Posts by A J Stiles

@ Gregg Iceton

Have you curtains at your bedroom and bathroom windows?

Do you put letters in envelopes?

Have you ever uttered the phrase "I just want to be alone with my thoughts" ?

Oddball Platforms

@AC,

If someone wanted to badly enough, they could run Firefox on a Sinclair Spectrum, Cray 3, or CNC milling machine. It'd be hard work, but it'd be possible, because the Source Code for Firefox is available for anyone who wants it.

Adobe, however, will not release the Source Code for the Flash player; despite the fact that they give away binaries for certain, selected platforms gratis and therefore would have nothing to lose by giving away the Source Code.

There has been some amazing progress made with GNASH, but it's still a bit like trying to learn to speak French by sitting in a café in Paris, listening to what people ask for and watching what they get given. This has to change: food manufacturers are obliged by law to print ingredients lists (and with good reason: search for food adulteration), so why aren't software vendors obliged by law to supply Source Code?

Obviously

Please stop believing that hiking up fuel duty has anything to do with protecting the environment. Increasing the price of using a car will not reduce the amount of car use, for one simple reason and one reason alone: There is *no* alternative to the motor car.

Government policy over the years has forced everyone to be dependent on cars just for the bare necessities of life. Most workplaces are inaccessible by public transport; even in the best cases, public transport users have to make a choice between arriving the best part of an hour early or arriving a few minutes late. Chances are that you'll have a long wait for a connecting service in town -- or two, if you're really unlucky. And the housing market is such that relocating to within walking or cycling distance of both partners' workplaces (if there even exists such a locus!) is unlikely to be a realistic option.

Having travelled to work to earn some wages, presumably you'll want to spend them. Which, given the rents in cities, almost invariably means an out-of-town retail park. And even if you could deal with manoeuvring your shopping onto a bus or train, you are unlikely to find one serving such a place. Even if you do, getting home is likely to require two buses and a wait for a connection. And all the while, your frozen food is thawing out. (Yes, you *could* get your perishables from a local shop, petrol station or somewhere similar -- if you didn't mind the extortionate markups or the dire selection.)

If -- after what you've spent on fares and markups -- you've any money left over to go out and enjoy yourself of an evening, once again good luck getting there by public transport. Or more precisely, good luck getting *back*. Chances are, the buses stopped running before 22:00 -- or at least they only go as far as the depot, not into town.

Not owning a motor car is not a viable prospect -- THAT is the issue which really needs to be addressed. But the Government are making far too much money out of our car dependence to do anything which might break it. And you can manage very well without a car in London -- which is all that most visitors ever see of the UK, so they get the impression that everywhere else is the same.

@ El Scotto

There *is* a unified package management system for all Linuxes (for that matter, all Unixes) and even all architectures: it's called GNU Autoconf. You can package up your Source Code and generate a configure script which will then detect various things and generate a Makefile (a file containing metadata which controls the compilation process; saying where to find various necessary files and where to place the eventual binaries and config files).

Somebody at your favourite Linux distro will -- in time, If the package is deemed useful -- take the source package and make a set of RPM or deb packages especially for that distribution on each supported architecture, containing pre-compiled binaries, dependency and conflict information for automatic resolution and digitally signed to prove that the contents have not been tampered with. Until that happens, if you really can't wait, you just have to learn to use

$ ./configure

$ make

$ sudo make install

and remember one crucial piece of information: Wherever the Source package asks for another package such as libfoo, you need to install libfoo-devel (RPM) or libfoo-dev (.deb) as well (if there is one). This is all for boring historical reasons that are no longer valid but persist anyway.

The Linux community would *gladly* write our own iPlayer client, if it were not for the fact that certain important information is being withheld from us.

Thoughts for the Future

OK, it's time to think of the future, and I think there are two things that must be addressed here:

ONE: Make the use of proprietary encryption algorithms flat-out illegal. The *only* secret should be the key. This is well understood by those with a clue: it is not just co-incidence that the OpenBSD implementation of ssh is considered to be the reference standard and the much less well known proprietary version, distributed without Source Code, languishes in obscurity. Not everybody has a clue, however. If they can make supermarkets print "CONTAINS GLUTEN" on a bag of flour (even though everybody should know that flour is made from wheat, which contains gluten -- but obviously someone doesn't, otherwise they wouldn't need the warning), they can surely ban "crypto" providers from keeping secrets which could compromise the integrity of the products they are selling (even though everybody should know there are occasions when you have no alternative but to insist on the Source Code -- but obviously someone doesn't).

TWO: Outlaw "technology discrimination" (e.g., charging different prices according to whether payment is being made by electronic transfer or actual shiny round pieces of metal). This will hopefully prevent people being coerced into using inappropriate or improperly-tested technologies.

Open Source = no liability

Ah, the anti-Open Source crowd have crawled out from beneath their little stones to spout their misinformation! (The inability to spell "hobbyist", and its use as a perjorative, is a good clue. It is well known that anything motivated primarily by external reward tends to be done to a lower standard than something similar done primarily for the love of doing it.)

Source Code is the absolute best way of telling a (knowledgeable) user *exactly* what a program does, warts and all; because Source Code *is* the program, just presented in a more human-friendly form. If a program can cause something to happen, then a thorough examination of the Source Code will reveal under exactly what circumstances it can happen.

To put it quite simply, if a program is doing anything other than *exactly* what the Source Code says it should do, then it must be the fault of the compiler / interpreter or the computer itself.

Open Source authors, therefore, absolutely will *not* be held liable for anything that happens as a consequence of people running code they have written. Because as long as the user has been given the opportunity to examine the Source Code, and warned to assess its suitability for a particular purpose before proceeding, if they went ahead and did so anyway then whatever happens next is their own responsibility. If you are in full possession of the facts, then you cannot plead ignorance.

Authors of freeware -- software which is distrubuted gratis but as binary executables only -- would, however, be in exactly the position that you describe. And shed them no tears; if they are giving away binary executables gratis, they would have nothing to lose by giving away the Source Code as well.

The enormous disservice done to users by keeping Source Code secret from them would cease to be economically viable in a good many cases: many would find it cheaper simply to supply users with the Source Code and an exhortation not to copy it -- withholding the Source Code has done precisely nothing to prevent unauthorised copying of Microsoft Windows and Office -- than to insure themselves against the potential liability associated with concealing the Source Code.

And to answer lglethal's point, nothing that a piece of software does is particularly "special" and just because a program took you a long time to write, doesn't mean it's worth anything. Keeping secrets is a sign that you have little confidence in your own abilities. I do not believe that people would have due cause to say nasty things about the code that I write; therefore, I am quite prepared to show it to them. I would stand to gain precisely nothing by concealing it anyway; because what any program is supposed to do is evident, and somebody else could always write their own program to do the same thing (and, of course, they would then have the Source Code, and so be in position to ruin me by distributing that. Given a choice between two programs which perform identical functions, one supplied with Source Code is obviously more desirable than one supplied without Source Code).

@ Seán

No, no. Instead of paying the cleaners £6 an hour, they pay them £9 an hour. Only they halve the cleaners' hours.

This is exactly what happened at a company I used to work for. They switched cleaning firms in a cost-cutting measure. The new cleaning firm actually poached (by offering a higher hourly rate) a lot of staff from the old cleaning firm (who, due to losing a fairly large contract with a certain engineering firm, were laying people off). The offices and factory floors ended up being cleaned by the same people as before -- except that they had to work harder than before, and ended up bringing home less money than before.

Anyway, if you're sick of being pushed around by management, JOIN A TRADE UNION! and get pushed around by a shop steward instead!

Funniest Joke In The World

I have actually heard The Funniest Joke In The World. But I think it suffered a bit in the translation:

Q. Why is a watch called a watch?

A. Because it shows the time!

Paris, because there's a clue in there somewhere.

Ad-Free ISP

Is there anyone out there who would be prepared to pay slightly more than they are currently paying, for an ISP with the following:

* 2Mb download / 256Kb upload. Not "up to". 2Mb and 256Kb.

* No more than 20:1 contention.

* Static IP address and no inbound ports blocked. Run your own servers! Be your own MX!

* POP3, IMAP and SMTP email (virtual hosted for unlimited addresses) with SpamAssassin (creates "star ratings" depending how "spammy" messages appear to be) and SpamJavelin (generates "disposable" addresses for display on web pages; each address is displayed only once and is allowed to receive only a limited number of messages, with all future ones sent to /dev/null) as standard. CGI script to edit your SpamAssassin and SpamJavelin settings.

* Transparent web proxyserver blocking all known advertising sites and most pernicious cookies (e.g. Urchin Tracking) before they ever get anywhere near you. CGI script to submit new advertising sites / cookie specs.

* All logs to /dev/null. We don't hand over other people's personal information for any purpose, not even to keep our sorry arses out of prison.

Personally, I'm waiting for the day a cyberstalker preys on someone whom, it transpires in court, he knew to be a young vegetarian woman by analysing the adverts streamed to her browser.

mp3 patents

Since MP3 encoding and decoding are purely mathematical operations, they should by definition be excluded from the scope of patentability in both the EU and the UK.

I think it's time we made a new reality TV show ..... "Life in the Public Domain". The contestants have to live together in a camera-ed-up house for several weeks, all without using anything which is copyrighted, patented or a trade secret. It should be easy, right?

BTW, Philips DVD recorders (and possibly some other makes) can bypass Macrovision copy-protection! The machine only actually checks for the presence of the Macrovision signal when the record button is first pressed. If you feed in a suitable non-Macrovision signal, then quickly switch over to the Macrovision signal, the annoying "copy protect" message will not appear -- and if the recorder even has such a thing as an analogue AGC, its time constant is short enough to cope with the out-of-range peaks. Very handy if you find you have mistakenly applied Macrovision protection to your old home movies .....

A new emerging market

"the take over isn't about rebranding apps and changing logos and portal pages, it's about getting a greater foothold in the money making areas of the web -adverts.

if microsoft can display twice as many adverts as they once were then they are now claiming twice as much ad revenue."

Actually, there's another place where there is money to be made: "de-advertising" the Internet.

Imagine a broadband connection that, instead of promising unrealistic speeds and failing to deliver, promised you two megabits and actually gave you two megabits a second! Now imagine a transparent web proxy server that simply swallowed advertisements, 1x1 GIFs and those __utma/utmb/utmc/utmz cookies. Imagine all logging straight to /dev/null.

People would pay for that, I'm sure.

Beyond Economical Repair

In failing to build in properly-enforced privilege separation from the ground up, Microsoft did an extreme disservice to Windows users. Now it's coming back to bite them good and hard.

Developers of legitimate applications have been relying for all these years on the very features which make Windows insecure to make their applications work. Now, it's very tempting just to call that bad programming -- after all, nobody would ever get away with writing Unix applications that required root access.

If Microsoft released an updated version of Windows that included security designed in from the ground up rather than a tacked on as a bit of an afterthought, this would inevitably break compatibility for a lot of legacy applications.

And if legacy application breakage is unavoidable anyway, then why should anyone looking to purchase an operating system stick with Microsoft and their vendor lock-in, when they could use the opportunity to end all the badness in one fell swoop -- i.e. pay some third party to install an Open Source Operating System and common applications across the board, recode equivalents for their legacy Windows applications (and, crucially, hand over the Source Code this time) and arrange for retraining of staff?

Since any application for which the Source Code is available can be persuaded to run on Windows, it would not even be totally unfeasible to let the option remain for workers to install Windows -- at their own expense and without in-house IT support. The cost might well be enough to put them off.

@ Martin Owens

Obviously, they are doing it so that somebody else can write an Open Source alternative!

There'd really only be cause to worry if Ubuntu refused to accept the Free Launchpad / Landscape replacements -- assuming someone goes ahead and writes them -- into their repositories.

"Never buy anything advertised in spam"

"Never buy anything advertised in spam" is pointless advice. If you send off your money for a fake Rolex watch (why? The only people who wear Rolex watches, even real ones, are tossers -- who the hell wants to look like a tosser?) you most probably won't receive anything anyway.

"Spam 'em back" won't work, either, because the contact mailbox is invariably unusable.

The people who send all these millions of messages about "\/1/\9r@", counterfeit "//atches", pirated "0EM" software and dodgy shares aren't the ones making the money ..... they're the ones *having money made out of them*.

The real money is being made selling spamming services and tools to people too stupid to realise that merely sending out twelve billion e-mail messages every second does not guarantee you a favourable response -- just like throwing a brick with a piece of paper reading "FANCY A SHAG?" wrapped around it onto a crowded dancefloor is hardly a good way to get yourself laid.

Bend Over, Here It Comes

"Do remember that chip and PIN was never ever about security; it was about switching the cost of fraud to the card holder.There was never a secret about that; CHIP cards were hacked before they were ever introduced....and the card issuers knew that."

Chip-and-PIN has a second purpose: to acclimatise people to the concept of inserting a card into a reader and keying in a number. All these separate plastic cards, one for each account, are a pain in the backside, right? Soon, all your bank accounts will be accessible via your Biometric National Identity card. Which will also replace your workplace ID. Then your car keys (and the vehicle will even be able to check if you have been using your card to buy alcohol recently, download some information about your metabolism and disable itself until you've had long enough to sober up. Not everyone's car will have this safety feature, of course, so random breath tests -- and car searches -- will still have to be carried out).

The next logical extension, of course, will be for your ID card to replace your house keys. And from there, additional locks will be banned so as to secure the ability for the Secret State Police to enter your home for the purpose of protecting you.

Not Microsoft's decision to make

There is a little thing called "the Doctrine of Exhaustion of Rights", which prevents Microsoft from stopping you selling on a licence. Basically, once you have bought something, what you do with it next is none of the business of the person who sold it to you and whose property it no longer is (unless you *make* it their business, e.g. by throwing it through their window or retaining copies which infringe copyright).

A licence is only required for acts (such as making copies above and beyond Fair Dealing; note also that any copy that is inevitably made in the course of using software for its Rightful Purpose would *not* infringe copyright) which the Law of the Land ordinarily forbids.

But re-selling a piece of software is *permitted* by the Law of the Land. And that's sacrosanct.

Therefore, just because Microsoft's licence does not deign to permit you to re-sell the software, is irrelevant; because *you* *do* *not* *need* *permission* *from* *Microsoft* to sell it.

Question of the Month

"Does anyone know if limiting access by mac address can be compromised?"

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Ahahahahaha ..... oh ..... excuse me ..... got to pick my tits up off the floor .....

This is a non-story

"However, in certain unusual circumstances a savvy attacker can lift the keys from computer memory."

Yes, and those circumstances were absent here. You have to find the computer while it's *actually performing a decryption* (so the keys will actually be in memory -- they get zeroed out as soon as you quit the decryption program), and quickly reboot it. And even then, you're relying on the bit of memory where the keys were stored not getting overwritten during the startup process.

So what we had was a disc of encrypted data and no key. In other words, everything done right. No story.

Anyway, anything that says on it "HOME OFFICE - CONFIDENTIAL" is so obviously a fake, whoever called the Old Bill wants charging with Wasting Police Time.

@Hedley

They don't.

Imagine you have to fit four evenly spaced shelves into a space 4 ft 5 3/8 in high. That's not at all a nice figure to have to divide by five; and even with a calculator, you'll still need pencil and paper in case you manage to forget the whole numbers while you're converting decimal fractions to 16ths or 32nds. (Which, by the way, you'll have to do four times: once for each shelf position, to avoid cumulative errors.)

Or you could just divide 135.6cm. by 5, use the constant function on the calculator to get all four shelf positions (while the answer is showing, press + twice; successive pushes of the = key will give your 27.1145-times table) and have time left over for a cup of tea and a fag.

And Americans wonder why immigrants are so much quicker at building houses!

Bunnies and Kittens

Bunnies and kittens, eh?

That could be more fun than you think! Look up the alternative meanings for "la chatte" (French) and "el conejo" (Spanish) sometime .....

Missing the point a little

Only one of the four engines was running on biofuel, and even then it was a mix containing 20% biofuel and 80% fossil fuel. So that's 5% biofuel.

Factor in that the plane wasn't even carrying any passengers, and it looks as though the test (did anybody really, seriously expect it NOT to work?) has ended up doing more harm than good.

Anyway, of course algae are effective at drawing CO2 out of the air. They're mostly carbon, for crying out loud ..... where do you think they get the carbon from that they're made of?

Here we go again with the whingeing

You can't use fossil fuels because it upsets the greens (and beside which, they're running out). Someone works out a way to make fuel from plants (which aren't going to run out) and the greens *still* get upset, this time because growing plants for fuel means that the land can't be used to grow plants for food.

There's a simple way to make sure that the demands for engine fuel and food don't conflict: make the fuel from the *in*edible parts of plants.

Though I'm sure the greens will still find a reason to get upset .....

Simple solution

Just enable the memory test in the BIOS! This will test every location to make sure it is working. In the process, it gets written to; and whatever may have been there before becomes lost for all time. The test does slow down the boot-up process, but at least it makes sure the RAM is zeroed out.

Adding an extra couple of minutes to something that only needs doing every few months probably is well worth it, if it makes your computer more secure.

@ Mark

According to the terms of the EULA, the permission granted under the licence for your first friend to use the software probably was withdrawn when they voluntarily parted with the original installation media.

What's more interesting is that you don't need to agree to the EULA if you acquired the software subject to the Sale of Goods Act 1979 As Amended. Because according to SGA79, goods must be fit for purpose -- and if using the software for its rightful purpose entails making a copy, then that copy must by definition be non-infringing. Otherwise the goods would not be fit for purpose. Refusing permission to use legitimately-purchased software would void the sale.

@ Paul Barnard

During the Winter, UK times *are* UTC.

The Big Question

The question, phrased as simply as I can put it, is this.

IF the Earth can only sustain *either* fifteen billion* people scratching out a meagre living in the dirt *or* three billion* people living the all-electric decadent Western lifestyle, AND everyone ultimately is going to end up with the same standard of living,

Which is it to be?

* these figures aren't meant to be accurate -- they are for illustration only.

You Get what you Deserve

and if you use *any* software whose Source Code hasn't been independently audited, then you deserve what you get.

The day Opera un-cage their Source Code (and they'll end up having to do so by law, one day) is the day I'll be interested in anything they have to offer.

@AC

Exim is *just* an SMTP server. It doesn't provide POP3 or IMAP (but that's what there are POP3 and IMAP servers for: it's better to be able to play one song from start to finish with no mistakes, than any number of cool riffs). It scales extremely well (just make sure you have plenty of RAM).

It also has a meaningful configuration file syntax. There really isn't much not to like about it -- unless you were educated at Oxford!

Definition of Newton

The Newton is the unit in which force is measured. It is the amount of force required to accelerate a mass of one kilogramme by one metre per second squared.

Since the acceleration due to the Earth's gravity is about 10m/s², a mass of 1kg. exerts a force of about 10N. on whatever it is standing on.

A Joule is also the amount of energy converted from one form to another at the rate of one Watt integrated over one second.

Serves them right

I have never paid for a piece of software in my life, and I don't intend to start now.

What do Adobe supply, that you can't replace with Open Source equivalents?

What do Symantec really do, that they would still need to do if a certain so-called "operating system" espoused the concept of Privilege Separation (as can be found in certain Open Source operating systems)?

A pox on all their houses -- the Hoarders and the Pirates alike.