Posts by jamesb2147

Re: And the rest of the bill...

You assume the people doing this know how to use that DC. This is kind of a poor, ignorant man's form of a domain.

Re: Seems cheap

IDK how things are done in Australia, but I think he's referring to the $800 price originally listed in the title, which is now updated to $800m, which in the US is generally posted with a capital M as $800M.

Re: "SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!"

@Trevor - Tongue in cheek much?

You disagreed with @Sampler, then reiterated his point. My head is spinning.

Re: Chilling

@BillG - You've been drinking some Kool-Aid.

"As I understand it, the seven countries on Trump's EO have no effective form of government. So getting on an airplane is as easy as riding on a bus."

Nope. Just nope. You could make that argument, maybe, about some countries, but Iran is *definitely* not one of them.

Re: AC

California is a curiosity unto itself. I do not understand how that state manages to get so much so right and so much wrong all at the same time.

Re: Bloviating Idiot, Musk Edition

The incredible part here is that it's not clear whether Musk understands that.

Sadly, if true, it means The Donald is a better negotiator than Obama ever was. Perhaps an accident of history, being the first black President, he HAD to stay away from extreme positions and HAD to be willing to move to the middle. In any case, his strategy seemed to be meeting the opposition halfway... except the opposition never moved an inch, ever. As any mathematician worth their salt will tell you, eventually you end up on the opposition's side. Then the opposition leaped further back from where they were, and Obama said "fuck it!" and pushed his now-modified agenda through with his Democratic majority, until he didn't have that.

The difference is stark.

Re: "Hardware is so over"

Agreed.

As someone else mentioned, this isn't the end of phone hardware innovation... it is perhaps the end of phone hardware innovation until a major new tech can be developed (e.g. flexible displays, mentioned earlier by another commentard).

It just might be the beginning of the end for Apple, however.

Re: Crashplan

IDK if I'd go quite that far, but I certainly had issues using the Mac client. After a few updates, it got to the point that it'd continuously chew through CPU without any data being backed up to show for it. :/

I did stop using it, tho. It's back to manual backups to a local fileshare for me.

Re: how far?

His point is that your solution is unlikely to be able to keep up with the resources of the Chinese state machinery employed to prevent VPN connectivity.

This post should be of interest to you: http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewall-of-china/

Padding packets over an SSH tunnel on a random port worked in early 2016... for a day or so at a time.

I would not call them "personal" email accounts

We're not talking about Gmail here.

These are RNC email addresses that staffers are likely using for campaign purposes (at least, that's what they're intended for...). There is literally no evidence in the article to support any claim that they are being used otherwise.

And don't get me wrong, I want to skewer Trump as badly as anyone. This just isn't the way to do it. His administration already has so many gaffes... pick one of the actual mistakes to run an article on, El Reg. Perhaps a series on FCC Chairman pick Ajit Pai, the less qualified of the existing 2 Republican commissioners who basically ran a PR campaign on behalf of Verizon while at the FCC despite Trump rhetoric about "draining the swamp"?

Re: Telegraph pole?

Is the proper term utility pole these days?

Re: <!>

To be fair, that's because the plebs (they be us, sometimes, too) live on a planet that is not constrained by reason.

Re: Critique

RE: The guy isn't playing the Han Solo role.

You might be right on the moral ambiguity. The only thing I'll say is that Han's character was only involved with the Alliance for the money in the beginning, whereas the new R1 guy was clearly motivated to work for the "good guys" even when they asked him to do "bad things." (I'm waiting to find out what those were.)

There's definitely something missing from his character, though. I miss the roguish charm of Ford's character, especially when Leia accuses him of being a scoundrel, and he says (presumably correctly) that she likes him because of that. I like that Han shot first, with no agonizing over his decision. He's a character with swagger, something the Star Wars films have been unable to capture since (though, mostly, they've not tried).

This film was probably an attempt to inject a grey area into a world Lucas designed to be almost entirely devoid of it. I'm honestly not sure how much it really achieved this goal, as I saw it mostly as a film about how evil Vader is, how bad greed is, how internal politics and jockeying can lead to evil deeds... but mostly only by the Empire. The Alliance were still the good guys, they just made mistakes sometimes. The bad guys were evil, so they still needed to be stopped, by any means necessary.

That, combined with the cut footage just from the R1 trailers, makes me wonder how much this film changed between directors. It seemed much darker in the earlier trailers, and honestly, I suspect that would have made for a much more interesting film ("What will you do when they catch you? What will you do when they break you?"). I hope we learn that one day, but Disney makes me think we'll never know what R1 might have been.

Re: Hmmm

Have a vote for the military joke... ho ho ho...

Re: lol

Not exactly true, but good as a general rule; winners are rarely concerned with making sure the rules *change* unless certain it is to their benefit.

Shockingly, California has had substantial and thus far, effective, electoral reforms. They have marginalized the Republicans in the state and probably poisoned Republicans nationally against the practice, but it is demonstrably effective. Further, the Californian people adopted a carefully worded measure that *continued* those policies, even though voting "No" meant ending the reforms. It was sleazy as hell and enough people saw through that to screw the effort. The reforms there seem permanent for the foreseeable future.

I find the entire idea of exporting IP laws quite fascinating. The US laws aren't actually half bad; do the commonwealth nations have an enshrined "fair use" that's unlikely to ever be legislated away? I don't believe so, though I'd love to be wrong. And, to be clear, this idea originally stemmed from the Berne convention, so you can thank the European mothership for that little idea.

I am curious, Trevor: How is the TPP so awful for Canadians? I ask honestly, because I feel as though I'm not well informed on the topic.

Re: Ubiquiti - always wait

Depends a bit. Their software releases are hit and miss, with frequent regressions (e.g. a current bug regarding OSPF memory leak when links go down that was in releases for the last 9+ months or so).

The Unifi products seem to be worse off for this as they are more broadly affected by stability problems where the EdgeOS products (read: EdgeRouter line) generally have bugs in specific, advanced features. They're still the cheapest decent way of getting FQ_CODEL that I know of. I love my ER Lite.

Re: "only around a hundred outsiders get to see it each year"? Really?

Came just to say this. Thanks, Alfred, have an upvote. Even in 2003 there's a BBC article about how there were 1500 "Western tourists" annually.

Even an American can go, they just need to arrange travel through a Chinese travel agency, which can in turn book your travel into the country. They have tours starting by taking a train in or flying the national airline, Air Koryo, which, ironically, offers a business class cabin, for those who feel more comrade than the other comrades.

What's strange is that the DPRK offers tourism at all. You'd think it would cause unrest, but they're looking to increase numbers officially to 2M+ visitors/yr by 2020.

Re: HurriCon One?

I could be mistaken, but I don't think this is the first hurricane to hit Cape Canaveral.

Which is not to say that they'll be prepared, but at least they have some experience.

Re: Tulipomania

I wouldn't call it Tulipomania. It's not really the same concept.

You are hitting on the point I wanted to make, though, that the rebranding is needless. When your company begins to think that its biggest hurdle to adoption is branding, you have a problem, and it isn't branding.

Hell, between this and the Pixel rebranding of the Nexus phone line (which, allegedly, may not even be a complete rebranding when it's unveiled next week!), my trust in Google has DROPPED precipitously. This is a bad sign from corporate. Something is wrong in the executive ranks for this to have slipped through (much like G+ a few years ago). Pushing out bad products is one thing (hello, Wave!) but pushing out a rebranding exercise and claiming that is going to solve all your issues is just ludicrous.

I think I'll spend next weekend migrating my email out of Google Apps -- err, sorry, the G Spot now.

Re: Mr

Will Marriott do this? Probably not.

There are two ways to enforce a hotspot ban:

1) Spoof de-auth packets

This is illegal and I only wish the fine against Marriott and other convention operators had been higher. I'm honestly *shocked* that the FCC hasn't tackled Cisco/Meraki et al for actively advertising this as a feature since its use is decidedly illegal. Shame on the vendors for pushing this garbage on US users. However, my point in mentioning this is that this feature has already been built and is included as a rogue detection and mitigation feature, and generally costs customers nothing to implement, as a matter of course.

2) Train security staff

Actually, this is really complicated. You have to purchase highly specialized scanning equipment (Fluke is $2k just for a basic device) for *each* enforcer, train that enforcer extensively because they're likely security staff and not IT (most hotels don't keep IT staff on hand), potentially add to the security ranks because this is additional workload, write this clause into agreements with customers, and still not chase away high paying customers/convention attendees. This is *exceptionally* more expensive than option 1 above, which is free with your wireless controller license.

A business would only take this route if the management decided it was worth the investment. Certainly, in some particularly large conference locations, it will be (the Gaylord Opryland may end up back in the news for this). Your average Marriott, though? Puhhhh-lease.

That's why the author's article posits a question that's already been answered. You might occasionally get fleeced by an overzealous hotel management team. Avoid that property in future and rest well, assured of the fact that the economics of tracking down WiFi violations is vastly weighted in favor of just letting it go.

Re: Don't get out much?

I guess you've never heard of a little startup called Square. They process payments and created an entire industry of direct competitors from Paypal, Chase, Bank of America, etc.