Posts by Steven Knox

"Then you can deploy your app to Google."

But do you have to?

Huh?

First

"(The US FAA don't care for unmanned planes near hurricanes in US airspace, apparently.)"

and later

"Previously the Aussie robocraft used a American naval airbase at Key West, but it's hoped that the new Barbados deployment for the 2008 hurricane season will allow more storm probes than in previous years."

So was the former simply Lewis speculating in his usual paranoid manner (and completely ignoring the latter fact), or did the FAA recently change their stance, and the latter is NOAA spinning the fact that they must now deploy from Barbados?

The REAL benefit:

Window insert/replacement.

Add a camera, and you can still see out, you can switch your boring street view to something on TV or to a landscape of your choosing, and best of all, you can present whatever face you want to the world.

Switch on a Yahoo! advert whenever Google's Street View team are coming through, put up semipermanent "Scientology is a Cult" placards, the possibilities are endless!

Misleading Headline

Microsoft hasn't made an ODF move -- they've just done some PR. I take their claims about a seriously as I do the new "incarnation" of Dr. Who.

"There is a continuum of thought related to interoperability reaching back many years based on the growth of Microsoft’s enterprise business, all of which has been affected by the regulatory activity in the U.S. and Europe."

Yes, I've heard of that continuum -- it ranges all the way from "embrace" through "extend" right into "extinguish".

Basic Rant

Because my pH level is too high. Nothing says "I haven't got a life" better than replacing Fs with PHs. STOP IT!</rant>

"When it comes to protecting privacy, so many Americans just can't be bothered."

Oh.

So that's why privacy advocates consistently rate the UK above the US in their lists of the worst surveillance states.

"...huge amounts of bandwidth ... during rush hour."

Shurley that's the impact of wardrivers?

@Devil's Advocate:

"It doesn't need to care about encryption, as it drills into the payload of every data packet and reassembles the content, thereby knowing what it is"

The only way it could do that is by decrypting the payload. So either it has to care about encryption, or all it's doing is checking headers. Since the first is unlikely, odds are you've been reading their marketing materials, which would tell you that the product cures world hunger if they believed you'd fall for it. I recently got a call from a guy promising that his DNS server software would ensure 100% uptime for my web server.

@Greg Fleming

"It can be done, so don't go saying there's no such thing as a secure computing device."

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A SECURE COMPUTING DEVICE!

The best anyone can hope to achieve is to make a device secure enough that only people AS CLEVER AS THEY ARE can break into it, and even to make something that good, you have to be fscking BRILLIANT.

That's why we have property protection (both physical and intellectual) laws. If we really could make a secure computer, or building, we would, we'd put everything in them, and we wouldn't need any laws to protect our stuff.

Missing/incorrect information

"... 586 for 1,000 machines running Windows 2000. Servers running Win 2003 had ... 586 unique threats per thousand machines. "

So, same results for 2k and 2k3, or wrong number copied? And what version of Windows 2000 are we talking about?If they're including 2000 Server and Advanced Server in their results, that would likely skew the 2000 rates down significantly.

This article raises more questions than it answers. I'd like to read the full report; perhaps someone could post a link to it?

Load times for external stylesheets...

had your title "How to destroy 60 hard drives an hour" right next to your advertisement "Test Drive Sun's Quad-Core Intel Xeon systems today"

NY DOES have a right to their taxes...

and it's NOT Amazon's responsibility to collect them. Like Maine's, where I live, New York's sales tax is actually a sales and use tax. That means that if you live in NY, and don't pay sales tax on something you buy, you need to pay use tax when you pay your income tax. (See http://www.tax.state.ny.us/pit/income_tax/sales_and_use_tax_on_my_income_tax_return.htm)

Re: In a way, they're right ...

Actually, the contract does NOT take place in the PC. A contract only takes place when both parties agree to it, and Amazon doesn't agree to sell you anything until they check your credit card and get their money. So the contract is finalized on Amazon's server.

Update: Microhoo! merger has already happened

Check out the sig line on this e-mail i just received:

*******************************************************************

FOREIGN TRANSFER MANAGER

MICROSOFT SECURITY DEPARTMENT (UK).

M.S.PRO. ZONAL COORDINATOR

Phone Number: +447045756797

Phone:+447024099197

E-mail: claimsdepartment61@yahoo.com.hk

********************************************************************

Notice the e-mail address for the Microsoft Security Department (UK) is a Yahoo (Hong Kong) address. Microsoft wouldn't use a competitor's product, so they must have already bought them. This also proves you fellas didn't actually give Hong Kong back to China like you promised. Now if you don't mind, I'm going to respond to this e-mail with my personal and bank information so they can automatically deposit the winnings from that lottery they say I won. Funny that, I don't even remember entering...

How many Microsoft customers...

are being left with (more) insecure desktops because of these 38,000 customers with this POS* installed? Surely the right thing to do would be to make the install check for the existence of this POS* and simply not install in that one case (although surely the right thing to do would have been to test the install on a system with this POS* to begin with.) That shouldn't take more than 1 hour to code. Then the update could go out as planned, just not install on the POS* systems.

* Guess which expansion of POS I mean.

No, really?

He felt that even this would "begin to undermine the whole distinction between humans and animals".

Did he ever think that maybe that's because the whole distinction is artificial to begin with?

Penguin, because they're people too...

@David Wiernecki ***PEDANT ALERT***

'In other news - he was charged with "uttering" threats? So, if he'd bleated them, or sneered them, or yelled them, he'd be in the clear?'

Er, David, "utter" simply means to speak or bring forth. So all of those actions you mentioned are forms of uttering. Perhaps you read "mutter"?

Contract

"Northrop Grumman was pleased to announce last week that it had won a $54.9m contract from the US Air Force to fit the so-called Airborne Signals Intelligence Payload (ASIP) aboard the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper aerial wardroids. "

Sounds like they got a pretty good deal on their cellphone contract, there.

The real question is...

why didn't the TSA simply model their system after something like the OFAC's SDN list* to begin with? Did they really think this type of thing had never been done before?

*The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control's Specially Designated Nationals list is a list of entities which US banks must check before opening a banking relationship or transferring funds. It's got names, addresses, aliases, birth dates, etc. specifically for the purpose of checking if you're e.g, Osama Bin Laden the terrorist or Osama Bin Laden the greengrocer.

Correction

"The LinkStation Mini uses a pair of 5,400RPM 2.5 inch notebook drives to perform its magic, making it the only Buffalo storage unit not to run on SATA drives."

Not so. The LinkStation Mini DOES use SATA drives (see http://www.buffalotech.com/files/products/LinkStation-mini_DS.pdf) This is not surprising, as 2.5" SATA drives have become the norm in the laptop world.

Oh, you poor, misguided fools.

When you buy a dozen eggs, you don't get 16. When you buy 100 CDs, you don't get 128. When you're going 30km/hour, you're not going 32,768 meters per hour.

The only reason "kilobyte", "megabyte" and "gigabyte" have been used to represent 1,024, 1,048,576, and 1,073,741,824 bytes respectively is because it was and is illogical and impractical to package RAM in quantities of 1,000, 1,000,000, and 1,000,000,000 bytes. It was easier to refer to 1,024 bytes as a kilobyte rather than 1.024 kilobytes. THAT's where the inaccuracy is. Hard drive manufacturers (bless their kind souls) have been maintaining the purity of the decimal prefixes all this time, bearing the full brunt of your petty wrath.

Maths

.'..scans can be generated in "as little as 10 seconds" and have "potential peak throughput levels of over 400 people an hour"...'

10 seconds per scan is 6 scans per minute or 360 scans per hour = well UNDER 400 people per hour (10% is certainly statistically significant). Are they expecting people to double up? Actually, that could be fun -- see what poses you and your (travelling) partner can do (fully clothed, of course) in the booth!

If you go by the page for the video video mentioned above, 2 seconds per scan is 30 scans per minute or 1800 scans per hour = WAY ABOVE 600 people per hour. Perhaps in this case they're assuming that the operators/passengers are too slow?

Really? No-one else immediately though...

I can think of a few laptops I'd like to live in...

@yeah, right

'If they took security "seriously", would they have perhaps not incorporated said bug in the first place?'

Yeah, right. Because people (epecially programmers) are perfect, and it was a deliberate decision to incorporate that bug.

Yeah, right. Because programmers are never under heavy pressure by management to "get it done and out the door yesterday."

Yeah, right. Because programmers are in full control of the compilers and run-time environments that their management decides they will code to, and of the configuration of their clients' systems, so they can ensure that they work as claimed.

yeah right, either you've never written a line of code in your life, or you've written buggy code.

Am I the only one...

who saw "model" and "Platinum" and was hoping...?

@Nicholas - More Pedantry

"I love the way John _has_linked_ to a page all about the film, yet _still_manages_ to misspell the films title!"

I believe that you'll find that tense misalignment is a grammatical error. Try "has linked...has still managed" or "links...still manages" -- or follow Sara's example and use "has linked...while still managing".

PS - Don't mess with Sara. She's the best Vulture Central's got (and surely vastly underpaid)!

PPS - To those which hate the constant pedants' wars: I agree, but pedantry is like crack to some of us -- specifically those of us who actually cling to the horribly unlikely dream that someday humankind will create a language (or anything, for that matter) that is logically consistent and easy to use.

"bogus researchers"

That description about sums it up for me. Whatever happened to the scientific method?

Oh, and "ostensibly so they could be entered into a draw to go to Paris" -- and slightly more women than men responded to that one? Really?

[icon is part of the joke, for the slow]

1,2,3,4 I declare a distro war!

C'mon, if you aren't using Slackware on hardware you built yourself from scratch (bonus points if it's at least 1% electrical tape), you might as well use OS X or something else from Fisher Price.

I agree with brandon

The space you wasted telling your audience OF IT PROFESSIONALS that:

"DNS lookups are one of the most basic and common tasks on the internet. They translate human-friendly names such as theregister.co.uk with machine-readable IP addresses like 212.100.234.54."

would have been much better used with a list or link to a list of affected servers, or of those systems which use real crypto.

Perhaps El Reg was a test site...

That would explain amanfrommars!

Really?

'Billy Hoffman, manager for HP software' security labs, added: "Companies will say: 'We can Web 2.0ify your existing applications in 15 minutes - we've got a wrapper'. These people are charlatans, and you should punch them in the face. They are taking your back-end database tiers and moving them to the parameter."'

So is HP actually advocating criminal violence, or is Hoffman providing personal advice here? Oh, and ditto on 'parameter s/b perimeter'. One doubts that a database of any significance could be efficiently stored in one parameter.

@Gordon Ross

I think if you re-read my comment, you might see that I covered that under the "compelling features" argument -- unless you're actually claiming that UK operators bid so much that they don't believe they'll ever turn a profit on those 3G licenses. Then I'd say I covered that under "incompetent management." I'll explain more in depth if you ask nicely and spell my name correctly ; )

Shurely...

the problem would soon solve itself, if the danger is indeed as Dunkin claims?

"two-inch square sliver"

Isn't a sliver something which is narrow in two dimensions and relatively long in the third? If this were circular, you could call it a disc, but I think the best desciptive term might be a "shingle", not the least because when the CPU is put on it, you could call it

Still no reason to buy.

The vast majority of existing content is recorded in < DVD quality. No amount of processing is going to add compelling detail to these shows.

Most new shows recorded in HD don't have details which require anything over DVD quality. Those which do usually suck in terms of quality of content.

The only HD content I've seen which is even remotely compelling is a very short list:

Planet Earth

Blue Planet

Now I love those shows, but I'm not spending @$300 just to watch

them in HD.

BD adoption should not be measured in terms of players sold anyway, as PS3 skews those results. There's no definitive way to tell if a PS3 is being used as a Blu-Ray player, a gaming machine, or both. So the only metric that matters is disc sales. As long as the content is not compelling, that metric will be relatively low.

@Joe Bloggs -- the other 10.4 million will be ones that were sold before this year. The 29.4 million figure is the total number of households which own a device, as stated in the article, not the annual sales. Paris's reading comprehension is quite stellar, too, no?

JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION!

'We asked why Karoo had not made the trial opt-in if the service is so useful. "Well, we could do it either way," the spokeswoman said. "We'll be listening to customer feedback."'

Yes, you could do it either way. That possibility was inherent in the question. The obvious point of the question was, why didn't you do it the more logical, customer-friendly way in the first place?

Please use the above paragraph as a template response next time a "spokesperson" thinks it's sufficient to reword your question as an answer.

@Webster Phreaky

Will you put your Reg commenting privileges on it?

Completely changes my image of...

blade servers.

RTFA

1. The patent is for the complete device, as evidenced by the title, and further by the full application. So unless you've seen a phone WITH slide-out keyboard AND trackball AND dual-orientation screen, then, no there isn't prior art -- and thus if the patent were granted, they wouldn't be able to sue for infringement on parts of the system. Seeing as RIM are the only ones using trackballs at all on their phones (that I know of -- other examples?), and haven't yet used slide-out keyboards, I don't see why the device WHEN CONSIDERED AS A WHOLE is not novel, although I also don't see whom they'd need protection against, either.

2. Yes, Simon, RIM is Canadian, but the patent app was filed by their US legal branch with the US PTO, which is why all the other commentors have their panties in a bunch (but see 3).

3. Finally, this is a patent APPLICATION, not a granted patent. Wait to see what the US PTO do with it before whingeing, please.

Power Connector Vulnerable as well.

"About the only thing that's not vulnerable to an attacker with physical control is the power connecter."

Don't see why that's not vulnerable, at least to a DOS attack...

-(= ||

@AC

"Why have they put all the workings into the lid rather than under the keyboard?"

Probably because the keyboard's removable, as mentioned in the article. Feel free to read it, at your leisure.

Actually, IP Addresses are NOT PID...

...but they are being treated as such by the courts, and THAT's the problem.

IP Addresses identify a node on a network. When combined with ISP logs and accurate date/time information, they may even be able to identify an account with which that node is associated. But they DON'T indicate in any way what individual is using that node (or indeed, how that node was accessed.)

The only consistent way to handle IP addresses would be to mark them as non-personal data AND make it illegal for any entity (public or private) to in any way claim that they do indentify an indivual.

So what are the odds we get logically consistent action from a goverment?

And the Survey Title is...

"Addition to Technology and Work"

I think thats as far as we have to go to determine the value of this bit of research, thank you very much...