Posts by Doctor_Wibble

Re: Carbonates are how the Earth deals with excess CO2

Damn. This inconvenient limited absorption thing scuppers my favourite of piping power station exhaust through huge forests... obviously all completely sustainable because you chop them down periodically in batches and bury them deep under a desert somewhere, some of it rots thus magically generating mud where stuff can grow and if you wait a few million years the deep stuff will have turned into coal and you can start the whole cycle again. Hurrah!

All makes perfect sense as long as you don't look too closely. The real trick is to sell enough copies of the book before anyone spots it.

> For your protection and safety we are going to disable the airbag and seatbelts.

So the old advice of "Don't upset the apple car" is as true as ever...

And the problem is also Other People

It's not just the near-monopoly, it's the fact that even as a non-user your information - easiest example being emails and email addresses - ends up in the hands of these companies for processing even though you never entered into any kind of agreement with them.

On the one hand, an email sent is no longer my property so in theory the recipient can file it any way they like, but on the other it is still subject to a degree of trust, which some seem to think doesn't count for anything any more.

The bigger problem though is the *permitted* address-book slurping that people get done when joining 'social' sites or 'freebie' email providers (or 'manage my address book apps), not just because that now incorporates me as a node in some unknown mapping but because it's all in one handy place to get grabbed and sold to spammers every time someone clicks on a flashing bleepy thing and every time one of these companies gets hacked.

The free service is not in exchange for *your* information it is for that of other people because as an unconnected individual you have no particular value.

Re: p0wned

> That's the phonetic spelling.

Which I've never been able to comprehend, I always pronounced 'pwned' more like 'pooned' i.e. with an almost-Welsh pronunciation for 'w'. Unless I got that wrong too but at least I can pretend I tried to have a clever excuse.

edit: 'p0wned' definitely wrong IMHO, and the 'power 0wned' explanation sounds like utter 60110ck5

Re: Stolen is not the correct word.

> surely pirates/torrenters et al are merely BORROWING the product?

Good point - yes, if they put if back where they found it, and as long as it isn't scratched that should be fine!

Re: Hold on a second

Not wanting to sound like some conspiracy nut, but the phrase 'false flag' is jumping up and down begging for attention!

A carefully planned and executed data-extraction attack going smoothly and entirely undetected suddenly has someone giving the target a quick direct ping by mistake? And given the amount of random probes and hack/login attempts that happen on even a home IP address, I could start logging traffic and 'prove' that the Chinese government is obviously trying a grass-roots takeover, competing against Iran, Azerbaijan, Romania, and occasionally for some reason, Norway and Iceland. And sometimes even in alliance with each other which is the obvious conclusion because attacking at the same time could not possibly be coincidence.

Of course if NSA/TLA publishes their 'evidence' nobody is going to believe it and they only have themselves to blame. Plus remarks by others about letting it continue without saying anything.

Re: Shoe-rly shum mishtake!

After checking my handy portable cylindrical metal containers of haricots blanc en sauce de tomate avec le mini cumberlands I concluded that although 4 would be fine to be equivalent to 'a pair of shoes', it looks like 'around 6' takes it to approximately 1 shoe-box though I don't have enough tins to test this for sure because I only keep one or two in the cupboard just in case any common people insist on visiting.

Of course we now have 'how big is a shoe box' but this is easily quantified by using a piece of string.

> Ahhh the old MTU trick..

That was (sort of) my thinking - changing a setting that has presumably been the same through numerous resets, reboots etc is 99.99% likely to be either (a) desperation or (b) distraction except for the occasions when (c) someone made a change on the server and didn't think it through and there are no convenient scapegoats.

Re: Real Security systems

> Retina Scanners have nothing to do with the Iris, it is all about the pattern of live blood vessels in the RETINA.

The difference between the two is nigh-on impossible to get across to the public - this is an old problem, recalling the multi-forwarding of the hideously incorrect "scan of the back of your eye" email 10+ years ago which still makes me cringe to see because the whole point of having a researcher is that you ask them to check your facts instead of giving your opponent an easy opportunity to dismiss your argument as poorly-informed.

I have calmed down a lot more recently so the sight of it no longer induces a 'qwerty forehead'.

Re: Christ on a bike!

Or better yet, use it to make some clones for initial analysis before making a final decision on just what sort of farm the planet needs to be. Keeping Earth as more or less free-range might be OK as long as there's a sufficient market for that sort of thing but if it turns out that breeding factories and a production line are what is needed to ensure an adequate supply then that would involve a fairly convoluted planning application for change of use, not to mention the inevitable human rights protesters and activists getting in the way...

Sorry, I never could resist the old alien 'we are humanitarians we only eat humans' joke...

Re: fridge sized?

> Are oz washing machines the same size as pommy fridges?

No idea but a washing machine is also for beer, i.e. all the ale-quaffing overspill is harvested from clothes using a spin cycle for the 'landlord special blend' barrel which is already fed from a complex network of underfloor guttering.

Re: All lies, I tell you!

> Oh no it isn't!

Look behind you!

(that time of year imminent...)

Re: Invitation-only, for now...

> but GMail is hugely successful and was a whole paradigm shift at the time (no folders? Searching the archive? Madness!)

Seriously? The appeal of gmail was first and foremost the absurdly huge storage capacity with the lightweight UI taking second (while still significant) place.

Things like moving all your emails into one folder (ooh that's a difficult innovation) and searching them (could we not do that already?) never got mentioned by anyone because they really didn't care.

Other webmails had tiny mailbox capacity, this one was vast. No 'paradigm shift' bollocks required.

Re: Clara the teenager

> It would be good to see Clara spun off to a C-Beebies sub-series and leave The Doctor to get on with it.

This might be the actual cunning plan, maybe it will become standard practice though it remains to be seen if it is reward or punishment...

[ disclaimer : no relation, above or below ]

> Naaah, you just need a good ole' spray-can of paint.

The cheap-and-nasty (in a good way) approach does have much to recommend it.

That said, a cargo of exploding paint tins could also be quite devastating if deployed, needing less accuracy, and making entire regions of orbital space unusable for a considerable time after taking out their primary targets. These are the WMDs of the future! Weapons of Magnolian Destruction!

Re: easy to perform

Easy to fix:

- remove 'iframe' from the html spec

- remove javascript from existence

- remove flash from existence (not related I just hate it)

These three steps will solve many problems at once since the MITM is often not the spotty teenager at the next table, it is the compromised ad server network that doesn't bother to check the crap their customers feed into it.

Plain text on a plain background should be good enough for anyone, along with 640k, cardboard box in the middle of the street (etc)...

> 'sucker@gullible.ltd.uk' is a better email address than gulliblesucker@gmail.com too. yup got to love those @lycos,co.uk and @freeserve.co.uk addresses.

Nooo! Burn the heretic! You are not allowed to say that gmail is just another webmail provider because it's *swoon* google and somehow a gmail address is not the sign of someone whose business attitude is "meh, good enough".

(Disclaimer :p own extreme low volume mail server)

Back to FTA, "faster and more resilient" means either "we tried to be too clever and fckd up" or "one of the machines we 'streamlined' was the one with the mailboxes on it". Depending on what OS/etc they use behind the scenes maybe all the libraries had to be recompiled for clustering support, or the database was not cleanly shut down, or Exchange still won't properly restore to a different machine even if you have absolutely identical hardware. Or 'something else', no point listing options without a default...

Re: Block port 25 by default

Yes!

Blocking port 25 for anything other than the local (ISP) mail server will kill a huge amount of spam - if you are sending via a not-your-ISP mail server you should be using authentication anyway and an alternate port is easy enough and not even non-standard. Do we stand a chance of convincing all ISPs to do this?

With a low-volume mail server I can see the vast majority is from the the other side of the Rhine so it's easy enough to block most of it with a few IP ranges. Less feasible for a larger service though. Somewhat complicated by cloud-compute instances doing relay probes and ssl probes and badly-written bots trying 'auth login' 200 times even after the 'fail' response.

The biggest obstacle is the spam filtering services - this is a technical method of pretending there is no problem and as long as people are convinced that everything is fine because they never see any spam no real progress will be made.

And of course there's the semi-official 'your anti spam fix fails' list that will probably appear here at some point.

p.s. also make all HTML email completely illegal and ban email programs that open attachments automatically or offer an 'open with' option instead of whatever attachment being turned into something completely inactive though iirc even simple images have had their problems too...

Re: Eh

> Otherwise how does it communicate back to the Black Hat? Is he (for its always a he) sat outside in a car or at the starbucks across the road?

Presumably you have to staple a mobile to the back of it and send a string of SMS though if the post room is in the basement you are SOL.

Or create a mini mechanism to use the final dregs of power to put the memory card in an envelope and fire it out of the side in the hope that some kindly soul sees it and drops it into the post for you.

Better yet, make it auto-hack the nearest phone, copy the data to it, plant a custom app and wait for the person to get near a signal, auto-activate, send you the data and delete itself like I saw in that documentary with that Harold guy. Plus or minus smiley face, skull and crossbones or some warning about 'mess with the best'...

Or send to someone non-existent and return to non-existent sender at somewhere with open wi-fi to do a last-gasp data-dump.

Re: Copying & Printing

Fair comment, though unless they are getting rid of the physical books completely, maybe they don't have to change anything in that respect, just point you towards the actual dusty tome?

Alternatively, printing of scanned versions gets limited to x amount of pages (exact percentage get defined in court at some point?), potentially printable only by an authorised librarian.

So get enough people printing that percentage of said book and some string and a couple of bits of cardboard, hey presto your own deluxe bound edition! But since that's the only one you will all have to fight over who gets to use it because it's an attempt to bend the rules, not obliterate them by doing 100 copies before binding... that said, I suspect this kind of thing may already have been declared 'unsporting'.

Re: Pegging order?

>> Are we talking about a light-up telephone here?

Presumably from one of those hospital 'removal' anecdotes...

Wouldn't work

We already have the answer to "Nurse Who" so that just wouldn't work.

"Bernard", if memory serves...

Re: Appallingly bad design?

> students are often accused of plagiarising themselves

Brings to mind a quote that some may remember:

"South Sea Bubble was a goldfish..."

Re: This cant work

> Do they consider an artistic nude by a famous artist porn?

And if they don't, what about references to said works (even fictional ones)? All those episodes of Allo Allo that feature The Reclining Madonna would surely have the BBC/iplayer blocked by default...?

Re: No central database - just lots of little ones

Ah, yes - "no central database" - deny something that nobody has said - I seem to recall the last government took exactly the same line. Smith wrote in the Mirror, May writes in the Sun - different parties, same tactics.

Could be mis-remembering but I don't think any of these plans (current or previous) ever actually involved a single big central database, did they?