Posts by Oh Homer

Re: "How would you respond to them ?"

I would give them the single key needed to open that single lock, which is a radically different proposition to giving them a master key to every lock, and the legal precedent they'd capitalise on to use it speculatively (just as the NSA did), violating the rights of millions of innocent people in the process.

If the price of protecting and serving the public is oppression, then in reality we are being neither protected nor served, we are merely exchanging one injustice for another.

Re: "let the nation of Albania handle it all"

Why should anyone other than a sovereign nation's own government be allowed to "handle" anything in particular affecting that nation?

Want your dodgy "patents" enforced in the UK? Then register them (and have them scrutinised and approved - or rejected) in the UK.

Why should some foreign nation's unelected quangos have any jurisdiction whatsoever over this country, regardless of whether it's a real nation or some fictional micro-nation?

Not just Trump

There is a very sick prevailing culture of "blame the victim" in America, fuelled by a psychopathic contempt for the poor - most of whom work full time (in multiple jobs) and pay taxes (unlike their privileged critics, who hide their ill-gotten hoards in tax havens).

Most shocking, to me anyway, is the fact that this sick attitude extends to the deeply impoverished working class majority (although America's neoliberal rules of etiquette dictate that we're not allowed to label them as such), since they've been indoctrinated by centuries of neoliberal doctrine into the delusion that they are all merely "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", that poverty doesn't really exist (and if it does then it certainly isn't the fault of capitalist vultures), and anyone who claims otherwise is clearly just a "lazy bum" who deserves no sympathy whatsoever.

"acceptable ads"

That would be ... none.

The marketeer monkeys haven't really thought this one through properly, have they? Either that or their advertising cult mentality is so deeply ingrained that they essentially live in an alternate reality, where people who go to the bother of downloading a plugin, specifically for the purpose of blocking spam, don't really want to block it.

I use an ad-blocker (one that actually works and hasn't prostituted itself to the marketeers, unlike AdBlock). I also run ads on my site. I would no more expect to be able to force people to look at one of those ads, than force them to read one of my articles in the first place.

Business is an opportunity, not a right.

Re: "how expensive voice calls were under state ownership"

Bollocks.

I'm old enough to remember when you could make a call from a phone box using just a 2p piece.

Today? I pay £40 just for the fucking "rental", without even making any calls.

Greed may be "good" for the greedy, but it doesn't really do much for the rest of us.

Re: "This has been done"

Here's a handy list, including the devices you were looking for, and others with an open hardware specification.

Re: H0rsePr0n

Shouldn't that be "PigPr0n"?

Re: "STATE Monopoly?"

I'm fairly confident that there's nothing left of the infrastructure built by the Electric Telegraph Company in the 1840s, save for what's been preserved for posterity in museums.

The same was certainly not true for many years after the privatisation of the publicly funded GPO telecoms infrastructure.

The problem with the "speed camera" analogy

A person caught by a speed camera typically does not trigger it deliberately, and therefore cannot be said to have "taken the photo".

The degree to which the monkey may or may not have been aware of the purpose of the object he was holding is debatable, but the fact remains that he did trigger it by deliberately fiddling with it, and is therefore the "creator" of the result, in both the logical and moral sense. Even less ambiguous is the fact that in no sense did the owner of the camera actually take the photo, irrespective of what he may have been doing to stage the scene, manipulate the monkey, or anything else.

To put this into context, if I convince you to travel to Australia and take a photo of Ayers Rock, do I somehow become the copyright owner of the photo you took, just because I "set it up"?

The fact that the law does not support copyright ownership by anything other than humans means that this monkey's photo is unavoidably in the public domain, as should be any artistic work that is not actually created by humans.

I fail to see what is so difficult to understand about something as crystal clear as this. It really seems like a case of copyright extremists desperately clutching at straws.

TalkTalk "Doing a Ratner"

Even if it's true (which I sincerely doubt), existing (and potential) customers won't especially care that TalkTalk isn't "legally obligated" not to be a bunch of cowboys, and will vote with their wallets.

The cavalier attitude alone will probably send them running for the hills, if not the security risk itself.

Personally I've always suspected that any company that spams as aggressively as TalkTalk is highly dubious. This is merely confirmation.

Goodbye TalkTalk.

Re: "I blame North Korea, China or Russia"

Looks like someone beat you to it and has already blamed "Islamic extremists".

Well, yes. Obviously.

Basement-dwelling geeks and career criminals apparently feature very low on the British Establishment's list of likely suspects, strangely enough.

Re: So opt out.

Fait accompli, at least as far as possible, which sadly isn't very far, considering that Microsoft steals money from my wallet for an OS that I don't want and will never use, every time I buy a PC.

These days it's a moot point though, since I, as with most people, probably have more chance of buying a new VCR than that equally archaic museum piece called a PC.

Re: Avoid btrfs like the plague

Please explain why I should rise to the challenge of someone who openly concedes to being completely ignorant about btrfs, versus someone who actually used it every day for two years?

Re: Meeeh

As much as I'm a big GNU/Linux fan, sadly the award for virtual desktops probably goes to the Commodore Amiga.

The BBC's proposed "mechanism"

Surely the only possible "mechanism" to determine the "legitimacy" of an encrypted connection is to either decrypt it (by technical or subversive methods) or interrogate the user (by making some sort of threat), either one of which would be in violation of all kinds of laws and international treaties.

I realise the BBC probably thinks it's some kind of branch of the Met Police, given the sort of gangster tactics its enforcement goons operate, but criminalising secure data connections in foreign countries is stretching things a bit far even for the BBC.

Re: "Copyright is a basic property right."

Exactly. Intellectual "property" is an artificially designated temporary privilege, not some inalienable right.

If the state protection of knowledge and ideas were a basic property right then it would never expire, but it does expire, and with very good reason, because it's provided for dubiously pragmatic reasons that are morally indefensible (such is the nature of pragmatism).

It's not really any form of property or right, it's just a time-limited inducement to the sort of people who are only motivated by the promise of being able to monopolise their derivatives of other people's pre-existent knowledge and ideas, in the perhaps vain hope of "promoting science and the useful arts".

In the final analysis, however, the actual usefulness of anything "created" by their greed-driven target audience of monopolists is highly debateable.

Re: "surprised"

Actually no, I'm not in the least bit surprised that GCHQ is breaking the law, and I never claimed to be. Fascist regimes tend to do that, after all. I'm merely stating the obvious, while noting the futility of stating the obvious. It's a very British thing that seems to confuse the hell out of Yanks, which is one of the other reasons we do it. It also tends to elicit responses indicating support or opposition for whatever thing it is we're complaining about, thus allowing us to easily identify who the dicks are, and add them to The List of people who will be lined up and shot when the revolution comes.