Posts by Vic

Re: Time for some truly revolutionary GUIs?

Why voice control is not the goal of the next level of PC and tablet UI design I don't know

Because many offices are open-plan.

Vic.

Re: @ A K Stiles

So when they ask you for the password "You do not have to say anything."

No, you don't.

But you will go to prison if you don't.

As you can probably tell, I have significant reservations about this law...

Vic.

Re: Longitude prize

You're facing the intractable First Contact problem, where Alice and Bob need to prove themselves to each other when they've never met before. The only way to do that is with a third party, Trent. Problem is, any Gene or Mallory can just impersonate or fool Trent.

Your point notwithstanding, the bigger problem IMO is that Alice has already decided to trust Gordon[1] and Mallory to boot. So the root of the web of trust is already compromised before we start.

The solution - as always - is education. But I've no idea how to get end-users to care about this[2], let alone get them to take action in terms of curating their root cert lists...

Vic.

[1] Who, as we all know, is a moron...

[2] Even after they've suffered personal losses, most users just think tha's how life works.

Re: "the loot might be worth up to $36m, Samsung put the price much lower at $6.3m"

> $6.3m manufacturing cost price. $36m selling price.

Nah. That's $36m "street vallue".

Nice to see cop estimates are the same the world over...

Vic.

Motor racing is a NON CONTACT SPORT.

You've not seen Anthony Reid drive[1], then?

Already we have drivers who grew up with that heap of crap that is BTCC crashing in to each other because they think its OK

I caught the tail end of a Touring Car race on telly the other day - it appears that the BTCC are clamping down on contact. Which is as it should be - it's supposed to be a demonstration of skill, not a test of armour...

"it was OK in BTCC so I thought it was OK in FFord"

Thankfully, open-wheel contact is usually expensive[2] enough that drivers tend to avoid it long before they get to the super-high speeds where they might consider it profitable

Vic

[1] Particularly when there are flint walls around.

[2] I caught up with an old friend the other day - he rented out his Jedi this year. The bloke that rented it crashed on his first race, taking the car out for the rest of the season while it had a £14K rebuild...

Re: A perplexing article

The main benefit of "finagling the signal" is that it can be dynamically adapted - in near real-time or as part of a set-up procedure - to the acoustics of ANY room

You've never played the Railway Inn in Winchester, then?

Vic.

Apple's understanding of the device being "off" / in stand-by is to just turn off the video output. The processor still runs at full speed and the hard drive still spins at normal speed

Sky decoders used to be the same - putting the device into "standby" meant turning off the A/V outputs and turning the front-panel LED red.

These boxes need to be tuned to a stream, need to have their demux running, and need to have the CPU decoding some of the table information in the stream. This is how the Conditional Access stuff works, so I imagine it is still the case with current builds.

Does anyone know what the energy impact of DAB would be if anyone used it?

Vic.

Re: and so, ad infinitum

> you did know appealing an ICO decision is free, didn't you?

It isn't.

There may be no fee to the ICO involved, but that doesn't mean there are no costs.

Vic.

Re: "this means your phone will fall back to the mobile data network while the screen is off...

Pfft, unless (as I do) I keep my phone switched off until I need to use it. My battery has lasted 19 days so far.

I keep the phone switched on, but BT/WiFi/Data switched off unless I'm using it.

I get about 8 or 9 days out of my Galaxy S2 :-)

Vic.

Re: And if I actually USE Linux..........

However, I bet if I setup a linux distro, you'd be in, out, and shaking it all about before I could say "hokey cokey".

Actually, no.

The defaults for *most*[1] distros is to set up for secure operation, and let the admin punch holes in it as he sees fit. As long as you don't take stupid advice from idiots on fora[2], it remains pretty secure.

Windows, although perfectly securable these days, comes with many of the defaults set to "insecure" to make sure that users don't get confronted with any sort of "access denied" errors. That's a shame.

Vic.

[1] Not all. There have been moves to make Linux "friendlier". This invariably makes it a steaming pile of security nightmare in return for a very minor increase in (temporary) user satisfaction.

[2] The most common one is to chmod everything in sight to 777. This makes it writable by everyone - so the immediate errors go away. And it makes your server *trivial* to take over. I've had customers pay me big money to secure their boxes, then *insist* that I 777 everything because they read it from a starnger on a website. I need written instruction to do that...

Re: Is this really a problem?

Do we really need to upgrade every year for a new handset that doesn't differ significantly from what came before?

Yes, you do.

And you need to put your one-year-old, high-end handset on fleabay for £100. Where I will buy it.

Ta muchly!

Vic.

Some authorities went with a Fuji solution, others went with Kodak. Nobody specified that the two digital formats had to be compatible - so they're not.

Does mogrify support both formats? What would be the cost to make it so that it does?

Vic.

Re: Confused...

It doesn't have to be a root user especially, just a directory in which one has sufficient rights to create a file AND (rather more importantly) some dumb person (with sufficient rights) who is likely not to notice a a file called '-rf *' or whatever before doing some wildcard rm anyway.

But that's not an exploit.

Even if the "-rf *" is interpreted as a file before wildcard expansion (as it is on my shell[1]), all it does is prevent the command from working properly; it doesn't give the file's creator any additional privilege unless it is being executed by some sort of command processor - i.e. the root user needs to type "python *" or something eequally idiotic.

In short, this can only catch out users with elevated privilege and not the slightest clue what they are doing. And there are easier ways to pwn them than this...

Vic.

[1] As follows :-

[vic@perridge wc_test]$ ls -l

total 4

-rw-rw-r--. 1 vic vic 0 Jul 4 11:05 foo

-rw-rw-r--. 1 vic vic 4 Jul 4 11:05 -rf *

[vic@perridge wc_test]$ rm -rf *

rm: invalid option -- ' '

Try `rm ./'-rf *'' to remove the file `-rf *'.

Try `rm --help' for more information.

Re: Still asking why (anything post XP)

Little can bring a system to its needs quicker (ha) than multiple competing applications all running their own update check process every time the system starts

Microsoft could trivially - and perfectly legally - port yum or similar to Windows and get it adopted as the way to do software updates.

This would give Windows much of the update ease we G/L types crow about. It would also give users a single interface to find out what software is on their machines, what is out of date, and a method to update it.

It amazes me that they haven't done so...

Vic.

Re: Direct Opposition

> We were actually just taking the client out

I'm glad it's not just me that feels the need to bump off his customers from time to time...

Vic.

Re: VM DNS has been rubbish for as long as I can remember

That's the kind of "appreciation" I (and the DNS servers I run) could do without.

I run a recursive nameserver on the quiet - it makes customer-site diagnostics a lot easier when I've got a spare nameserver to hand.

Last year I found what initially appeared to be a DDOS against my server. It turned out to be a *huge* number of DNS queries from a Dutch netblock.

It appears that certain less-scrupulous ISPs hand out other people's DNS services from time to time. So they got firewalled. I expect they got a lot of complaints form that...

Vic.

Re: Psych(o) researchers

“The manipulation would have a negligible real-world impact on users’ behaviour”, Yarkoni writes."

Punching Yarkoni would have a negligible real-world effect, causing black eyes in only 0.000000014% of the population. So that's alright, then.

Vic.

Re: Domain level Blocking

> I am stating that most terrorists are fucking idiots.

It's a common mistake to underestimate one's enemy.

They clearly have a repugnant set of ethics, but if they are truly "fucking idiots", then why aren't we catching them and prosecuting them properly?

Terrorists might[1] be total cunts, but there's a strong chance that many of them are at least as intelligent as the rest of us...

Vic.

[1] It has to be a "might" because many of the people in history that we look up to were technically terrorists at the time...

There is no way they would have also implemented the backend infrastructure required to allow the noip DDNS client to "phone home" and update their A records.

They didn't actually *need* to do that to effect what they wanted to do.

All they needed to do is to return an authoritative NXDOMAIN for the malware-related subdomains, and pass through everything else to NO-IP's DNS servers. This is trivial stuff.

That they failed to do so speaks volumes :-(

Vic.

Convictions for literally almost any crime would have to be removed due tot he rehab of offenders act

Not so.

From the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 :-

5 Rehabilitation periods for particular sentences.

(1)The sentences excluded from rehabilitation under this Act are—

...

(b)a sentence of imprisonment or corrective training for a term exceeding thirty months;

So if you get 2.5 years for a crime, you are ineligible for rehabliitation under the Act. You always have to declare it.

This is why I thought it was a bit rough a while back when some kid got 4 years for trying (and failing) to arrange a riot on Facebook/Twitter/WhateverItWas. Although the law allowed for that punishment, it meant that it would be an indelible mark on his record.

Vic.

Re: Driving in to central london

How big is a gallon of electricity, then..?

The "e" stands for "equivalent". Google can help you find out the definition...

Vic.

Re: “OED is descriptive”

"Blitz" when used in German in that context is not a synonym for "lightning" either.

The only context in which "Blitz" is used in English is to describe the wartime bombings. That's why saying that English has the word "lightning" is such a non-sequitur - "Blitz" is never used in English to mean anything to do with lightning.

Vic.

Re: Here's a Lesson Learned (from SDR) for anyone going down this road...

ie Future iteration of FGPA's or similar that can load new CPU models on the fly whenever a non-trivial set of operations are detected.

Already happening...

Vic.