Posts by choleric

Re: Brilliant line.

That's probably the only way to improve this episode. "Say 'Hi' to John Postel when you see him."

Re: So, does this mean

Apart from articles about Yahoo!

From the article:

"... any website that does not use a security certificate will feature a red exclamation mark..." If there are bonus gratuitous marks of exclamation to be had why not take them?

Re: Not fair

To be fair, the biggest time waster is probably surfing the internet, and Google has had that down for a few years now. I bet they have data showing that including solitaire bloatware actually increases worker productivity.

In other news Google moves to Redmond and releases Search 95.

Re: Unintended consequences

Can you also imagine the usual suspects not getting the contract for that very reason?

Of course it may not be something that happens all at once. It may be brick by brick as a functional collection of open source libraries are written for smaller projects, which can used as a foundation for the gimungous projects further down the line.

Re: And the race continues

The same could be said of TalkTalk. Even Andrews & Arnold use the TalkTalk backbone for some of their products.

It's a shame the retail products are so poor.

Re: Leap Seconds

Because programmers are so lazy they would prefer to get other people to change the whole calendar than fix their code...

Re: License per concurrent device connected.

Yeah, that "device plugged into the mains" thing is weird isn't it?

What about when I'm low on battery and want to charge while I watch?

And what about the WiFi router? It's a device I'm using to stream iPlayer and presumably it's plugged into the mains too, so does that count?

There is so much stuff with this that sounds half baked.

Re: rfc1149 fail ?

Twitter status page showing the fail quail?

Re: I know, I know

If you fall for that one you must be a real boson.

Sorry, I saw the opportunity for a bad joke and leapt on it.

What is it with the physicists? Boring, boring name. Please tell me we've not run out of them! Can we not take a leaf out of Debian's book and use character names from films? Maybe LotR or, to tighten the feedback loop, Star Trek?

Re: Your wifi cam is not directly accessible from the internet

Yep. A little "upnp: not supported" notification on a device that can manage quite well without it is better than a "you've been pwned" notification any day of the week.

Re: I just can't help it, by Jove

This is now the new Godwin's Law isn't it? Additional bonus points increase as the reference tends towards the complete non sequitur.

Re: An issue that bitterly divides the country

In these glorious days I think you can have your scone and eat it, can't you?

Re: "accidentally mis-dialled a wrong number from space."

No it's much worse than that. If he did it accidentally then he got the wrong wrong number, which, if two wrongs don't make a right, means he meant to get the right wrong number but didn't, so he was wrong, but it was an accident so that's OK, as long as the person on the receiving end wasn't signed up to TPS, in which case the ISS, or ESA, whichever one's right, could be on the wrong end of a hefty fine. I think that's right.

Mind you, it's better than the mistiling event that Columbia suffered. Coat, ta.

Re: Kids for quite a few years now

From http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/none

"It is sometimes held that none can only take a singular verb, never a plural verb: none of them is coming tonight rather than none of them are coming tonight. There is little justification, historical or grammatical, for this view. None is descended from Old English nān meaning ‘not one’ and has been used for around a thousand years with both a singular and a plural verb, depending on the context and the emphasis needed."

So it turns out that Millennials use it either way. And when I say Millennials I mean those from 1000AD, not 2000AD.

Re: Rabbit hole

It was an (obviously poor) attempt to make a link between APIs and code, and verdicts and reasoning. Never mind...

Re: And the patent to UN-STICK the pedestrian???

I think 3M got there a few years ago already.

Re: sarcasm in Silicon Valley

I think Andrew's point was that for all the innovation coming out of t'valley at the moment the people might as well be AIs. Or was it the other way round?

Depends on whether you get the raw image or a jpg. If the latter it won't be random, although with a bit of massaging it might be sufficiently random.

Re: Secure?

Exactly. This sort of thing has worked so well for celebrities over the years, why shouldn't the police try it?

Watch out for The Ploddering coming to a Bittorrent near you soon.

Re: Dual Redundant Power Feeds?

> Dual Redundant Power Feeds

I think that's what made the idea so attractive to the Doc Marten too, if one ran out there was always the other cable to chew on. Talk about a high energy breakfast.

Re: Apparently, he was using Ansible...

Now there's a comment that bites the hand that feeds IT. What's the word for that kind of thing? Re-cursing? Biteback? Excellent?

Re: It means millions of websites will be safer from spying and interception techniques.

It's like lending records in a library. The books are all published and it's no secret what's in them, but your private use of them and what that reveals about your purpose in using them can still be of interest to someone. HTTPS obscures what you have been reading from your ISP and any other observers on the route to the site you are looking at.

It is often possible to work out which site you have been visiting from the server's IP address (although if it's a multihost site that will only resolve to a list of possibles), but the details of exactly which page on that server are hidden by HTTPS.

Yes indeed. Have NASA got no respect? Don't they know that those letters belong to an organisation with an unimpeachable track record in (nearly) space flight and playmonautical derring do? I should think they might apologise and have a word with the FAA by way of making things right again.

Super-Pressure Balloon, what a waste of three good letters anyway. Next they'll be claiming the rights to Nasaly Aspirated Snot-like Accelerant, or some such tissue fodder.

A lot of this information is already available in the headers, (eg SMTPA, DKIM signatures) but email clients don't display it in any easily accessible way (which is your point about the headers), and they are not available for all email systems.

As these new RFCs are developed it would be good to see the IETF keeping an eye on usable indicators or flags that can be quickly displayed in email clients (rather like Gmail does now with indicating an encrypted SMTP channel or otherwise in their web client).

It's not enough to be secure, you've got to show people that you are secure so that they will learn to value it better.

Thunderbird plugin as a proof of concept?

Re: The price baloons. To what exactly?

phuzz wrote: "But yesterday was 14/3/16 (or 2016/03/14 if you want to use the more logical Japanese system), what's that got to do with Pi?"

This is the only redeeming feature of the standard American date format that I can see. It is otherwise irredeemably illogical. It also falls foul of equal opportunities legislation, discriminating as it does against other important irrational numbers like e (2.71828182846ish, try to get that regularly into any standard date format!).

Mind you, while I like eating pies on pi day I'm not sure I would want to indulge in the designated fare on an e day.

Re: Airbags

And there was me thinking the Bulgarian Airbags would be for a soft landing in the event of a crash.

Re: Seems arse about face

Nope. DARPA are the red team in this exercise.

War 101: "Know your enemy."

Absolute genius. Douglas Adams couldn't have done it better. "It turned out that the ultimate weapon of global destruction was not the nuclear bomb but the humble toaster. The world ended shortly after 7.30am on a Thursday as the world's toasters burned their owners to a crunchy crisp."

Re: "Good news if you've got a Nexus..."

It's not just Nexuses. Any phone that can run cyanogen or equivalent can pick up the newest updates.

And then there's your OnePluses too.

It's not all doom and gloom.

Re: Deja Vu

Maybe not, but that doesn't mean he was wrong to say it.

The very act of warning that a bad thing can happen is sometimes sufficient to stop it happening. Someone in a position of influence speaking out about a danger can change policies and strategies across an industry so that the problems they are warned about never come to pass.

When that happens then the bad stuff doesn't. Does that make someone like Gabe Newell wrong? Only in a very limited sense. In fact they have been right, and very effective.

We should applaud those who speak out in this way. If we end up with another PC monopoly then pretty much everyone is worse off.

Most mobile apps report to random IP addresses in AWS or Apple or Google's cloud, and who knows what happens to the data after that? The fact that this watch reports to a Chinese address maybe just indicates that the opsec of this particular company is particularly poor. You don't have to be Chinese to be a dodgy cracker.

I remember installing one well reviewed and popular mail/productivity app on Android and discovering that it sent my email password to a cloud server (AWS in this case) and logged into my account from there. At no point in the "read more" blurb, installation instructions or setup was I told this would be happening. Uninstall, change password, block specific IP address, one star review.