Posts by DaLo

Re: Sir

Is an odometer and a clock in the car also a meter? Do these need to be banned?

Heck, they are actually connected to the car and the calculation is done locally - using the driver's head or a calculator!

Re: Install Pri-fi

"What's the relevance of this MAC address discussion?"

I was replying on the above post who was talking about tracking via MAC addresses, this is another feature of Pri-Fi - to randomise the MAC address (as well as suppress AP broadcast).

Something can be disruptive even if it doesn't eventually succeed. A really good company would notice the disruptive threat and react quickly and effectively, using their experience and knowledge which then may make the newcomer redundant. It's when an established company doesn't notice or dismisses the threat, of which there are many examples, that the newcomer can really take off.

So, if Ford produce a driverless car that works as well as Google's but is based more around single ownership/family ownership and a regular car design (retrofitting to their existing chassis for instance) then that may well be a lot more appealing than an expensive bubble car from Google that has shared public ownership (and there is never one around in the rain or on a Friday night). Google's car might then fail but it will still have been disruptive and caused a seismic shift in industry thinking and speed of development.

Re: Silly question...

Light is affected by gravity - that's why there are 'black holes'.

Re: Ughh... bad news

Seeing as there is a reasonable chance of a crashing international plane hitting water why not develop a simple locator that is held in a sealed recessed area of the outer body which has a switch activated when significant water pressure is detected (non-electrical)?

The flap pops open and a floating tracker beacon pops out and stays on the surface.

This would not be able to be deactivated by crew (and due to a pressure opener wouldn't be at risk of causing an electrical fire). The high pressure, only experienced underwater, would ensure non-accidental release and with an armoured housing wouldn't get destroyed on impact.

Re: Remote wipe?

I think, but I might be wrong, is that the feature actually disables the phone even surviving a factory reset/bootstrap. It is there to stop the potential resale rather than just erase your data.

Don't think it was ever free. Outlook express was free, but that was not the same thing at all.

Outlook was, however, included with the Exchange serve licence, as long as you had the relevant Exchange server Cals you could also use Outlook. This is no longer the case and you need to buy Outlook separately (or as part of Office of course).

However, there is not much point in using exchange without outlook and vice versa so not so much of a bait and switch. The main point is that it limits people using Open office for Word, Excel replacements while having Outlook for Email (as there really isn't much from the Open Source community that can match it) as the price difference isn't that big after you negotiate a nice discount.

Re: Is this really so unique?

I am willing to bet that medical records are not routinely passed to accident lawyers in the UK.

However, I am pretty sure they are passed by insurance companies, tow trucks, coachworks, garages etc.

If you are sure that it was someone in the hospital (in the UK) then I recommend you contact the ICO and Health Care Trust immediately to pursue it and catch the culprit.

The article is already slightly Anti-kickstarter and rightly so. The way they can absolve all responsibility from this obvious fraud that they are helping to generate half a million dollars (minus the healthy Kickstarter commission of course) is just plain wrong.

They still have time to pull the plug but leaving scams like this going just damages the long term viability of both Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites.

I reported this project about two weeks ago https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1690998653/magnetic-hoverboard-i-think-yes as it clearly breaches their terms (they have no plans for a finished product, it's just a scam to use as a marketing opportunity for their other products)

If Kickstarter just becomes known as being a fraud site for criminals then it doesn't help anyone, especially Kickstarter themselves so they should get off their ass and create some proper safeguards and policies that provide at least some basic protection from obvious scams.

Non-embossed cards (in the UK at least) are designed specifically not to be used in manual imprinters as they specifically need an online, real-time authorisation. The will often have "electronic authorisation only" or similar.

Re: Publicity Stunt

"So after proving hes running a company thats an answer to a question that no-ones asking"

So no one is asking "what are we going to do for fuel as oil reserves start to become depleted?" or "how would a dramatic enforced shortage of oil by OPEC affect the economy?" or "if man-made global warming is true how can we reduce our reliance on it especially if taxes are punitive on oil burning vehicles?" or "isn't is ridiculous how expensive it is to run a car in Europe now-a-days?" etc

There are plenty of questions being asked about the future of petrol and diesel vehicles, if you think there isn't then you must have been asleep for the last 20 years.

Electric has the advantage that once cars are "generally" battery powered the raw source of that electricity can be decided by the politicians, the environmentalists, the economists etc. Whether that is more nuclear, wind, tidal, solar, coal, gas, fusion etc All the cars get an automatic upgrade to using that new source at the same time.

Could it be that the actual issue is that the petroleum industry has a little bit too much sway and too much invested to see it disappear? Or that car manufacturers have too much invested in combustion engines and aren't always the quickest to adapt to change especially on such a large risk for them (many European vehicles manufacturers can't even afford the expense of a new regular chassis and wheelbase so they often share a similar platform and have a lot of mergers)?

The main issues with electric cars has been the range, the batteries and the "chicken and egg" lack of chargers en route. If a car has a 200 mile range and there was a decent network of rapid chargers then most people could work to that. Day-to-day commutes would be within range and longer trips could be broken up with lunch or a break at an appropriate location.

Elon Musk at least has the guts to try to address this and has the balls to do it without whinging that the government should stump up all the cash or the industry will fold. He's put his money where his mouth is and decided to give it a shot, it might eventually fall short but the thinking is sound.

Sites rarely have a certificate for all their various domains. They'll just redirect to their default or create a specific secure.xxxxx.co.uk domain to use for secure interactions.

Re: Clarification needed.

You're right the subdomain is only hidden for some sites now I hadn't used it for a while so I turned the setting back on to check. This is a change that they have made as it didn't do this originally. I'm not sure what the list consists of but the 'www' and "m" subdomain will still be hidden when you visit a site (slightly confusing if you happen to follow an m.site.com link as the display will not look correct but the URL will state site.com the same as if you had clickled www.site.com/).

Re: Site locations

I would doubt it would be a shopping centre as everyone going to a shopping centre normally goes there for a long period of time, however an individual store to encourage a captive, well-off audience for 30~60 minutes would be more likely to see the marketing opportunity.

Re: Selling the Car

"Can you disable individual phones from the dashboard/display?"

That would make this system a lot more secure, if an individual mobile had to be verified and activate from the car with the ignition turned on. You wouldn't be able to load the app onto any other phone then and use it as the mobile would not be verified.

Re: "or face 6 years' porridge"

Criminals often get a choice - plea bargaining is common. Even choosing to admit guilt early can knock a large amount off a sentence.

"The only way they can guarantee their own service is by taking bandwidth away from others."

At this stage this is not exactly how it works. Now I am a supporter of net neutrality, however this at the moment isn't destroying that (companies could already pay to be hosted in the LINX exchange in the UK for instance to take advantage of their peering arrangements)

The deals these guys are doing should in theory increase bandwidth to all services for users (in the short term). They are getting private pipes from the ISP to the CDN of Netflix or Apple so that the high bandwidth traffic from these sources does not consume bandwidth on their regular internet pipes.

If Comizon has a 100Gb link to 'the Internet' for its subscribers all traffic is brought down that but Apple and Netflix could consume say 10% of that (and therefore reduce bandwidth for other services by 10%).

However, if they then add a 10Gb private link direct to Apple's CDN and a 10Gb link direct to Netflix then the 10% on the 100Gb link can be freed up for other services and Apple and Netflix can be sure that when more than 100Gb of data is being requested on the regular pipe their services don't suffer (Based on the road analogies, they are building a new straight highway running alongside the existing one, with no on-ramps or off-ramps between Apple/Netflix and Comizon.

Once it gets into the Comizon network they are claiming that the traffic is treated the same as the other services and that there is no prioritisation. The subscriber also has their 20Mb link to Comizon that will recieve the Netflix or Apple traffic along with all the other traffic that might be on the line. You would think this would be beneficial for Comizon so maybe the payment is just Apple/Netflix having to pay for the private link and maintenance of it - or maybe it's a split payment between them, whereas in the past the ISP paid for the direct link?

Either way the worry is that when deals are done between individual ISPs and Content Providers eventually the lure of being able to charge a premium for their content within the Comizon network is too great, or that the regular shared link will no longer be upgraded in favour of private links or even that some services are only available with decent quality from certain larger ISPs without a law stopping it.

It is creating a private internet between a select few that the subscriber will have to pay extra to access (even if not directly) that is the issue.

Re: Rotting?

Shareholders want their share price to increase - that's why they invest in them.

If the business profits grow it is a key indicator of business value and so share price rises. Continual profits can always pay out dividends (for the companies that do) but if they make less profit (unless there is a good reason for it such as a massive investment in an exciting new project) than last year this could, among other factors, affect the value of the company and therefore a reduction in share price. No-one wants a decline in their share value so investors will jump ship.

Every year the pressure is on a company to be growing and therefore relevant. Obviously, above inflation growth is unsustainable ad infinitum but there's nearly always a bigger piece of the pie you can try to have until you max out that pie and have to find another pie to take a piece of (hence companies like Amazon diversifying into groceries/cloud/hardware etc).

Re: Hmmm

..."a proper testing and code inspection phase..."

And yet they were unable to spot something as obvious as a product from a well known vendor not being able to do anything at all and not even being submitted by said vendor.

Unusable definition of 'proper' testing!

"will he now have to go through another multiple of cases to force Bing, Yahoo, etc take down links to an identical article?"

Will make no difference now as due to the Streisand Effect any search for his name will now have hundreds of news links talking about this ruling, each one repeating the original reason of his 'embarrassment'. Any attempts to suppress those would probably have a new raft of news stories discussing the suppression of the suppression of the original story ... and ad infinitum.

If he truly wanted to hide his details then effecting a ruling like this was not a good way to do it (I think a super injunction would be needed) so I guess he just wanted to prove a point.

Re: Who owns the data?

I am not one to say what is specific by law in Germany as you did not state that what you were quoting was specific to Germany and I am not inclined to look up German Law but stating the DPA on The Register you would expect it would apply to the UK Data Protection Act which makes your points definitely not apply under UK Data Protection Laws.

For instance in the UK you are quite welcome to e-mail your CRM databases your newsletter if they have a relationship with you, without their explicit permission. You are not allowed to buy in databases from elsewhere for potential leads for non-business individuals unless they have given consent though.

You can also identify someone by name quite readily without "a waiver" under many circumstances and use personally identifiable information without a waiver. For instance if someone sent in a letter of recommendation saying how great your company was, you could pin it up on your wall in the reception without needing to ask explicit permission. It would be polite to ask but not necessary by law.

Re: Here transit

Google has always had some transit information but this is a fully comprehensive and redesigned interface.

It has more complete information than Nokia including domestic ferries however Nokia includes live timetabling information which Google currently doesn't (only timetabled).

The BBC story on it has a lot more details and compares it to the competition.

Re: @PaulR79 "Never click links for banks etc in emails"

" If you are alert you can check, if you've not got a dialling tone the line is still open."

Ahh, but they play an artificial dialling tone down the line until you press the first digit. Another way to check is to dial a different number and see if that "goes through to the bank" or just see if a human answers when you call - as no bank ever answers its phone until you gone through at least twenty layers of menu options first.

Re: It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Not quite, did you read his blog post?

It had data protection on and he could not access the data protected areas. Therefore trying to access the e-mail messages themselves via the file system were not allowed

# xxd Protected\ Index

xxd: Protected Index: Operation not permitted

However the attachments fell outside of the protected area and were accessible.

Re: Beyond a joke.

You could mirror two SSDs even in a server environment and then swap one of the drives out for a new one after 6 months ~ year.

You'll then find that they are unlikely to die at the same time and if you have a hot spare will happily rebuild fairly quickly.

The drive you take out after 6 months can start up a new mirror with a new drive to have a similar scenario.

You should get warnings when all the over provision blocks are getting used up and so can make sure you don't hit the WE limits.

Re: Hang on.

How would they know that a broadcast won't be available on demand later? It's usually not easy to tell unless the broadcaster was to add a tag to the description

Re: I'm not entirely opposed...

So if your master password gets compromised then anyone anywhere will be able to work out the passwords to any sites you use?

If you forget the master password you lose access to all sites?

If you wish to change your master password you have to change the password on every site you've ever used?

You have to keep the device with you wherever you go?

You would have to type whole URLs and Master Password onto - i presume a small keyboard every time you want to visit a site?

Surely - KeePass or similar would be far easier.