Posts by Christian Berger

Those treaties typically don't benefit democracies

They enable foreign companies to sue against laws on courts not following the laws of the affected country.

Imagine a country deciding to ban Internet censorship and deep packet inspection. A maker of equipment used for that purpose, who invested some money into selling such equipment in that country can then sue that country. After all their investment is in danger.

Same goes for DRM. If a country would outlaw DRM companies like Macrovision could sue that country.

Since the interests of large companies able to sue typically don't align with the interests of normal people, this is very anti democratic.

We already have artificial "thinking" beeings

Those are large organisations. They behave like a single being and show all the effects you would expect from such. For example an organisation typically has a drive to self preserve. Organisations also want to grow.

The implications of course are that many of those organisations are now harming our world since they are not properly safe guarded.

It cannot be the point of x86 to run Android

The point of x86 is that you have the "IBM-PC"-Architecture which not just includes the instruction set and core, but also how graphics and mass storage works and how to discover hardware. That means I can run an image of every OS written for that platform, and it'll work, no matter what company I buy my computer from. It'll also work on a decade old computers or on computers in a decade.

ARM is still working on it, and it's likely that the SoC manufacturers will oppose/boycott it. This is the opportunity for x86. Now they could act to make mobile devices as useful as laptops are. Instead of having non-upgradable devices, you could have actual computers which you could install a new operating system on after the support for the old one runs out.

Remember when business proposals had to comply with reality?

Today you can just spend money on lobbying making sanity illegal.

And yet no advantage for the common user

Since Apple can just push a new firmware to every user... which can simply read out all the data and transmit it everywhere you want.

Encryption is fairly useless unless you have control over the hardware that encrypts. If you control that hardware you can just bypass the encryption or read out the secret keys.

Virtualisation and Secure Boot are no security features

Since they both either promote or enforce insecure closed code.

Secure Boot only makes sure you cannot boot vendor approved code... which isn't necessarily more secure than just any code. In fact denial of service attacks have already been found my accident, occurring with valid input. (just think of the EFI bugs)

Virtualisation sounds like a good idea at first, however most environments are terribly leaky. Quite often you will be able to snatch (part of) secret keys through the borders of virtualisation. It's a convenience feature, allowing you to share hardware, but not a security feature.

What may have been the problem

Nokia mostly sold to operators. Operators are rather peckish and have different interests to the actual users. That's why the Maemo line shipped (mostly) without GSM modems.

Just imagine a N770 with GSM or UMTS. Why use normal telephony on it, when you can not just use Skype, but even have a video capable SIP-client on it? Why use SMS when you have a variety of different instant messaging services? Why use WAP when you have a full featured web browser?

A good smart phone goes against everything the operators want. Smart phones only cause traffic, but generate little income. If Nokia brought out one of those, they'd have severely damaged their business relation with the operators... or at least they thought they would.

The only innovation Apple brought into this is that they gradually stopped caring about the interests of the carriers.

Logical consequence of the way we build mobile devices

Those simply swept away years of experience on making computer systems secure. Since those devices are essentially completely new developments, only sharing the kernel.

Additionally "security" in the mobile world only means "security" of business models. Mobile devices have protections to keep you from installing a newer version of the operating system, making you buy new hardware whenever the vendor wants you to. It includes protection from copying software.

True security features like community based code reviews are nowhere to be found. Additionally development is so appalling few good programmers write for such mobile devices. Combined with the possibility to make a quick quid even with horribly bad software quality, there are now hordes of bad mobile app developers. This is just like it used to be with the "Multimedia CD-ROM" scene in the 1990s and the "web designers" which came afterwards.

So it's not surprising that a mobile application which claims to do something difficult is in fact completely broken.

Lots of smartphones had hardware keyboards

Of course the good ones had essential keys like the escape key. It's a rather smart idea since you can but the buttons a lot closer together than you could do with an on-screen keyboard while still keeping it usable, plus you don't waste half your screen for the keyboard.

This was just in the news in Germany

They even referred to "The Register". It was on DRadio Wissen.

The problem with such extreme liberals is...

...that they don't understand that laws can be important. Yes there are lots of crap laws which are a symptom of democracy failing in many countries, but laws are there to level the playing field. They are there to protect the weaker, let it be individuals from companies or small companies from large companies.

The question is not more or less laws, or more or less government, but the right laws and the right government intervention. The US are a prime example for this. There are people dying because they cannot afford going to a doctor, yet the government spends trillions on wars and spying on the world.

Does that even count as a supercomputer any more?

I mean this is just "as much" as about 50 desktop computers (OK it has more RAM). I'd put it into the "midrange" category. Not something you'd predict the weather on, but something you'd use as an application server for 500 people.

Reminds me of the Java days

Back when Java was still considered to have a bright future under the sun, they made rings with little Java chips inside so you could exchange data by touch through the conductivity of your body. It never really got anywhere but the keys were hideous.

Why this is less of a problem with open source

Your typical Linux distribution or *BSD system comes with all the software you need in place. So you get your kernel, your shell (graphical if you like), but also things like your web-server. Software running on those systems typically is ported to multiple systems. So your web-server most likely doesn't just run on Linux, but also several BSDs, Solaris and maybe even Windows. Chances are extremely high it'll run on the next version of your operating system without any changes... and even if it needs changes, your distribution will take care of those.

While on Windows you have your operating system, which is fairly bare bones compared to what you get on most other operating systems. Therefore every software vendor needs to supply large parts of the system. Your operating system vendor has no idea what software you run, and your software vendor has no way to contact your operating system vendor in case of problems.

An additional problem is that most software vendors on Windows don't adhere to the UNIX philosophy. This means you end up with closely integrated "do it all" modules having binary interfaces. Since there is little communication between different companies, misunderstandings are common. Particularly with binary interfaces this creates a mess amplifying every little version mismatch.

We need a common plattform first

We need something where it doesn't matter if you've got ARM system from Vendor A or B. You just slap on the ARM version of your favourite operating system just like you do on x86.

Of course there is a big niche for ARM in hosting. Most people and organisations don't need a full x86 server. However they do not want to have a virtual server because of all the security problems involved.

ARM servers might fill the gap, giving you a 10 Euro/month dedicated server.

Does this mean...

we'll now have computing power shortages caused by trading?

Working at that company...

...introducing Ouija boards as a new means of "communication" probably would solve a lot of internal communications problems.

Makes sense

Maned moon missions are a great way to boost your engineering for decades to come. Just look at what it did in the US. The momentum still lasted into the 1980s when it gradually became desirable not to be an engineer, but a banker.

Hmm. let's look at what Sony uses when they need a laptop

For their (back then) new Betacam SX they obviously had to have an edit controller. They chose to go with the time and just have a laptop with some extra hardware to control the VTRs.

Let's look at what kind of laptop they used:

http://www.marcelstvmuseum.com/folders/sony%20betacamSX%20folder.pdf

That doesn't look like a Vaio, does it?

The sad things are...

Most of those patents are either trivial or make the product worse or both.

We need a "communicator" case for that :)

So we'll have a real computer in a pocket.

As a paying subscriber I now consider canceling my contracts

Back in the 1990s I used dyndns since I simply couldn't afford anything else. Then when I wanted DNS dyn seemed the obvious solution, plus I'm doing something good by supporting the free service.

Now since that's gone, I'm considering going, too. The main problem is of course that I cannot port my dyndns.org subdomain.

There are datacenters running on coal, gas and nuclear?

So far every datacentre I have looked into for hosting was running on 100% renewables without nuclear. Just look at companies like Hetzner or Manitu (the later positioning itself as an ethical company).

http://www.manitu.de/unternehmen/oekologie-und-klimaschutz/ (100% water)

http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/unternehmen/umweltschutz (also 100% water)

Other sources of electricity would just be far to expensive to run a datacentre of.

Or of course...

you could get an engineer to set up Asterisk, Freeswitch or anything normal, was well as a VPN and get all of that cheaper, more reliably as well as more suited to your needs.

Systems enforcing licenses...

...should not be considered highly available. It's a completely unnecessary part that can fail, and that can even be a security issue.

I'm sorry, buf if your company needs that...

... you are in _serious_ trouble. Apparently you have stored all your data in non machine readable (office) formats.

I'm also shocked to hear that a product from 2010 _still_ requires ActiveX or plugins.

Fairly academic

It's something called a homomorphic encryption where you can do certain operations on the plaintext by only having the cyphertext. It's doesn't exactly solve a real-life problem as today you can simply perform operations on a trusted device, i.e. your computer at home you can access via your mobile device if needed.

Given the track record of Cisco when it comes to securing their own products...

... this does seem like a blind person talking about colours.

No, there is no congestion on the Web...

Even if you assume that by "Web" they mean the Internet, there is no congestion under normal circumstances. The backbone is easy to upgrade, and you need to exchange your lasers regularly anyhow.

The place where there are congestions is the access network of cable companies. The problem simply is that "broadband cable" is a passive distribution network, it never was meant for individual communications. Those networks are a bit cheaper to roll out, but very expensive to update. The shared part of the network is distributed over many buildings.