* Posts by Vic

5860 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007

Astroboffins solve birth of the Man in the Moon face

Vic

Re: @Vic (was: @DAM (was: @Chris Miller))

> Are you really incapable of reading for content, Vic?

One of us is.

> I'm not arguing, I'm discussing

In this post, you said :-

Your "impact craters" on the nearside aren't a result of impact.

That's not discussion. That's assertion.

> Professionals are not infallible.

Indeed they are not. But when challenging a professional, it's always useful to provide some substantiation when stating baldly that he is wrong. You have provided no such substantiation, nor have you demonstrated any credentials in the field in question. Thus your opinion carries very little weight in opposition to someone who does this as a day job. If you want to gain that gravitas, you'll need to provide some justification for your contrary position.

Vic.

Vic

Re: @Vic (was: @DAM (was: @Chris Miller))

> Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, Wiki sucks. But it's got some good links.

Ah, I see. Your qualifications are "reading Wikipedia".

> Not a professional, just an amateur

But you decide to argue with the people quoted in the article who are professionals.

Vic.

Vic

Re: @Vic (was: @DAM (was: @Chris Miller))

> "impact craters" on the nearside aren't a result of impact.

The article says differently.

I await your lunar science credentials with bated[1] breath...

Vic.

[1] I almost wrote "baited", but I'm really not that interested in this fish.

Vic

Re: @DAM (was: @Chris Miller)

> the nearside had a measure of protection. Only stands to reason

That might "stand to reason", but it's incorrect anyway. From TFA:

The climate of the Moon is also said to have played a part in the formation of its features. The researchers believe that because the near side of the Moon was warm enough to produce a thinner crust which allowed for larger impacts. As a result, the craters in the near side are said to be as much as twice the size of their counterparts on the far side of the Moon.

It's the nearside - which you claim is "protected" - that has the bigger impact craters...

Vic.

Vic

Re: Hogwash! Weekly World News said that...

> the moon is the skull of a giant interstellar space creature!

Space goat, you say?

Quick! To the Arks!

Vic.

Vic

Re: Easy to explain..

> The real question is who did this?

Yeah, sorry, I'd had a few beers, and it seemed like a good idea at the time...

Vic.

MPAA, RIAA: Kids need to learn 3 Rs – reading, writing and NO RIPPING

Vic

Re: Let's generalise this a bit

> the lead-in on DVD's saying that downloading pirated movies is STEALING

It very carefully *doesn't* say that downloading is stealing - it just implies it rather heavily.

It's a dreadful piece of propaganda - pretty much everyone comes away with the message they wanted you to get, even though they didn't *actually* say it...

Vic.

RETRO-GASM: The Fuze electronics kit for the Raspberry Pi

Vic

Re: Back in the real old days

> for d = 0 to 360

You're using degrees? Wash your mouth out with Trigene, you heathen :-)

Vic.

Lavabit, secure email? Hardly, says infosec wizard Moxie Marlinspike

Vic

Re: not true

> So you try to invalidate my post

You appear to be inferring motives that simply are not present...

Vic.

Vic

Re: This Annoyed the Hell out of Me

> People who're in the DNS business shouldn't be tampering with other peoples' published keys

DNSSEC relies on the chain-of-trust model that is so broken - under the PATRIOT act, the US Government (or its ill-tended "representatives") can not only force a change of record (and get it signed such that almost everyone will believe it valid), but they can force those in the know to remain silent about such changes.

It *would* be possible to check the fingerprint - but how do you tell a legitimate DNS change from a subversion?

Fundamentally, we just can't trust the trust root any longer. It's no point saying that such trusted agents wouldn't do any of this for fear of losing that trust status - they have no choice. That's what PATRIOT means - you can be forced to do pretty much anything the Government wants you to do. Real patriotism...

The only way to protect your assets is to sign stuff yourself, and stay away from the trust roots for anything that matters. Aside from that being a *huge* fragmentation of the Internet, it's also a trivial work-around for anyone that cares about their privacy - i.e. this will occur (and is already doing so) both in the context of "legitimate", innocent traffic as well as the nefarious stuff. The US has succeeded in nothing except breaking the trust model for the common man; the bad guys will laugh it off.

Vic.

Vic

Re: not true

> The majority of emails sent server to server use port 25 and thus clear text.

Your inference is incorrect; port 25 does *not* necessitate cleartext.

TLS is supported by *many* MTAs - indeed, it's often the default installation to use it. What we *don't* have is pre-shared keys (so the encryption is merely opportunistic, and prone to MITM attack), but that could be fixed between small groups of MTAs without much effort.

Fixing the problem globally is rather harder; ISTM that the best fix would be the same fix we apply to all other sorts of criminal behaviour. It won't give us 100% privacy, but a few spooks doing jail time "pour encourager les autres" would certainly clean up their behjaviour significantly...

Vic.

Berners-Lee: 'Appalling and foolish' NSA spying HELPS CRIMINALS

Vic

Re: Nepotism?

> Well, anybody knows SCUBA divers use air tanks...

Some of us use oxygen cylinders as well. I would, if I were filming cetaceans[1].

Vic.

[1] RBs are quite a bit quieter...

Thought you didn't need to show ID in the UK? Wrong

Vic
Joke

Re: What exactly is the problem here?

> the fact you think that to get from England to France

I assumed he was talking to the Germans...

Vic.

Vic

Re: That's Theresa May for you.

> Remind me: who votes for them?

Hardly anyone.

That doesn't stop them claiming a "majority", though...

> wealth is no longer a prerequisite to get the vote.

It is, however, a prerequisite for determining which options are available to voters. And if you control the question, you control the answer...

Vic.

IBM menaces Twitter IPO with patent infringement BOMBSHELL

Vic

Re: bummocks

> To be fair to IBM they did help to crush the wind out of Santa Cruz Operation

No they didn't.

They crushed SCO. SCO was *not* the Santa Cruz Operation, despite what they might have wanted you to believe, they just bought a business from them.

Vic.

SR-71 Blackbird follow-up: A new TERRIFYING Mach 6 spy-drone bomber

Vic

Re: As an intellectual and technological excercise...

> As for the UK health lottery, I didn't realise that.

Look at the small-print on the TV ad: it's a revolving selection from 51 regional lotteries. IOW, if you pay for it every week, you only even get *entered* into a lottery once a year...

Thieving bastards.

Vic.

iPad Air not very hot: Apple fanbois SHUN London fondleslab launch

Vic

Re: A bit harsh

> "64-bit architectures have NOTHING to do with speed"

Unles you're doing SIMD calculations. The extra word length means more operations per clock. But I'd expect that to be a small minority of most users' work...

> If anything, they're slower than their 32-bit counterparts

Most CPUs suffer from bandwidth restriction to RAM. The more bits you have to load up for a given routine, the longer it takes to get into your CPU. Cache only goes so far befoer it's full...

Vic.

Coding: 'suitable for exceptionally dull weirdos'

Vic

> I would prefer our educators prioritised philosophy over coding

The two are essentially identical.

A friend of mine at University studied Philosophy, and we all took the piss mercilessly.

Then she walked into a coding job at Hoskins on essentially the same money I was earning - Philosophy teaches exactly the same logical reasoning, it just doesn't teach the syntax of computer languages.

And language syntax is trivial[1] - it's the analysis that makes the job.

Vic.

[1] Intercal excepted, natch...

Vic

Re: Comment from the Cockwomble in question

> I deliberately wrote the piece to get a reaction from the developer community

The real *knack* of getting the reaction you want from any community is not to be an arrogant twat whose ignorance of the subject in question cannot be measured owing to a world-wide shortage of numbers that big...

Vic.

Blighty's laziness over IPv6 will cost us on the INTERNETS - study

Vic

Re: Does IPv6 gives each device a permanant IP address -- if so boon for spies and criminals.

> the plan with IPv6 was for each device to have a permanent IPv6 address.

No, that's never been the plan.

There is *one possible* scheme for issuing link-local addresses that derives fom the MAC address, but it is not a mandatory part of the standard, and is only used for lcoal addressing - Internet-bound packets will get an address from the local allocation, which is very much *not* fixed.

> Will IPv6 addresses be permanent in the same sense that MAC addresses are today?

Not outside the LAN, no.

Vic.

Vic

Yes to SPF

> Don't use SPF - it can cause all sorts of problems:

Do use SPF. It only causes problems if you don't bother to read up on what statements you are making.

> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/smtp-spf-is-harmful.html

... Is chock-full of inaccuracy and misdirection. Bogus beyond belief.

> http://david.woodhou.se/why-not-spf.html

Keeps making the same old claim about throwing away email you wanted to send - and that's patently wrong.

SPF is the simplest of simples: it is a way for the *owner* of a domain to specify which machines will send mail on behalf of that domain.

If you don't want to make such a bold statement about your own domain - then don't.

If you want a domain owner not to make such a bold styatement about his own domain, then you need to negotiate with him about how he uses his own property.

I've been using SPF for many years now, and it's a godsend. It *does* require a little care - most notably if you're trying to run an email forwarder. But that is a simple problem to solve, and is the only thing SPF actually breaks - the rest of the noise you'll hear about it is generally when someone wants a domain they don't own to behave differently...

Vic.

Vic

Re: Invalid assumption?

> IPV4 means serfs get to run clients, and our overlords get to run the servers

No, that's nonsense.

I've been running servers on IPv4 for many years, and there's no way I could be considered an "overlord".

Vic.

Vic

Re: Chicken meet egg

> Mines the one with the /32 of IPV6 in the pocket.

Bah. I've only got a /48 and a /56.

10^24 addresses is so little...

Vic.

Vic

Re: El Reg not IPv6

> My own external servers went IPv6 4 years ago

I converted my servers at about the same time.

It was a great learning experience, but honestly not that useful; I see almost no inbound IPv6 traffic - certainly nothing I'd miss if it disappeared - and my outbound stuff goes over IPv4 without issue.

I'm holding out for whatever comes after IPv6 - when someone realises that 128 bits was a drunken Friday-afternoon joke, and we settle down to something more realistic (perhaps 40- or 48-bits).

Vic.

Why Bletchley Park could never happen today

Vic

Re: @Charles 9

> How about a variant of avian flu with a longer incubation time?

How does spying on my email prevent avian flu?

Or are you suggesting the bird flu epidemic of a few years ago was man-made? If so, the tin-foil shop is over thataway...

> The one after WW1 was plenty deadly

Ah, well there you ar then. If only there had been some encrypted web traffic to watch, that wouldn't have happened and all those people would still be alive...

If governments were committing these obscene amounts of money towards preventing pandemics, most of us would be very happy. But they're not; they're spending that cash on lookingfor "reds under the bed", most of whom aren't there at all, and many of those that are there wouldn't have been had said governments acted lawfully and ethically in the first place...

Vic.

Vic

Re: No war

> does that lack of much terrorist activity indicate that NSA et al. activities are unneeded, or does it follow from their success?

Well, from this side of the Atlantic, our terrorist issue pretty much disappeared the moment Americans stopped funding it...

Vic.

Billionaire vows to turn 007's Lotus Esprit into actual submarine car

Vic

Re: Lotus

> look at the Tesla - Lotus chassis design

The Tesla is based on the Elise. That's about as different as could possibly be from an Esprit.

Vic.

Vic

> Only needs to be partially watertight

Have you ever ownedf an Esprit?

Fantastic car, it truly is. But the two adjectives you wouldn' apply are "reliable" and "watertight"...

Vic.

Vic

> Its a submarine

It's a Lotus.

As a former Esprit owner, I can assure you that it comes nowhere near the watertight requirement for a submarine...

Vic.

Wanna sell a phone in New York? Better have a receipt

Vic

Re: I won't hold my breath waiting for a difference.

> But then the OTHER store can check.

Yeah, because stores are renowned for doing loads of paperwork to help their competitors.

Vic.

Vic

Re: I won't hold my breath waiting for a difference.

> the stores can probably tell it's a fake through their receipt journals.

Only if you take a forgery of one of *their* receipts.

Forge a receipt from any other store and they won't have access to those journals.

Vic.

Vic

Re: Is it really that hard to ID a phone?

> I'm surprised that this has not been rolled out worldwide for GSM's.

Like this one?

Vic.

Windows 8.1: A bit square, sure, but WAIT! It has a Start button

Vic

Re: Why did MS suddenly fall out of favour with contrast

> HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General\SuppressUppercaseConversion

Why is it people insist on telling me that Windows is "user-friendly"?

This sort of thing should be a click or two away...

Vic.

Vic

Re: "Worthwhile upgrade to Windows 7" - Why?

> One OS to rule them all

Never a truer word...

Vic.

America: Land of the free, still home of the BIGGEST spammers on the planet

Vic

Re: Digital stamps

> A marginal cost of a tenth of a penny would be easy to bear for any normal mail volume,

This would have no effect whatsoever on spam.

The spammers would simply steal credit in the way they currently steal bandwidth.

> Making it *not* pay is the only real way to shut it down.

Indeed, but your proposal does nothing to affect that profitability.

The Boulder Pledge is the only way to stop spammers, and that's a *very* long-term proposition.

Vic.

Control panel backdoor found in D-Link home routers

Vic
Joke

> Post your IP address, somebody will contact you

OK - it's 127.0.0.1.

Thanks for your help!

Vic.

Canadian operator EasyDNS stands firm against London cops

Vic
Joke

Re: False economics

Can someone explain to me how a US TV show that I might download from a torrent, watch and then delete costs the UK economy "hundreds of millions of pounds each year"?

Because, y'see, you're supposed to spend all your money with Amazon, who then return those hundreds of millions of pounds to the Treasury in taxes...

Easy, huh?

Vic.

Vic
Devil

> Intellectual property distribution is a civil infringement

Not any more. Section 107 of the Act criminalises such distribution in a commercial context.

Shit piece of law which badly needs repealing. Like that's gonna happen :-(

Vic.

Glowing Nook knocked to under 50 quid for Xmas

Vic

Re: great but

> there's a an issue with a "tear"

I had one like that.

I took it back to John Lewis, and they exchanged it for me on the spot.

I'm extremely happy with the replacement :-)

Vic.

iOS 7 SPANKS Samsung's Android in user-experience rating

Vic

Re: It would be great if those guys started to understand how WP8 was designed and works...

> Can any phone do that?

Yes.

My HTC Desire has a panel on the front screen to allow me to turn on/off Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS and PC Sync (whatever that is - I don't use it), and to switch the brightness between three settings.

Vic.

Vic

Re: Typical bull

> Chose choice, chose style, chose individuality. Don't chose to be a clone.

Isn't there supposed to be something about heroin in there?

Vic.

LinkedIn fires back against 'hack-and-spam' US class-action sue bomb

Vic

Re: I noticed this years ago ...

> Some folks will happily nod at Clubcard vouchers while decrying Facebook.

The difference is that you can withhold your "loyalty card" if you so choose...

Vic.

Vic

Re: Never sends...

> None of the people who sent me a LinkedIn invite ever admitted to doing so

Bear in mind that there is a lot of phishing spam *claiming* to be from LinkedIn, but actually not.

They do seem to prefer email addresses with "linkedin" in them - although I get some to other accounts as well.

It's always worth checking the headers...

Vic.

OK, so we paid a bill late, but did BT have to do this?

Vic
Joke

Re: Summary

> on occasions going in to liquidisation still not having paid.

If someone's truly gone through liquidisation, paying bills is probably the least of their worries...

Vic.

Microsoft relents: 'Go ahead, install Windows 8.1 on clean PCs'

Vic

Re: MS still locked in 1990's OS upgrades and installs

> Is it 1990s or 25 years ago?

The one does not preclude the other...

Vic.

Vic
Joke

Re: @Michael Habel

> Outlook is rated as "garbage"

You can't really blame them :-)

Vic.

Vic

> none of them (none of them) would even consider using LINUX in any real capacity.

Then you don't know anyone of any great import.

Pretty much every major organisation I've seen for some years runs Linux boxes in some capacity. XP/7 rule the office desktop, but even that opsition is slowly being eroded.

Vic.

City of Munich throws Ubuntu lifeline to Windows XP holdouts

Vic

Re: Ubuntu -- It's a relay race

After probably hundreds of personal hands-on installations of every flavor of Linux, I have never had a single one run to completion on its own.

I do not believe you.

Vic.

Vic

Re: I bet a lot more people would switch if...

> Linux doesn't really support NTFS.

Yes it does.

Vic.

Vic

Re: How does this help?

> Can I still get standard enterprise support for a 13 year old Ubuntu version

There are no 13-year old Ubuntu versions. But if you find a 13-year old version of a distro that you want supoprted, then yes - you can get support for it. What is more, you can choose the level of support you want.

Vic.