Posts by Vic

Re: Techie question....

> I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure this would make a MITM attack even easier.

Only if you use a self-signed cert in an overly-simplistic manner.

> it could just be any old certificate

...But would it have the same fingerprint as mine?

I carry a piece of paper in my wallet with my fingerprint on for exactly this reason; I can tell instantly if a corprat cert is being used (because I don't get warned about my invalid cert), and I get a fingerprint to check if there's any doubt.

I used to consider myself somewhat paranoid, but recent revelations have shown I'm simply not paranoid enough...

Vic.

Re: The first hurdle....

> I don't recall any of the past three employers has asked for proof

When I took a permanent job back in July, my new employer asked for proof of the qalifications I'd claimed in my application.

I simply answered "I didn't tell you about my qualifications"... :-)

Vic.

Re: Size?

> when was the last decade you could actually buy 5.25'' disks?

I've got a few I could sell you. Bargain price, really... :-)

Vic.

Re: Guilt by Coincidence

I still find it incredible that no armed policeman has ever been brought to trial after killing someone on duty.

[Emphasis mine]

I don't find it incredible at all. They were specifically authorised and ordered to do what they did. They were led to believe that they were preventing a terrorist atrocity.

The numbnuts that told them to do it, however, ...

Vic.

> 'Some blokes'... Have you heard of a bell curve?

If tonight's commute home was anything to go by, I'd say it's more like a bell-end curve...

Vic.

Re: So, this from the bunch that...

> I have two words for them one of which is rude

Not rude enough, my friend...

Vic.

Re: Don't think it's a good idea

> All you people that replied to my note.

Replied to you? This is the first post under the DJMoley account.

Unless you're confessing to using sock-puppets...

Vic.

Re: If the spam problem were reduced, then this would be reduced, too

> I just don't see why email can't be secured using similar technologies.

It's astronomically simple.

If you have to get your credit card out for every single mail you send, you'll stop sending email. If you have to key in a PIN for every post, you'll have precious little contact with other people.

So what will happen? Email clients will hold credit, and pay for emails in hundreds or thousands at a time - after all, transaction fees are going to dominate if you're paying in anything less than that quantity. Paying 50p in fees to process a 0.1p payment is just daft.

So we now have an email client with sufficient credit to send a significant number of emails - either spam or ham.

If you think you can secure Joe Punter's machine against malware that can take over that client, then I fear you may have an inflated opinion of your capabilities. And if you can't, then the spam will keep on flowing in spite of the oppressive payment scheme you're proposing.

Vic.

> The End Is Nigh

What, Right Nigh?

Vic.

[ Well, Ronnie actually ]

> PHP and wikis are the stuff of nightmares from a security standpoint.

I once had a customer who was *incandescent* that the (internet-facing) wiki I'd installed for him wouldn't let him just write PHP and have it executed.

I told him I'd need written authority to turn that on...

Vic.

Re: Worst film of the year?!

> Have you seen Pacific Rim or Man of Steel?

I've seen "The Counsellor". That's two hours of my life I'll never get back :-(

Vic.

Re: I live near Hedge End...

> I live near Hedge End, too. That's why this article caught my attention.

I work in Hedge End, so I had a look.

BT has 2 Richards in the phone book in Hedge End, and neither of them back onto a school.

The other day, we had a story about fish shagging in Woolston, keeping people awake. I live just up the road from Woolston, so I read that one too.

BT has none of the people mentioned in that story in the phone book.

Now I know that some people are ex-directory - I am - but I'd expect at least one hit. Unless, of course, the Daily fail is just making this shit up...

Vic.

> i've never had a first time swipe to unlock work

I thought that - but in fact, you probably have.

It's *incredibly* slow to react; I found myself swiping a second time, thinking the first had failed, but if you actually wait that long, it does unlock.

> lots of other niggles

Worst for me is the quality of the PDF reader - it's bollocks. Poor rendering of anything but simple text, and no zooming.

Aside from that, I reall ylike my unit. It was cheap,. and it lets me read ebooks easily. I plan on rooting it to try to get a better PDF reader, though[1].

Vic.

[1] One of my main reasons for getting one was to put airfield diagrams on, so I can find my way around an unfamiliar field without having the book falling open at all the wrong pages all the time. The Nook could be an ideal piece of kit for this - small & light, long-lasting battery, daylight-readable screen, backlight for night flying, and the ability to set out your detinanation/checklist/whathaveyou as the screensaver, so even if the power does fail, you still get to see what you need. But the PDF reader is so totally crap I haven't yet.

Re: The Arsonist

> No more boom and bust

Credit where credit is due: he delivered on that promise.

How may booms have we had since he made that speech?

Vic.

Re: What about SLES?

> (there is a tool called alien which can make you agnostic)

Beware that alien doesn't convert dependencies...

Vic.

Re: So what?

> A vagina without a woman is terribly out of context and doesn't make any sense.

Oh yeah?

Vic.

Re: Ooo, I have a bad feeling about this.

> Let's see how it pans out.

What happened to the REHAB kit?

LOHAN might benefit from another visit, just to make sure there's no air trapped under the vinyl that might cause embarassing tumescence at altitude...

Vic.

Re: Windows

> average user who can't even follow "don't run untrusted applications" knows how to run Linux commands!

It's a little easier pasting the output from a terminal into a forum page that trying to do a screencast. The idea was to show that the OS doesn't run stuff that isn't explicitly marked as executable.

> Windows will inform that it is an application when they try to run it anyway

But users have been conditioned to agree to any popup that is placed in front of them. There is an "OK" button to push.

What I was demonstrating is that if the executable bit isn't set by default - and NTFS does support that[1], although I'm not sure I've ever actually seen it in the wild - there is no way to agree to such an action; the file cannot be executed because it just isn't executable.

If you want to make it executable, you have to go out of your way and deliberately make it so.

> In what circumstances will the executable return permission denied?

In the circumstances where the file does not have the executable bit set by default. *nix platforms do this by default. Windows can, but generally doesn't.

Vic.

[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/magazine/2006.01.howitworksntfs.aspx

Re: Did anyone actually read the article?

> Currently the stats show it has fewer fires than conventional cars.

Do they? Has anyone actually run the numbers? With what confidence interval?

N.B. I haven't run the numbers either - I just flinch every time I see someone make a simple division and claim that *proves* something; with small sample sizes, it usually does nothing of the sort...

Vic.

Re: Personally,

> I've found it's better to drink coffee while one is awake.

I used to have a T-shirt that said

"If I'm awake, buy me beer.

If I'm asleep, wake me"

Vic.

Re: How could they find an SD-card reader....

> ... that doesn't work out of the box

I had an old HP laptop that had an SD reader with an embedded processor - it needed a closed-source firmware blob to get any life out of it.

I never bothered...

Vic.

Re: ****shit merchants

> Extrapolating "possibly slightly increased risk"

The first thing I do on posts like that is to see who the author is. Many of us here have known the other personae for some years, so it's often apparent who the newcomers are.

So when you see a new user, joined that day, with just a handful of posts (often just one) posting something inflammatory, it's pretty obvious this is an evangelist...

Vic.

Re: Language?

> Seems to me like this thing translates hieroglyphics into a set of calls

Such things are not new - the Z language, for example has been with us for nearly 40 years.

The problem that all proponents of such systems seem to forget is that the language is largely irrelevant; the job of coding a piece of software is predominantly a specification issue. You need to tie down the required behaviour accurately and completely, and although some languages make that harder, very few really make it much easier.

"Natural language" invariably makes the whole thing worse, because natural language is inherently imprecise unless you hang out with us "picky" geeks...

Vic.

Re: If it all goes wrong, just sue Microsoft @Nigel

> CentOS/Scientific support ends in 10 years

CentOS / Scientific support is around for as long as you want it. And you can pick how much you pay for your support - the more you need, the more you pay.

> White Box EL seems to have been canned years ago.

WhiteBox is still in existence, and I still have support customers using it.

Vic.

Re: USA FREEDOM Act.

I don't know what you pay MP's, but affording a "team" of matriculants from the London School of Acronomics is entirely out of question on a legislator's salary.

Running an election campaign is entirely out of question on a legislator's salary. But they do it...

Vic.

Re: Fast?

> 0-60 of 11.9 seconds and a top speed of 89mph is 'fast enough'?

It is, actually.

A real 89mph is somewhere in the region of an indicated 100mph in most cars (modern cars all seem to over-read, to the tune of nearly 10% in many cases). You'll be hard-pushed to sustain that.

12 seconds to get to speed is no performance machine, but it'll do. That's faster than most of the traffic I see nowadays.

The trick to being quick is all in the observation, not in the machine...

Vic.

Re: Is anyone really suprised?

> If we're talking in terms of a traitor and a coward,

ODFO...

Vic.

Re: Honest question...

With digital, you have to convert from analogue to digital and back to analogue, which takes time, depends on the codec, but possibly as much as a second.

It's not the conversion from analogue to digital or digital to analogue. It's the *compression* that takes time.

Compression occurs over a time window, so you can't even start the job until you've digitised that much audio. You necessarily delay by *at least* the time window in use.

A second seems rather long, though; when I was doing videophones, it was generally perceived that 100ms+ delay made you sound evasive, and meant the other persion was more likely to distrust you...

Vic.

Re: Let's generalise this a bit

> Sorry Vic, but you're wrong..

My aplogies, you are correct. It does indeed say that downloading is stealing - which is factually incorrect.

ISTR a version that juxtaposed two statements together to create the *implication* that it was saying that, when it hadn't. Perhaps there's been some editing going on. Or perhaps I've had an incorrect[1] quantity of beer.

Vic.

[1] It is left as an exercise to the reader to determine the sign of such error :-)