _lessor_ of the posted limit or the speed at which you can stop in the distance of clear road lane ahead. If there's no centre line then it's half the lane distance as the oncoming traffic has to be able to stop too. Twats who speed in fog or other poor conditions work on the basis of "The posted speed limit is my target", or (worse), "I'm travelling below the speed limit, so it's not a problem")
Speed enforcement is an easy revenue target for jobsworths and a lot of them end up in "Road safety partnerships"
Actual SAFETY practice is something that goes over most civil servant heads as "too hard"
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