* Posts by Daniel B.

3134 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2007

T-Mobile: Samsung ban really not in the public interest

Daniel B.

At least Verizon does. So it isn't like this is all about selling knockoffs, they actually are concerned on this.

Firefox devs mull dumping Java to stop BEAST attacks

Daniel B.
FAIL

Err... Java isn't Javascript.

NoScript blocks JavaSCRIPT.

Daniel B.
FAIL

Stupid

It isn't like Java is the multi-platform ActiveX; Java has its own security sandbox, unlike ActiveX. The real problem is the cypher protocol implementation; people should be already implementing/migrating to TLS 1.2 already.

If Mozilla were truly worried about Security, they would be disabling *Javascript*, of course.

MySQL.com breach leaves visitors exposed to malware

Daniel B.
Coat

Bobby Tables

I think I know who paid a visit to the MySQL site then...

4G or 'faux G', it's a mealy-mouthed marketing mishmash

Daniel B.

Iusacell, I'm looking at you!

Mexico's Iusacell carrier is outright lying, boasting its 4G network. Except they are a CDMA carrier (thus no 4G there) which has deployed a parallel GSM/EDGE/UMTS/HSPA+ network. The HSPA+ part is what they call "4G".

Of course, the few users who have HSPA+ capable, or even UMTS handsets feel the speed... because nobody's using the network yet. FAIL

Samsung-Apple patent lawsuit tally hits 21, and counting

Daniel B.

So did most Blackberries, and my SonyEriccson (which predates the iPhone). Prior art should nullify this stupid patent.

HP dumps Apotheker for Whitman

Daniel B.

They used to have awesome workstations and servers as well (HP9000). I believe Carly axed PA-RISC and went for the shItanium...

At least they still have calculators...

Memo to open source moralists: Put a sock in it

Daniel B.

The problem with RMS...

The problem with RMS is that his ideals aren't just working in the English language. Free means both "free as in freedom" and "free as in no cost", so Free Software is usually interpreted as $0 software. Ironically, your RedHat exapmle is one that got slammed back when RedHat decided to go pay-only and turn the free RHL into Fedora... and it was slammed because they weren't giving RHEL for free.

Then there's the GNU/Linux debacle, which really puts off anyone outside the FOSS/FLOSS community. It's the IT version of Political Correctness gone mad:

A: I'm checking this cool OS called Linux

B: HERETIC! IT IS CALLED GNU/LINUX!

A: Err.. Okay, so this Linux..

B: GNOOOOOO LEEEENOOOKS! JOO SAY IT GNOO SLASH LINUX!

A: Um... Fuck it, if every Linux user is as demented as you, I'd rather suffer Windows.

Oh, and some people started using the unambiguous Spanish word "libre" instead of free; RMS still won't use Libre Software because he insists on using Free. This puritanism on terminology might be huting FOSS more than MS FUD.

Virtual and real worlds collide in gamers' minds

Daniel B.

Fallout 3, indeed.

My stepson started having the "response menu" effect after 3 weeks playing Fallout 3. I also had a similar effect, and the fact that I put a Pip-Boy theme on my BlackBerry didn't help...

Why was Duke Nukem Forever s**t?

Daniel B.

That was the problem!

"Was pretty much just Halo with a sense of humour."

Halo was shit; it has a stupidd 2 weapon limit and a crappy regen health system that either made it too easy or too hard, coupled with oh so very lineal level syndrome. These are the things that I most hate about Halo... And were the things that DNF had. :(

Having Duke being so awesome and then limiting him to 2 weapons is shitty. Duke3d's defining feature was more or less the same one with Crusader No Regret: the zillion weapong you could use to kill bad guys in veery creative ways.

Netflix: How to completely screw up

Daniel B.

Not that bad though.

Mexico also got Netflix last Monday. While their initial catalog did suck donkey balls, it seems to be getting decent additions daily. Where they are full of fail is on languages; some movies have only Spanish dub (ugh!), others have weird choices like English audio with FORCED Brazilian Portuguese subs (huh? Mexico doesn't even speak Portuguese!) So they really have to fix stuff like that. Oh, HD works on my 3Mbps DSL, and the Latin American Netflix service has no DVD rental stuff. Maybe the LatAm subscribers will offset the US defectors?

Daniel B.

Easy fix

Use a PS3 or a Wii as your client for a Silverlight-free experience :)

Hackers break SSL encryption used by millions of sites

Daniel B.

Er...

Java != JavaScript.

That said, the JS piece is needed because it is a chosen-plaintext attack. It basically exploits the broken IV implementation used for TLSv1.0 to defeat CBC, so the JS thingy is needed...

Daniel B.

AGREE

Yes, JavaScript is a pest. Unfortunately, all that weird AJAXy stuff means that browsers can't just get rid of it, and all this Web 2.0 crap is further extending JS use. Unfortunately, other client-side web code solutions have failed to get off the ground (Java Applets, JavaFX) or are even worse in the security dept (ActiveX) so it seems we're stuck with it.

Then you've got Apple toting the "HTML5" banner, and it's going to be harder to get rid of JS...

How gizmo maker's hack outflanked copyright trolls

Daniel B.

There are quite a few.

CoS is well known for bullying critics with "copyright infringement" lawsuits, which is why Anonymous came to be well.. Anonymous.

Anyone pimping off dead author's works is potentially one of these; the one that screwed over The Verve for "Bittersweet Symphony" being one of them (the Rolling Stones are still alive, but the one with the rights who sued isn't one of 'em)

It might also apply to anyone holding copyrights for works not made by them; they can and will do things against the spirit of the original author.

Ten years after the Twin Towers: What's the Reg angle?

Daniel B.
Flame

Yup....

About less than a week after 9/11, most of us got a chain mail stating all the "niceties" the US has done in the last 60-100 years, and the death toll from many of their interventions in other countries. It ended up saying "6000? That was cheap!" or something like that.

Most Latin Americans, and keen historians will know that Sept. 11 has been an infamous date loooong before the WTC attack. It is the date of the (allegedly CIA-backed) Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power. Some of the ha-ha-but-serious jokes actually mentioned that there was a good chance that Chileans would end up being the ones responsible for 9/11!

Flames, 'coz that's how the Twin Towers went out, along with a lot of our liberties.

9/11: The day we lost our privacy and power

Daniel B.
Unhappy

Bruce Schneier sees the future

Anyone remember the "Applied Cryptography" book? That one was published long before 9/11. I remember reading it some time around 2002, and ran into the following sentence:

"Imagine that a big terrorism attack were to happen in New York. How many liberties would be sacrificed after that?" (paraphrasing, can't remember the actual sentence and I don't have the book anymore). Reading this when something like that had happened, and seeing that the author was right about that made me really sad.

Then again, RIPA's "gimme your crypto keys" clause was passed before 9/11, so maybe the whole event only accelerated the inevitable...

Hey Commentards! [This title is optional]

Daniel B.
Happy

Nice!

Now, can you pleeease fix the mobile version? I can no longer select any icons on the mobile comments section.

Nike auctions Back to the Future trainers

Daniel B.
Coat

shoes?

Screw the shoes, I want the DeLorean!

Apple finally purges Mac OS of disgraced DigiNotar certs

Daniel B.

You do got a point there...

Anyone can simply remove DigiNotar's CA from the Root Certificate store; not just in desktop OSes either. My BB can perfectly delete root CA certs as well. Are the iOS devices able to do this, or is this another of those cases there "Apple knows better" trumps security issues???

If the latter, Apple is fully responsible for this blunder, because the user can't distrust DigiNotar. BTW, I didn't find ay diginotar root certs on my BB...

ChaCha promises answers-by-SMS for free, sort of

Daniel B.

Also as funny...

Search what "chacha" means in Mexican Spanish...

Google tells Iranians: Change your Gmail password

Daniel B.

Kinda fake

IIRC the 'hackers' actually forged their own certs using DigiNotar's CA, isn't this the case? There were no clueless DigiNotar dudes actually giving away www.google.com certs. The forged certs would probably fail an OCSP check, so they're "fake" for all purposes.

British warming to NUKES after Fukushima meltdown

Daniel B.

Not that wrong though.

We're stuck with wasted fuel rods because we aren't reprocessing 'em. Anyway, nuclear/fission is really intended as a stopgap measure; the one thing that will actually give us unlimited power is fusion. Nuclear will last long enough for fusion to be viable... but the same idiots mindlessly campaigning against nuclear are also going against Fusion. Even though Fusion is actually *safe*.

Why modern music sounds rubbish

Daniel B.

@Dagg, Dolby NR

"most cassettes were played on sh*t boom boxes..."

That's why Dolby Noise Reduction was invented. Amp up the trebles while recording, then lower the trebles during playback, so the cassette's "shhhhhh" sound is lowered. Even if your cassette player didn't have Dolby support, you could get the same effect by lowering the treble setting. :)

Mine's the one with the Walkman...

Much of the human race made up of thieves, says BSA

Daniel B.

Businesses

They keep MS and Adobe afloat because they get audited every now and then. If people didn't have pirated MS warez, they would've gone down the Linux path, thus depriving MS from adopters, which will in turn recommend whatever they use at their workplaces.

French bloke fined for failing to shag missus

Daniel B.

Marriage and sex

You can still say no during marriage, but say no too many times and it's grounds for divorce, sometimes even annulation. Some immigrant jackass got himself deported in the US because of this; he married a fat chick (to get legal migration status, it seems) but delayed *any* kind of sex for years before she filed for divorce.

Sounds about right; if you aren't getting any sex, why keep the marriage? And 21 years w/o shagging???

Microsoft: Our clouds are cheaper than VMware clouds

Daniel B.

Right on!

Having had to work with Hyper-V, I can attest that it is a shit product. Its failover capabilities don't work as expected, and the underlying Windows OS is a liability. The one virtualized datacenter I managed was already creaking by the time I left, and they were already thinking about switching over to VMware. Oh, they also had XenServer in the mix, which never failed them...

Daniel B.

If you really want to dump VMware...

Go to XenServer. I would not wish Hyper-V even on my worst enemy! The one company that took on that is now considering switching over to VMware. Yes, they are willing to dole out more $$$ just to get rid of Hyper-V.

After Jobs: Apple and the Cult of Disruption

Daniel B.

Actually paying attention!

"These theories are not only discussed by actual business leaders, they have been successfully applied by them"

The term you're searching for isn't "disruptive", it's "Kamban". The art of not just coming with *one* new thing, but constantly improving on it and leaving your competition behind.

PHP users warned to stay away from latest update

Daniel B.

no md5 crypt!

They shouldn't be using md5 'coz it has been already attacked, it has been proven to be the hash equivalent to DES so everyone's moved to Blowfish for passwd crypto or SHA1/SHA2 for message digests.

Cloud music-locker ruling: MP3tunes claims '99% victory'

Daniel B.

A lot of 'em are legitimate

Megaupload, rapidshare, etc have been used for "piracy", but they have been also used for large file transfers; quite a number of companies have used it for business purposes. Then there's that former DJ who put up all his free promo stuff on filesharing services.

Same thing with BitTorrent; those playing SC2, MGS4 and a good bunch of games are using BitTorrent for game updates. The judge is right in removing the stigma of "filesharing == piracy" that the *AAs insist on using. Then again, these are the guys behind "copyright infringement == theft" so they do seem to lack basic logical thinking anyway.

DISPCLAIMER: I do not condone piracy. But a good bunch of antipiracy arguments are really, really stupid.

Daniel B.

A lot of 'em are legitimate

Megaupload, rapidshare, etc have been used for "piracy", but they have been also used for large file transfers; quite a number of companies have used it for business purposes. Then there's that former DJ who put up all his free promo stuff on filesharing services.

Same thing with BitTorrent; those playing SC2, MGS4 and a good bunch of games are using BitTorrent for game updates. The judge is right in removing the stigma of "filesharing == piracy" that the *AAs insist on using. Then again, these are the guys behind "copyright infringement == theft" so they do seem to lack basic logical thinking anyway.

DISCLAIMER: I do not condone piracy. But a good bunch of antipiracy arguments are really, really stupid.

RIM BlackBerry Bold 9900

Daniel B.
Coat

It gets better...

Chacha is slang for "maid" in Mexico. So people who buy that particular phone are probably going to be er ... fondling their smartphones...

RIM to turn in BlackBerry-using looters after London riots

Daniel B.
Happy

iPhone overrated, BB's death exaggerated

I've seen this as well; as much as the followers of the Cult of Jobs claim that the iPhone is taking over the smartphone and gaming markets, I see an ever-increasing number of Blackberries among the yoof. BBM is the new MSN Messenger for a good number of people, despite WhatsApp's rise.

SQL survives murder attempt by mutant stepchild

Daniel B.
FAIL

Toxic stuff

Most, if not all of these NoSQL thingies throw ACID out of the window. The problem is that the aren't meant to be substitutes for RDBMSs, but more for non-relational stuff that doesn't quite fit the relational model. However, it's being sold as an "SQL Substitute" which is wrong, and whoever goes ahead and implements this just out of hating SQL is going to have this bite back!

Crypto shocker: 'Perfect cipher' dates back to telegraphs

Daniel B.
Boffin

Public-key cryptography?

That's what Public-key crypto solves. Send the key, encrypted in such a way that only the intended recipient can decrypt it.

Angry Birds, other iPhone games shotgunned by Lodsys

Daniel B.

Troll, troll, troll your patent gently down the (money) stream

Patent troll. 'Nuff said.

US Supremes dump violent video game ban

Daniel B.

ESRB

Or, they could simply make something like ESRB or RSAC mandatory, like MPAA ratings for movies. The system is already in place, no need to write stupid laws like this one. Let an actual board set the standards!

Duke Nukem Forever rocks up on shelves

Daniel B.
Meh

2 guns only

That 2 guns only shit was made popular thanks to that really shitty game called Halo. Unfortunately, it seems to have turned into "teh thing" on FPS, so a good bunch of FPS now have that idiotic rule. Please, I'd rather have the "Felix the Cat bag" approach to weapons/ammo than the shitty 2 guns only system!

LulzSec hacks US Senate

Daniel B.
Facepalm

*Cringe*

I also cringed when I read "the firm behind Quake and Doom". That will always be id Software, and even now id Software still exists even if only as a ZeniMax subsidiary. Bethesda will "sell" Doom 4, yes, but the whole coding stuff is still being made by id Software.

Duke Nukem Forever

Daniel B.
Unhappy

They should simply go PS3.

If they're going to do real good stuff, they should give out PS3 versions. The shitbox 360 is getting outspecced by gaming PC rigs but the PS3 still has the hardware to cope with the increasing requirements. But yes, any real good PC game will blow any console version out of the water. I suspect that Take-Two Interactive are on PS's payola...

States consider saner 'sexting' penalties for teens

Daniel B.
FAIL

How about...

decriminalizing the whole act? It's incredibly stupid that kids can get jailed or whatever for sending nude pics of themselves to begin with. No wonder the US is the laughing stock everywhere else, where kids sexting are jailed and put in the Sex Offenders Registry, and Janet Jackson showing a boob serves to enact 50's-style censorship laws. Sheesh...

Time to say goodbye to Risc / Itanium Unix?

Daniel B.
Boffin

x86 is a steaming turd.

The reason we're still using this ancient piece of crap is because:

- Intel kept on cranking up the GHz to match the more power-efficient RISC chips,

- AMD went ahead and jerry-rigged 64-bit support onto the crappy x86 processor.

- Windows took over the desktop market, and it mostly runs on x86.

Points 1 and 2 turned x86 into a crappy but capable trashware processor capable of mimicking what the good processor archs were doing. Point 3 menat that x86 took over the desktop market, while the RISC alternatives began dying off, with Apple being the last one to vacate the PPC arch. Intel tried to move on with Itanium, but it failed in its first attempts and AMD seized the day with their jerry-rigged x86-64. Ironically, competition killed the path out of x86, while lack of competiton was what stuck us to x86 in the first place.

Apple pilfers rips off student's rejected iPhone app

Daniel B.
Devil

Re: Copyright of what?

"Did Apple copy the source code of Wifi Sync? Probably not, since the developer didn't send it to them"

Isn't "send us teh codez" part of the approval process of Apple's App Store? The whole point of their approval process is that they "check" the code so that nothing ugly gets through ... or so Apple says.

Of course, it is very possible that Apple just built their function from scratch, so it isn't a clear-cut case even if they did get the source code. :(

Pirate-bothering ACS:Law lawyer goes bankrupt

Daniel B.

RICO worthy lawsuit

AC, you're missing the point. A good bunch of these lawsuits, maybe all of them, were based on shaky "evidence", followed by a threat of "pay 500 quid or we'll bust your ass!" which reeks of mafia-like activity. Had this happened in the US, ACS:Law would have been slammed with a RICO lawsuit. Because it mostly fills the "racketeering" part of that one...

RSA makes token offer to worried customers

Daniel B.

0wnage of the century!

Damn. I work in the IT Security industry. I just can't find myself how to tell any of our clients that they might be 0wned if they're using these tokens. Even worse, one of my online banking services uses the SecurID tokens! Fortunately, they also use a zillion extra security measures, including extra auth questions if I ever log on from a *different* PC.

Hopefully, most systems secured by these tokens have some other layer of security in addition to SecureID; some are even inaccessible from the outside. Sill a big FAIL for RSA :(

Has Steve Jobs killed the consumer hard disk industry?

Daniel B.

150Mb/s? Where?

You should really see my g WiFi over here. Sometimes it gets knocked down to 18Mbps, which is probably competing with 10BaseT or 802.11b at most.

Wired kit, even the cheapest kit, will always be faster than wireless.

Daniel B.

@DZ-Jay

Of course iCloud is optional, in fact it has an added cost so it isn't like someone's forcing you to use it. Most of the responses are actually dealing with the tone of the article, which states that HDDs are dead because PCs are dead because iToys can now sync w/o a PC or Mac. That assumes not only that all iToy owners subscribe to iCloud, but that everyone has an iToy, which isn't the case in the real world.

It's like that other claim that Apple's iMac was the death knell for the floppy disk. No it wasn't... it died when USB flash drives became cheap enough to take over them.

Microsoft waves CentOS club at Red Hat

Daniel B.
Boffin

Xenix...

... was sold of by MS and lived a very long life under the name of Santa Cruz Operation, or SCO. The only thing that killed it was that it was purchased by the ultimate patent troll: Darl McBride.

MS ditched Xenix because they went on with IBM to make OS/2 ... then they split from that project and went on to create NT.

Apple proposes even tinier SIMs for future iPhones, iPads

Daniel B.
Boffin

@Giles

"It was Apple who started off the death of the floppy drive and were one of the first to adopt USB."

Yet floppies were still in use as late as 2005-6. It was when affordable USB pendrives started coming out that PCs stopped having floppy drives. The iMac dropped floppy support too soon, as there wasn't a viable widespread replacement when they did. We were still having stuff like the iomega Zip/Jaz drives, the Magneto-Optical stuff, the "SuperDisk", and CD-RW. That would be like launching *today* a 4G-only phone!