Posts by volsano

The pressure will also be on a lot of place names around the world. For starters, I'm looking at you, Kilkenny.

Half truths because much of what Mr Snowden has released is up to five years out-of-date.

The other half - what has happened since 2008 - may be even more disturbing.

"I believe at the time we thought we had done enough"

As the ancient IT maxim says: you don't get what you expect; you get what you inspect.

Their shoulder-shrugging approach to being caught out in a major security flaw is not a good pointer for the future.

A legally-enforced standard for power adapters in 2017 puts the EU where China was in 2006.

It's a sign of the changing times.

Privacy's a bitch, eh?

Successfully knocking out Cryptolocker will stop new infections.

But does it leave a way for the infected to (should they choose to do so) to pay the ransom? If not, the end result will be much worse for the unbackedup.

A controlled shutdown would be kinder to the victims.

The crazies, who will sit in their garden all day cursing the government that granted Amazon the freedom of the skies, still have options if they want to contest the airspace above their sovereign back yards.

Electronic countermeasures to mislead the drone. The drone might land in their garden or fly off in an wrong direction. The ECM could be mounted on permanently-aloft balloons.

Killer kites.

Suicide drone conducting a kamikaze attack.

Bugs, features and no-nos

Odd. He had been specifically advised by facebook that the behaviour was not a bug.

So he used the behaviour exactly as facebook knew it could be used.

They then went all TOSsy with his ass, told him that Terms of Service trumps Security Team.

Tells us all we really need to know about facebook's technical priorities.

TOMATO

You say "TOMATO".

West Midands police say "SOLICITING".

That's quite a drift in accent.

As any IT relationship manager knows, never try to search Google with Google. It could break the Internet.

Socialists!

Hmm, the "enormous value" for culture trumps the rights of the individual?

Thought I'd never live to hear that as a mainstream American view.

Though, replace "culture" with "corporations" and I'd be less surprised.

Plus ca change

This is reminiscent of the court orders of half a century ago on airline availability search systems,

Those early, specialised, search engines had a start-up habit of favouring flights operated by the AVS engine's operator. Legal rulings forced them to be "objective" - to the benefit of all:

Passengers (via their travel agents who ran most of the searches) need only search one system to find all flights, rather than multiple ones.

The better AVS systems could outcompete those from smaller operators, and eventually consilidate a grip on the market; today, there are only a couple that matter.

Fairness of display as a route towards further monopoly? It worked for the airline search engines; looks like Google is learning a valuable historical lesson.

A prediction.....

That the Reddit hive mind has not learned any lessons.

During the next great witch hunt, they'll be claiming it's different this time because they are using iCrowd technology (or some such heat of the moment techno drivel) to confirm their biases.

Confusing the wisdom of crowds with the madness of mobs is a common online mistake.

Thunderbird suddenly would not talk to gmail, claiming my memorized password was bad; re-entering the pw made no difference. However, the web browser interface logged straight in no worries.

Guess I get what I pay for with Google apps.

Pioneers go bust

The people who built the canals went bust. The people who built the railways went bust. The first wave of dotcom'ers went bust.

Pioneers die so the rest of us can learn how to live in the new world safely.

Why should the internet infrastructure be any different?

Breaking the sound barrier

It'd help too if the front of the goal was a thin sheet of some sort of plywood. A goal would be scored by the ball hitting and/or breaking the plywood.

Computer acoustic analysis from an array of microphones and vibration detectors would distinguish the characteristic sound signature of a ball thwacking into the plywood from other sounds such as a player head diving into it or giving it the elbow.

This may slow down a high-scoring game if damaged sheets have to be replaced several times. But, like the nuke-from-orbit tactic proposed in Aliens, it is the only way to be sure.

Soon, every goal will count, everytime.

Google's sudden cancellation of services is the big question mark hanging over them for corporate adoption.

How can I be sure that a particular service or API will not be dropped at a quarter's notice?

Few other corporations induce such opening questions.

iJa board anyone?

Maybe Steve is communing still with his Board on Earth.

Connection costs are a fixed overhead?

So I purchase my own device, and my management pony up £61pcm for the network connection.

One desk over (back in the day when we had desks) my colleague has a company-sourced device, and our management pony up £61pcm for the network connection.

If there is a news story here it is that employee connectivity costs £61pcm for the network connection, not including the costs of the end-user device.

Pace Mary Shelley

Burn it with fire or nuke it from orbit -- both excellent options.

But fear the day it is struck by lightning.

Hobbits?

It is possible that the assailants were hobbits. During a street brawl that sort of misidentification is easy to make.

Back in the day ....

..... Steve Jobs would have turned this into a marketing triumph.

After trumpeting this must-have feature across all known media, he'd've sat back and watched lesser companies announce unconvincing plans to make it easier for passwords to be retrieved by non-specialists.

The fan bois would rejoice at the removal of yet another barrier to internet participation by the common hipster.

And, soon, private passwords would be a thing of the past. The new iPassword would potentially allow us all to financially benefit by selling our iPasses on iTunes and sharing in the profits made from our identify theft by the purchasers.

Other companies would learn from Apple's strategy and fire their IT QA departments and hire marketeers instead. All bugs would now be declared as unmissable features, and the more gullible of us would pay more for the bonus ones.

trust no one

Dropbox is convenient and easy to use. Much more so that

n services like Wuala and Spideroak that offer similar services.

But the fly in Dropbox's achilles heel ointment is the lack of encryption on the servers operated by Dropbox.

I would need to trust a lot of foggy processes (fog is all you can see when you are in a cloud) before I could entrust data to all those third parties.

The risk is not just that something I want kept private might be disclosed. I do not want to risk lower-level security stuff being subverted or corrupted.

Merely a smoke screen

This jokesuit is merely a toe in the water by Apple whose real atomic patent is the one that controls the use of the letter i ("whether lowercase, capitalized, iconificated, or otherwise embellished" to quote the patent) to start the name of a product or company or "other assemblage of humans".

Intel, ICI; Ice cream, Instant whip; Ireland, Iran: just a few of the well-known brands at risk from this patent.

Worse, it makes a general claim to the whole art of beginning a word with a letter at all. Some say this will drive all latinate alphabet users to adopt Chinese, at least in commercial writing and advertising.

Short messages only

This may work for short, provided both the sender and recipient have secretly agreed the code.

We might agree that any text message that begins with a vowel contains secret text. The NSA can analyse the preceding 100 messages and decide there is nothing hidden (or have erroneously uncovered a decoy steganographic scheme).

Then I send:

Are you well? Hope the cold is better. Cheers!

And BOOM -- the terrorist attack is GO.