* Posts by Ken Hagan

8139 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: the Manager

I don't think that will change.

Extreme weather blown away from unexpected direction

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Re: Seems

Your monitor must be squint.

Microsoft: Keep Moto vid codec patent fight in US, not Germany

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I'm confused

Are MS asking the US court to tell Motorola to ignore the German court?

If I was a judge and I found X had mis-behaved and so I awarded Y something, I'd be a little miffed if X then found a way (in another jurisdiction) to bully Y's management into not taking advantage of the remedy (in my jurisdiction). In fact, I'd reckon that was Really Rather Rude.

What system builders need to know about solid state drives

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Re: Not yet worth it

I suppose I can't speak for the OP, but I'd be willing to bet he'll just buy another SSD and restore his lost data from back-up.

He gave a price of $160 for the sort of speed-up that money just can't buy outside the SSD market, and the hidden cost is that he might have to use his backups once every few years. That sounds like a pretty good deal.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
WTF?

Re: Buyer Beware

75MB/s isn't great, but surely no-one ever claimed that sequential write speed was the point of an SSD. The article makes a passing allusion to the three orders of magnitude difference in access time and then ignores it. WTF is all that about?

ARM-Android to outship Windows-Anything by 2016

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Stop

Puhleeze

The graph shows "actual data" for the first two data points and the other half-dozen are extrapolated. In real terms, that means "bullshit".

Lucy in 3.4 million-year-old cross-species cave tryst

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "hominin"?

I wondered that, too, but apparently hominins are a subset of hominids.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/270333/Hominidae

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Wait for the creationists...

If only all creationists were like Phoebe...

Everything you thought you knew about cybercrims is WRONG

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Re: A Damning Statement About the Windows Ecosystem

UAC was/is the wrong approach. The assumption behind UAC is that privilege elevation can be made easy so there is no need to question why end-users are asking to raise privilege every five minutes. Psychologically, this simply trains users to click-through.

Privilege escalation carries risks. Therefore, it should not be easy. Separate accounts is probably the only safe solution on Windows.

Life on planet Linux is slightly easier. The "sudo" command can be given a fine-grained list of users and applications that are permitted, so if you have some particular use-cases that cause most of the elevation requests you can allow them. This wouldn't work on Windows because lazy third-party applications would simply add themselves to the list and lazy end-users would never review the list. Sad, but true. On planet Windows, both end-users AND third-party developers are the enemy. Microsoft don't stand a chance.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: A Damning Statement About the Windows Ecosystem

Microsoft already offer these things, but it is convenient for end-users to bypass them.

They could try some arm-twisting (say, a system that locked the "Administrators" group out of %ProgramFiles%), but users would simply go onto the web and download a "handy utility" that "fixed the problem" and installed a botnet.

No operating system can be made secure if the local administrator wants to blow it wide open.

The problem is not Microsoft. The problem is millions of people who prefer to run a botnet on their machine rather than occasionally log in under a separate Administrator account. (I mean "prefer", by the way. Most botnets are sufficiently benign for the infected PC that its owner is *not* penalised for being infected and therefore *any* inconvenience involved in keeping the botnet out counts as a "net cost" for the lazy end-user.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Strawman

I suspect that the El Reg readership are not representative. The story headline really ought to have said "everything *most lay-people* ever assumed about...". With that borne in mind, it does sound like it would be useful if the general public (and politicians) were better informed about who is behind cyber-crime.

Perhaps we could start by not calling it "cyber-crime". Most cases depend on persuading the victim to do something unwise, rather than the perpetrator being really skillful at breaking into the system. Therefore it is "fraud" or "confidence trickery" rather than "cyber-" anything.

'Thermal cloak' designed, could solve major chip, spacecraft issues

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Radiation or conduction?

The article, and the Beeb's coverage of the same story is similar, starts by explaining that heat transfer is conductive rather than radiative, but then goes on to suggest applications in spacecraft design, where (even the article points out) heat transfer *is* purely radiative.

What gives?

Google asked to bin autocomplete results for Japanese man's name

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Is it the government they are showing two fingers to? Or is it the people whose legal system is being ignored?

There are certainly UK laws that I think are ridiculous, but I expect companies that operate in the UK to stick to them until they are changed by the proper procedure. (Digressing only slightly, I expect my government to stick to them as well, the more so because they have to power to change the ones they don't like, but again only by the proper procedure.) It's called "rule of law" and history has very little good to say about countries where it doesn't hold.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What chance google.jp being taken down

"Try looking in your address bar some time Ken. Google automatically redirect to your local country page."

Try thinking a bit more before posting. Where google redirects after I've gone straight to their .com portal really doesn't matter. If they didn't have the .co.uk address, it could easily redirect to google.com/uk.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What chance google.jp being taken down

If they are openly contemptuous of the Japanese legal system, I'd have said it was a racing certainty that google.jp will disappear. It's probably the only thing the court can actually do.

Whether that actually has *any* discernable impact on Google's operations is another matter. There's a google.co.uk but I imagine hardly anyone takes the time and trouble to set up their browser to use it.

100 EARTH-LIKE PLANETS orbit stars WITHIN 30 LIGHT-YEARS!

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Fermi Frightens Me.

For the last 4 billion years, we haven't existed either. Give us another few thousand and we won't be detectable by someone with our current level of technology, unless we want to be. (We'll be able to see them, of course...)

So just why is it called Fermi's <it>paradox</it>?

Who killed ITV Digital? Rupert Murdoch - but not the way you think

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Re: Don't forget...

Spot on about the multiplexers, the crowning irony being Andrew's point that they didn't have any content worth watching on the extra channels.

I expect most of the 1.3 million "subscribers" just used the box as a way to get the free digital channels. These are the same people who still haven't signed up with Sky because they've now got FreeView built into their telly and in their opinion there's still bog-all worth watching that isn't on the free channels.

Force Google to black out searches in new privacy law - MPs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Possible?

I rather doubt it, unless you allow an infinitely large number of false negatives. However, even if this were possible, it would be pointless unless you could also block connections from the UK to web-sites hosted outside the UK. If I can just hop over to some salacious Euro-gossip site and pick up the details there then there's no point in censoring it here. Ask the Chinese. They know about such things.

The internet as a whole is currently pretty much immune from *anybody's* legal system. It would be nice if it were different, but simply wishing for it will not make it so. You need to speak to ICANN about how addressing and routing works, and come up with a technical feasible proposal (scalability being the main concern) for suitable firewalling at border routers and thereby putting each country's part of the network at the mercy of that country's legal system. This is how the Real World works and (aside from a few countries with sadistic bastards in charge) it seems to work OK.

Sitting down all day is killing you

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Re: I'm OK.

So in your case, sitting down all day would be the healthier option.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I'm pretty sure...

I'm not sure about whether a guideline can require you to do anything, but H&S law in the UK means that employers have to tolerate staff taking the occasional break away from their desk and if you work in the sort of place where that's even remotely controversial then you owe it to your fellow slaves to make a point of taking the break so that everyone is equally lazy as far as management is concerned.

Microsoft stamps on HTTP 2.0's pedal, races to mobileville

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Re: Authenticated spam

Divide and conquer.

If I send all my authenticated mail through a relay (to whom I and lots of others pay a small fee, so it's a viable business model) and countersign it, *recipients* only have to whitelist the relay. (Recipients can complain to the relay people in the reasonable expectation that the relay people will pursue the matter rather than see their whitelisting threatened by a rogue customer.)

For further simplication, relays can aggregate with other relays. Also, I (and they) may have deals with other relays at the same level of the hierarchy, to avoid a single point of failure.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Jean Paoli

If we are talking about XML's inventors, I think it is only fair to consider the context of the work.

Compared to HTML, XML is a thing of beauty. Its regular structure makes it easier to parse. Its extensible structure means that this easiness ought to persist over a few generations. The fact that it has been abused more than Jimi Hendrix' guitar is no reflection on its original design.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: How about containers?

Less than you might think. Try surfing with cookies set to "bog off". You'll find that the non-personalised versions of most sites are fairly usable.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: How about containers?

I think the low-hanging fruit are gone.

HTTP is already designed to permit static content to be cached, so the "container" you are looking for already exists and is called a "file". If the prospect of lots of little files annoys you, there's another existing standard (mhtml) for storing multiple elements in a single file, that is supported to some degree by most browsers.

I also think the high-level fruit are likely to remain unreachable.

Sites that insist on base64-encoding the client's autobiography in the URL, or putting time-dependent trivia on every page, or offering personalised content to each visitor, are broken at the application-level (authorship) and cannot be fixed by changing the transport protocol.

Medieval warming was global – new science contradicts IPCC

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Re: the rising price of oil

In much of the world, oil costs what the local taxman decides it ought to cost. Each step forward in extraction technologies and (by comparison to the tax, modest) step upwards in price brings yet more raw material into economic viability.

We are probably 100 years away from the price of the raw material being the barrier to its use. When you consider the changes in society and technology that have happened within the last 100 years, it becomes entirely plausible that we will *never* run out of oil.

Congress warned that military systems may already be pwned

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Perimeter security

People are starting to use the phrase "perimeter security" as though it were short-hand for a bad thing. It isn't. It is always a good idea to fend off the unsophisticated attacks at the border, if only as an exercise in noise reduction for whatever measures you have in place within.

The bad thing is to have nothing within. PS is necessary, but not sufficient.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Anyway, all the real data is transmitted by carrier pigeon.

Been reading RFC 1149, have we?

More 'retina' display piccies spied within Mac OS X

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Re: I feel oddly reminded of Windows

You still do. For XP, MS advised that bitmapped resources (mainly icons, cursors and toolbar buttons) should be provided at 96 and 120 dpi. For Vista, they added 144 and for Win7 they added 192. These correspond to the desktop scaling (100%, 125%, 150% and 200%) offered in Control Panel. I'd be gobsmacked if Mac programming guidelines haven't said much the same thing for the last 10 years.

It doesn't mean that everyone does, though. I suspect that most Windows apps have 96dpi and nothing else.

Report: Nokia, Apple battle over ultra-tiny nano-SIMs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: universal method

I really doubt that the limiting size on current SIMs is the microelectronics. Therefore, there *is* a universal method for making SIMs smaller. However, it is the fairly obvious and non-novel one of putting the electronics onto a smaller package.

Even if it *was* the limiting factor when current SIMs were designed, such things *have* (as is generally known in this forum, you must be *really* new to IT) shrunk at a fairly predictable rate over the years and so it would not be the limiting factor now.

Go and troll somewhere else.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Prior art?

At least within the electronics industry, I *think* there's also prior art for "making shit smaller". Even if there isn't, it surely falls within the category of "obvious". Why not just agree to shrink the existing standard to a published set of dimensions and be done with?

Record-breaking laser pulse boosts fusion power hopes

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Energy, power, cabbages, whatever...

"which the NIF described as being 1,000 times more energy than the entire US uses "at any instant in time"."

I hope they didn't. It's 1000 times more than the *power* drawn by the US over any normal timescale, but the failure to distinguish between energy and energy-per-unit-time is a bit sad, given that the point of the sentence was to play a game around that very idea.

Chrome beats IE market share for one day

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Re: all others eventually copy its features

Only for very large values of "eventually".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Chrome catching IE slowly"?

I'm fairly sure I have read recently (perhaps in a Win8 context) that Microsoft are indeed considering exactly this.

It wouldn't be targetted specifically against Chrome (and so wouldn't pop up anything asking about browser defaults) but some future version of their freebie AV package might default to nuking any EXEs that get written to application data folders.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: goes against the hippies argument

If you re-read my post, that wasn't my argument. My argument was that the weekend/weekday variations would be seen in users who just accepted the default browser on whatever machine they are using. I said nothing about those who make a conscious choice.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Chrome catching IE slowly"?

You're right. It won't.

The flat line for Firefox is presumably explained by the fact that it is nobody's default browser, except for Linux distros with bog-all market share. If you are a FF user, you've probably installed it in bother places. If you stick with the default, you use a different browser in both places. (Opera's line looks flat, too, but it is so low that this might reflect the resolution of the graphic rather than the raw data.)

Chrome's rise is probably also explained by its being a piece of malware that bleeds onto machines whether you wanted it or not. At work, you may have a sys-admin willing to block malware trying to install itself without any administrative blessing (*). This is much less likely at home (hence the dichotomy) but eventually either or both of MS and AV companies will wise up and start blocking "drive-by XCOPY installs from untrusted web sites" and then Chrome's main distribution mechanism will be gone.

Musk muses on middle-class Mars colony

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Re: Open your mind!

Probably. I saw it and thought the intersection of "smart enough to have a net worth of $500k" and "dumb enough to sell it all for a one-way (*) trip to Mars" was probably quite small. However, I then read the first dozen of so comments and it appears that the El Reg readership are willing. I think there's something Darwinian going on there.

There are two reasons why it would be one-way. Firstly, you've sold everything on Earth and would return flat broke. Things would have to be near-terminal on Mars before you'd contemplate that.

Secondly, the Martian environment is nowhere near as hospitable as TV and films make out, and even if the rocket trip were absolutely free, $500k is not going to change that. You'll be living in a very confined space, eating your own shit, drinking recycled piss and breathing your neighbours farts, for the rest of your natural like. Happily, that's such an unhealthy lifestyle that you won't survive very long. In fact, you probably won't last as far as the next launch-window for the return trip to Earth. Even if you did, you'd be trampled to death in the rush.

Senator demands Congressional vote on ACTA

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Re: "somewhere in the world"

I knew Europe's influence was waning, but doesn't it even count as a place anymore?

Report: Feeble spam filters catch less junk mail

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Re: Seems Yahoo is the big culprit here

Email providers (ISPs?) don't do this because being lazy has no downside.

If there was an *easy* way for end-users to identify the "source ISP" and add it to their personal blacklist, then things might be different. Customers of lazy ISPs would start receiving messages to the effect that "The recipient has received too much spam from your ISP and is not satisfied that your ISP takes the problem seriously. Therefore, all mail from this ISP is now *automatically* rejected. You may be completely innocent, but your ISP is not. Your options are to change ISP or give up on the idea of being able to email this person."

It would be interesting to see how people used that facility and what effect it had on ISPs. Obviously one could unfairly blacklist an ISP because of one bad experience, but you'd be cutting yourself off from legitimate senders every time you did so. In the long-term, the incentive would be for recipients to blacklist only as a last resort and for ISPs to help their own customers avoid being spam senders.

But it does rely on having a *reliable* way to identify sender *ISPs*.

German court: Rapidshare must HUNT for dodgy pirate links

Ken Hagan Gold badge

And in other news...

Shops have a similar obligation to ensure that they aren't fencing stolen goods from crooked suppliers. IANAL but I suspect that the phrases "reasonable steps" and "due diligence" would be relevant here.

Oz billionaire says CIA backs Greenpeace

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Doing Oz a favour

There's a saying: the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones.

That coal is only an important natural resource as long as the technology of the day depends on burning it. If we ever switch over to a low carbon economy, the only use for coal (and oil) will be in the chemical industry, which has a vastly smaller appetite for the raw material. Supply will then exceed demand by several orders of magnitude and the price will fall by a similar amount.

There may be good reasons to keep coal in the ground, but conservation *of coal* isn't one of them.

That MYSTERY Duqu Trojan language: Plain old C

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Headmaster

Re: wtf is object orientated C?

An interesting link, if only to see the number of Americans who believe that the "ate" form is a Britishism. Speaking as a Brit, I can assure you that it bloody isn't. It's wrong over here too. It has *always* been object-oriented.

Doesn't stop people making the mistake but that, in turn, doesn't mean we have to roll over and let the language get mangled again.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: wtf is object orientated C?

Amongst other things, it is clear evidence of illiteracy, since "orientated" isn't a proper word.

Blighty's 'leccy power plant reform deals gas a winning hand

Ken Hagan Gold badge

That statement in full...

"We've been fannying about for 25 years and completely missed the boat to replace our ageing power stations with something that is either clean or dependable, and the North Sea is just about empty, so we're going to abandon all our carbon targets and base our medium term economic prosperity on the whims of foreign gas suppliers. Please don't expect us to think about this again within our lifetime. Energy minister is a very minor job, politically speaking, and I'd much rather spend my time playing politics and trying to unseat my more senior colleagues.", the Minister said.

Windows 8 tablet freezes in Microsoft keynote demo

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: various flavours of proper UNIX

If I remember my history lessons, the *idea* of a single OS running on different "sizes" of hardware was the big gamble of System/360, so Microsoft are about half a century out. Not for the first time, they call it "innovation" but the idea is actually older than most of the staff developing it.

Windows 8 for Kindle-like gear hinted by Microsoft bigwig

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Re: Metro on TV?

"you can change channel with a flick of the wrist"

Hmm, *that* could be annoying...

Vimeo takedown leads to court loss

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Re: had he not

The article says he retained a copy of the film and could have simply re-posted it somewhere else but he'd still have been vulnerable to the other person requesting a take-down from the "somewhere else". Therefore, he had to obtain a definitive court win before this obvious remedy was practical.

Extended software support 'immoral and indefensible'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Merely flags up how pointless it is

These five suggestions are all things that a customer could live without for ages and then purchase only the bits they needed. If the product is really important to you, you'll probably build up enough in-house knowledge to work out most of the answers yourself. Lastly, it presumes that the product is sufficiently obscure that customers won't be able to find each other on the internet and exchange knowledge.

Pope Benedict in .XXX pro-Islam cybersquat drama

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Beware the Streisand effect

The church would be better advised to do nothing. No-one in their right mind could possibly take the sites seriously, and most of the world probably has .xxx blocked by now anyway. The most likely explanation is that the xxx registry is trying to drum up a few news stories about people using their TLD. If the church actually engages with these idiots, they are merely encouraging the problem.

'Fileless' malware installs into RAM

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Installs the Lurk Trojan?

How does this count as "not installing any files"? Sure, it doesn't install any of its own files, and it taken a somewhat indirect route to installing this one, but if it survives a reboot (which the article states is the point of the exercise) then that sounds a lot like a file to me.

Now I could imagine a virus whose author was sufficiently confident of his ability to re-infect you after the reboot, who therefore chose not to install any files so as to increase the chances of going undetected. That would be an impressive piece of chutzpah and newsworthy.

But this, I don't think so. On the evidence of this article, it is just another delivery mechanism for a bog-standard file-system-based Trojan.