Posts by Ross 7

Gonna be a straight up blue win

I've been betting on a straight up blue win :

1) Polls are notoriously poor predictors of election outcomes;

2) Everyone always says "oh I'm fed up with Red/Blue so I'm gonna vote Yellow/Green/random" but in the end they get to the booth and think "well I *really* don't want Red to get in, voting Yellow is a waste of a vote so I'll go Blue" (or vice versa)

3) First past the post favours Red/Blue. Yellow vote is too thinly spread outside of the SW.

I'm sure Yellow will get plenty of actual votes, but seats? Alas not. Why do you think they've been pushing for PR for so long?

Agree that UKIP are crazy - have you seen the party leader on the tele? I don't think he is in possession of all 52 cards... Gotta love the "let's leave the EU!!!11!!" argument - guess he never heard of import tariffs? His main argument for leaving the EU appears to be that he hates Turks and Turkey wants to join. Where's Gordon when you need a good insult?...

Gaming industry slow on the uptake

The games industry is soooo slow on the uptake here. Any IP can be copied and made to work without paying for it, be it a game, app, film, song etc. Tech isn;t the key - changing ppls minds is.

Example - have you noticed how they'd stopped showing those despicable "you look like a thief" ads at the cinema now (well, that's what they feel like to me). I go to the cinema almost every week (sometimes we';ve seen everything except Alvin and the Chipmunks and we have *some* limits). I pay to do that obviously. To then be told that "copying films is naughty - don't do it" having made that payment is bloody galling.

I turned to my lass once and told her it made me want to d/l the thing just because of that ad.

They don't do that anymore 'cause (1) it pisses off ppl that pay, and (2) the pirates just delete that bit from the file before uploading it so the ppl that don't pay don't see it!!!!! Huzzah! They caught on! Now they give you a little "awww, thanks for paying - we lubs joo" which makes me feel fuzzy inside (that could be the blue slush tho)

Games houses need to catch up - telling me they don't trust me and think I'm prolly a thief MAKES ME WANT TO TORRENT IT. Out of spite. Giving me a small benefit (even one that costs them nowt) is going to be far more effective.

Ummm, DirectX 10.1 anyone?

Streaming pre-rendered frames is impractical in most markets - certainly here in Blighty. South Korea could prolly manage, but without FTTH it ain't gonna happen. I play my older Win games via remote desktop and even on a LAN it ain't perfect. Streaming CoD etc would be unplayable.

DX10.1 however allows the primitives data etc to be streamed and rendered on the client - I imagine this is where we'll be moving to in a couple of years. The subscription model of WoW etc has proven very successful at generating revenue, so locking the software into the server, providing a "player" for the client and letting them do the grunt work of rendering frames seems an attractive model.

You minimise patch data bandwidth, patching issues, hardware support issues (you only need write for one very specific platform) and if people want to play they have to pay. Whether BT can be coerced into providing halfway affordable FTTH is another matter tho' - I'm sufficiently urban to get a decent copper conn (14Mb/s) but they won't install fibre. In fact I've checked all my mates and family locations and none of them can get BT Infinity. Maybe "a couple of years" was a tad optimistic...

Power grabbing

That's all it is. CEOP want to be seen to be attached to large organisations like Facebook et al so they can grab more power and more budget. End of.

It makes me want to kill ppl. Well, Alan Johnson...

Wrong ppl with the right skills/resources

Actually taking these things down and keeping them down isn't impossible, the problem is the people with the skills and resources to do it (AV etc) are exactly the people who can't use the techniques required due to the legal position.

Blackholing etc is only ever a temporary measure - as soon as the CC chans are up again the bots will come home to roost. Modyfying the ring-0 code to bluescreen on bootup will force all infected machines to have a clean install, and will only deliver the payload on boot up, so won't damage running boxes. It's still very illegal however and not an option for the people in a position to do it.

There is one *possible* option however - do the above to zombies in foreign lands with no extradition treaties, and where you don't have any plans to work/holiday/transit through. It's still risky, and I don;t see AV co's etc doing it (and I don't blame them either) but using the same weaknesses in the law to take down the botnets that the botherders use to run them has a certain irony to it.

I guess we can but dream...

Basic parenting

All things in moderation. Nowt wrong with playnig a bit of football, reading a few books, playing computer games, playing guitar etc as long as they're done in moderation. If they are done to extreme and your kid ends up not doing their school work then I'm pretty sure we can all make a decent prediction of the outcome.

There was a "Jo Frost Extreme Parenting" on the other week (apparantly, so I hear...) where some "mother" was whining about her 8 year old playing WoW for 12 hours a day. Obviously that begs the questions how did he end up with a PEGI 12 game in the first place, and who the hell pays his subs?! Turned out he played it for 12 hours a day 'cause he was bored to death as his "mother" did nowt with him. Once he had some time with his ma he forgot about WoW.

Frankly if you let your kid forego their school work for any reason at all it's *your* problem. As stated by other posters - homework *then* play (whatever form that may take).

Better deals available

The advertised deal is awful, but they are happy to offer better ones.

Having moved house I phoned BT up to get line rental sorted so I could get Sky inet + calls. When I mentioned that, they offered line rental, evening and weekend calls, and the 10GB a month inet package for £16.xx a month for 18 months (about a quid more than the Sky deal which has the same 10GB a month limit).

The Home Hub seems pretty decent too (to be fair the Sky Netgear is also a decent bit of kit compared to the trash TalkTalk provided).

They're never going to attract customers with the advertised prices tho.

PS3 moves into Wii territory

I s'pose they need to widen their appeal to gain market share. Families with a bit of extra cash may see the new "family friendly" PS3 as a longer term investment than a Wii.

Personally I love my Wii - well, I love Mario Kart. But I do agree about the paucity of must have games. Pity they don't have WoW on it, altho replacing a 102 key kbd with motions might be a tad difficult (not to mention dangerous)

Hmmm, PIEglove....WoW...macros.... I've got an idea....

Workarounds

Just because there exist methods to work around a statutory scheme doesn't mean that the scheme is without value or should be binned. The Police have the power to arrest people, however some people work around that by arming themselves, putting on a Hiljab etc. it doesn't mean that arresting people doesn't work, just that it ain't perfect.

Most people in the UK are entirely incapable for searching for, selecting and operating a VPN connection for the simple reason they haven't got a clue what one is or why they would need one. It's therefore a pretty poor argument to say "let's not bother attempting to protect peoples work because some people can work around it, and a minority proportion of those will work around it".

The idea that the entirety of YouTube will disappear due to this legislation is pretty laughable. I don't mean to be mean, but seriously - if you actually use YouTube you'll see that they have a particularly robust copyright infringement policy. It would therefore be extremely unlikely that the legislation and policy would be so at odds that YouTube were blackholed. If you disagree I would welcome any examples that may reasonable come to pass.

(e) is an interesting part, and well lobbied for. It doesn't give you free reign to copy material that is currently unavailable, but the courts will give consideration to the point. As an example, if you download a deleted song that will never be released again for your own personal use you may be able to use (e) as a defence. It's no guarantee, but the courts will give due consideration to it.

On the other hand, if you download a Disney film that is currently unavailable but on their release list for 2015, it is unlikely that (e) would hold as much sway - they fully intend to make the material available at a cost and it is clear to the public when that will be. It's therefore not a panacea for people downloading in-copyright material, but it brings some reasonableness to proceedings.

The 50 letters procedure is presumably intended to please the courts who are busy enough as it is. If 50 letters doesn't make you think twice then you're going to risk incurring the wrath of a County Court judge for wasting his/her time. I personally would consider stopping at around 20 - you're clearly on someones list...

So the msg is...

"Even if the worst predictions come true, overall the world's poorest will still be only slightly worse off than they are now"

So if you;re poor, you;re ****ed either way?

IE7/FP10 weirdness

How odd - tried it with IE7 and nothing appeared to happen. Made sure Flash was running, yup (v10) so was a tad disappointed, then I tried to open new links.... Seems that whilst the IE7 process didn't throw any exceptions it did get in all of a muddle - couldn't get any new pages open in either existing or new tabs - they just sit there spinning, waiting for data.

Haven't got any netmon stuff here at work so don't know if the network code gut munged and it isn;t even trying to connect to remote servers, or it's something else. Interesting anyway.

Is it 1997 again?!

Sounds like it's dropping a VBscript into the cache, then using some jiggery pokery to run it from there in the local zone. Pretty sure that used to be possible (and was exploited) many moons ago. Still, good work to get it working again on more current OSes. In an educational sense - not as in the "great, another exploit to keep away from" sense.

As for SMB - will someone please just put it out of its misery? It's got more crap sticky taped onto it than....

*Sigh*

It's mainly the fault of AdMob (it's their software after all) but Apple have opened themselves up to criticism with the silent change in default behaviour.

I presume (I have no evidence to support this) that Apple received a lot of noise saying "it'd be way better if we didn;t have to continually press OK on confirmation dialogs everytime we press a button" so Apple obliged, wanting to improve the user experience.

Trouble is they didn;t think it through - the correct change would be to add a setting (defaulted to checked) that says "ask for confirmation before allowing apps to dial". That way ppl could choose to disabled confirmation dialogs, but everyone else who didn't have a clue would be nicely protected.

Even after over a decade of such problems from various vendors "default to secure" still isn't being widely adopted :( Any number of horrifically insecure "features" in Win and IE were there to make it easier for the user, but they ended up making their experience a pain when they got pwned. Will ppl ever learn?

Pretty common

Oddly enough I've seen it loads of times in a number of Tescos but not in any other supermarkets.

The little Tesco Metro in NE2 on a weekend morning is jam packed with students dressed like Arthur Dent. I've seen it late at night/early hours (like 2am) in the 24 hour Tesco Extra as well.

Personally I don't see the problem. I;ve seen plenty of people dressed far worse in non-nightwear doing their shopping.

Re:Great

Yup, they generate some pretty impressive magnetic fields. "Accidentally" leave your biometric passport in your bag and you;re set :o)

I have a solution to the queue issue tho' - just rename them back to their original name - NRI. All the tabloid readers will run a mile.

What - no Crysis jokes?

"Minimum specs for Tesla PSC.....1200W PSU" - ouch. On the bright side you'd save on heating bills. Although at ~£1k per unit and you needing 3-4 of them the capital costs (as reasonable as they are) probably outweigh any savings you might make.

Still, if I could convince the lass... Stick a PS3 emulator on it and it's a slam dunk.

Watts?

I've seen the ad on the tele and wondered if it was a connection to a Citrix application server, or actually a connection to your own PC.

Connecting to your own PC is crazy! You'd be looking at £20 a month in 'leccy never mind subs - I hope these people have pretty aggressive green options set on their PCs. Plus Windows tends to need moderately regular reboots (especially if you haven't aggressively pruned the services) so leaving it on 24/7 isn't likely to be easy. I know it has improved of late in that regard, but a dodgy driver or service can still push everything in userland into vmem. Word's a dog at the best of times never mind when it's paging from disk.

Metro

I read about this in todays Metro where it stated he was chatting with the "girl" via IM (i.e. no images), he asked for a pic, "she" obliged, he started tossing one off on webcam (note that he was transmitting not rcving), "she" then said she was 15 at which point he said "oh shit" and turned off the webcam.

I know some offences are strict liability, but you can't have strict liability where the "child" is actually an adult who hasn't even posed as a child until the guy has done something that might be illegal if the other party was a child (phew!). If it's not strict liability then he stopped immediately uopn being told the other party was allegedly a child. Can't it both ways I'm afraid.

Just smacks of crushing dissent - it clearly isn't limited to Africa/Russia/China/Zim etc.

Frying pan -> fire

See title

Ppl forget

Ppl forget that "responsible disclosure" was originally designed to provide a benefit to the then bug finder elite. They needed a way to monetise their time investment, so they became "consultants", selling themselves to various IT organisations. Trouble was their less famous mates were releasing 0-days on usenet, which was kinda embarrassing and also limited their income.

Responsible disclosure meant doing it the corporate way, and thus generated cash for certain ppl. It also provided a cheap way to bash ppl that didn;t abide by the rules - "oh he's very irresponsible for releasing that without giving it to us for free first!" That kind of thing was likely to put a dent in your CV and prevent you from drinking at the watering hole with the big guys.

The bugs are valuable information, so why should it be given freely to a corporation to benefit from? If you think that's the way it should be then I suggest you also look at the patenting of drugs - knowing how to make Herceptin etc is a very valuable piece of information, and helps lots of ppl. I still don't see it being given away for free...

Why? Because it takes a lot of time and effort to create and test it, and ppl should be recompensed for that otherwise nobody else is going to put that kind of time and effort into discovering things which would be a bad thing.

Plenty of ppl out there stand to benefit from exploits, and they're not the kind of ppl you want benefiting from them. It therefore stands to reason that if you want the "good" guys to know about them first that there's an incentive for ppl to tell them and not the bad guys. If not, don't bother complaining when your mate sends you a PDF and you subsequently need to spend 3 months sorting out your credit score.

Blocking legal action

The HO intention is very simple - delay the changes to the law so that the infringement can't be said to have occurred under UK law (it was legit when it happened) and the limitation period expires on it so no EU action can be taken.

If it costs a few mil to ensure that aim is met so be it. At least big business won't look at HMG and think "well they hung their last partner out to dry..."

Money eh?

Attempting to save face?

How the hell do you get from "we accidentally left 90g of RDX in some unsuspecting guys luggage during a security test" to "let's arrest the guy on suspicion of terrorism"?

I know here in Blighty mens rea is an outmoded concept thanks to NuLab and merely looking foreign is enough to get you summarily executed, but surely in Ireland you need some kind of intention to cause terror before they arrest you?

Plus you'd imagine that if he'd intended to blow up a plane he'd at least have got as far as setting his nickers on fire.

Forget dates...

Don't bother faffing with dates on the grounds be don't all work on the land anymore - life would be far simpler for us Brits if they dumped that BST nonsense.

As to the birth of JC - the Romans were notorious record keepers, he was supposedly born during or around the time of a large census in the Palestine region, so it shouldn't be too much trouble for a historian to pick a year?

Happy New Year :oP

Baby, bathwater

Errr ok - so the reactor is of an allegedly risky type (i.e. if you turn off the fail safes and see how hot you can get it there's a risk it won't fail safe, duh!) so they're going to dump all the ancillary gear such as heat exchangers, turbines, generators, excitors, grid interfaces, stores, offices etc as well? Makes sense....

Why don't they pull out the old reactor and put a new "safe" one (or gas turbine) in and so not have to rely on Russias whims/political desires to heat the old peoples homes?

Critical? Only of the 'tards that believe this crap

Awww gosh darn it I'm agreeing with MS :/ It's a bug, it's exploitable in specific circumstances and as such demands attention, but "critical"?! Jesus...

Damned brain

My (admittedly not terribly bright) brain read that opening line as "...free-market economist says that the British had CRUD global temperature database"

Oh dear Lord

I looked at the subheading and thought "eh?" Then 2 seconds later figured it out. I didn't mean to!

In response to Ken Hagan (23% of students go from one month to the next without writing *in class*...the questions and answers have been twisted) - the lass is a secondary teacher. Believe me when I say that ain't shocking. It's why they struggle at A-Level, and unis end up spending the first month of term teaching freshers how to take notes because very, very few learnt to do it at school.

I'm not saying the report is an example of perfect research, but 1 in 4 kinds not writing in lessons isn't as far out as you'd think unfortunately. As for the other 3 in 4, having seen what they do actually write you'd think most of them shouldn't have bothered themselves...

Re: logic and reason

Ummm, you may wish to bone up on The Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003 if you're UK based. Your employer will be vicariously liable for that kind of action and is unlikely to take it well when they get hit with a fine.

I would also point out that you are aligning yourself with the ID brigade, which I find rather amusing. Darwin was a Christian and so it would appear you don't think him capable of coming to a reasonable working hypothesis, so evolution must - by your standards - be unreasonable.

Careful with that petard in the future...

lolz

Some guy with an interest in UFOs manages to (allegedly) do all this damage from his bedroom - what the hell you do you think the Chinese/Russian/French must have been doing so easily during that time?! Pure arse-coverage here.