* Posts by Blain Hamon

336 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2007

Page:

Euro fraud cops crush garlic tax evaders

Blain Hamon
Trollface

So what you're saying is...

You do or you don't want to come over for the Gilroy Garlic Festival?

Mmm. Garlic ice cream, anyone?

Boffins invent miracle pill that counteracts effects of booze

Blain Hamon
Alert

Joking aside

Wouldn't that mean there's a danger of some idjit* drinking, taking the pill, and not being too sloshed to stop drinking? Surely this pill doesn't counteract alcohol poisoning.

* Yeah, it'd be their own dang fault, and go into the darwin award category. It might have implications for bar owners in the states, unfortunately.

IBM, 3M glue chips into silicon skyscrapers

Blain Hamon
Boffin

Correct, it's the glue!

As mentioned elsewhere, putting multiple layers in a package is already done. Even Apple's A4 has the RAM on top of the CPU ( http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple-A4-Teardown/2204/1 ). The novel part here, however, is coming up with an adhesive that serves as not only to position the parts, but also serves as the wiring kills a great many birds with one stone and shan't be easy.

I, for one, welcome our multilayered glued overlords.

Oracle suit outs Google's closed source Android tactics

Blain Hamon

Right, let's get this over with.

Random trolling about definition of open and evil. Random trolling about iPhone and walled garden. Flames and counter-flames. Clucking and taking about corporate practices. Counterarguments about this being standard for businesses. Mentions of Oracle somewhere in there. Incompatible ideological rants with regards to patents, trolling, lawsuits, and the like.

Did I forget anything? Oh, right, conspiracy theories and talk of market share. Now that that's settled, let's talk about interesting and new aspects of this.

I'm interested to see how second-tier Android OEMs react to the dirty laundry. Perhaps sly calls to MSFT or HP?

Room-temperature brown dwarf spied just 9 light-years off

Blain Hamon
Pint

Obligatory quote

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

Man reveals secret recipe behind undeletable cookies

Blain Hamon
Devil

Well, it did solve the problem.

He'll no longer be tracked on that computer now, will he?

We need a BOFH icon here.

Google SHOCK! Snaps up Motorola phone biz for $12.5bn

Blain Hamon
Coat

Borged? What are you talking about?

Nokia's a finnish company, and has nothing to do with Victor Borge, who was from Denmark.

Dangit, now I'll have to reread the article with phonetic punctuation.

iPad accessorizer gets into Bernie Madoff's pants

Blain Hamon
Trollface

"NOT intended to be protective..."

The covers are excessively expensive, but offer no protection. How appropriate for something from Bernie Madoff.

Q: Why do defenders keep losing to smaller cyberwarriors?

Blain Hamon
Boffin

Actually, it's possible

I wish I remembered where I heard it, or even if it's true, but there was a story of a hacker who was paid to break into a medical database and change some information. According to the story, he later discovered that the changed caused the patient to get the wrong prescription and die; effectively a murder by hacking.

Again, I can't verify this, but it's certainly feasible.

Rootkit gangs fight for control of infected PCs

Blain Hamon

And yet, you should still care.

Dear sir,

I, too, used to use words like 'M$' and 'Windoze', long ago. While my words may be sardonic, trust me when I say that such name-calling really does not help one's cause once one hits puberty.

So you use Linux, or if you want to cement the stereotype, complete with beard and suspenders, Gnu/Linux. Congrats for you. But it still behooves one to not celebrate too early, even if you, like I, avoid Windows, because it still affects you. Every time you get spam, it's affecting you. Every time there's lag due to too many packets out there, it's affecting you. Every time some company is exploited and has your personal information, it's affecting you. Every service that you use where Windows is there, it's affecting you.

And that's why the unnecessarily smug attitude is not helpful.

Blain Hamon

Some of them do...

Only these 'defensive root kits' are known as antivirus software... The problem is that it's always a reactionary position to take and there's valid reasons why they don't self-propagate to known-infected systems.

Trojan script gets stuck on superglue site

Blain Hamon
Unhappy

Stuck on?

Am I the only one disappointed that the superglue website didn't act as a honeypot and catch the trojan?

UK Cops 'duped' into arresting wrong LulzSec suspect

Blain Hamon
Holmes

Handle identity might not matter

I'm not sure about the UK laws, but if it's akin to the Yanks, suppose the claims are correct, and the scot in question is not the hacker wanted. But they have his computer and a warrant to inspect it. And if they find a smoking gun for some other crime there, prosecution will happen, even if it wasn't for the LulzSec incident.

Kit steals Mac login passwords through FireWire port

Blain Hamon
Boffin

Turning off DMA?

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Leopard_Security_Config_2nd_Ed.pdf (Page 48)

Turns out, as of Leopard or possibly before (So, what, 2007?) setting a firmware password will turn off DMA access for firewire and other external devices. So while this attack is possible by default, it's not as if this issue hasn't already been addressed years ago.

Heck, you can disable the ports via firmware. So save yourself the superglue.

Schmidt explains the Google way to self-erasure

Blain Hamon
Big Brother

Because it never is really anonymous.

Anyone remember when AOL released the search data, supposedly anonymized, but when examined, the search texts themselves were revealing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal

HBGary 'puppets' FAIL to convince

Blain Hamon
Coat

What's an alicebot?

potted plant with a slight a-progressive tinge?

unionized worker proletariat?

blacktied-brownshirted (but presumably lavishly funded) alicebots?

Um, HB Gary? You may want to tweak the AI that posts to El Reg. It looks like it crossbred with AManFromMars.

Steve Woz: From wooden Apples to iPhone love

Blain Hamon
Headmaster

Yes, but where do you think Sinclair and Acorn got their ideas from?

Before the Apple I (1976) hobby systems were more like the Altair, where you manually programmed, literal byte by byte, using toggle switches and lights. After the Apple I? Keyboards and TV output. The Apple II (1977) was already shipping by the time Sinclair's MK14(1978) or ZX80(1980) and Acorn System 1 (1979) or Atom (1980)

More privacy for the Queen, less for everyone else

Blain Hamon
Paris Hilton

Please clarify for us Yanks

Disclosure: Yes, I am from the US. I ask these not to troll, but actual curiosity.

> The Queen is our head of state, a role which has several remaining powers attached to it

From what I can tell (Admittedly a brief search), most of those powers are almost figurehead in nature. For example, save for a few hung parliaments, appointing the PM has been predetermined by the election of seats in the House of Commons, outside the Queen's actions.

On this side of the pond, most news we get about the UK government mentions the PM or Parliament, not the Queen. And most news we get about the royal family is along the lines of drama such as the royal wedding or Fergie in a Dr. Pepper advert.

Now, I'd much rather the royal family than Paris Hilton or Linsey Lohan, who appear to fill the role of drama news for drama's sake. But what sort of decisions, speeches, or proclamations that have originated from the Queen have recently and significantly affected Britain or its relationship with other governments?

Sprint introduces $10 smartphone premium

Blain Hamon
Headmaster

No sense listing what can't be used

Sprint uses CDMA like Verizon, not GSM like, well, the rest of the world. So even after jail-breaking, the current iPhones won't work with Sprint. The CDMA iPhones come out Feb 10th, so it's 100% moot until then, and even after then, the jail-breaking to switch carriers may be significantly different with the new chipset.

TL;DR version: No iPhones on Sprint because it's not AT&T. No jailbroken iPhones on Sprint because it's not GSM. No new iPhones on Sprint because it's not Verizon.

So why even mention them in a Sprint article?

Mac App Store giving away pay apps for free

Blain Hamon
Boffin

Corporate solution

> us corporate fuddy duddies are gonna hate the app store with a passion

Fortunately, there's two ways to nip it in the bud. Either blacklist com.apple.appstore (The program's bundle identifier) and thus block users from running the app store; or redirect *.phobos.apple.com to a black hole at the firewall and thus block the app store and the iTunes music store from contacting Apple.

South African wireless traffic lights pillaged by SIM-card thieves

Blain Hamon
Troll

Well, since you asked...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+south+african+rand+in+british+pounds

A thousand rand is 95.23 pounds.

Apple patents 'net-booted' OS contraption

Blain Hamon
Headmaster

Minor correction

"We are actively working with Congress and the Administration to find ways to retain funds in excess of the $1.887 billion spending cap"...

It's not that they collect $2B and only get a sliver of it. It's that they collect $2B and cannot keep more than $1.88B of it. What that means, and how that compares to the money spent in patenting things, I don't know. But it does mean they keep 94% of the fees, not 6% as implied.

Facebook trains self to recognize your face

Blain Hamon
Boffin

Sounds ripe for testing

So what happens when someone upload various photos of animal behinds, and tags them as [Acceptable target/unliked politician]? Purely in the name of science, of course.

Ad networks owned by Google, Microsoft serve malware

Blain Hamon

While I agree with you that ads should only be images

There have been exploits that trigger on little more than buffer overruns by corrupt images. So, um, yeah. If you really want to be safe, use Lynx.

Russia wins World Cup bid in parrot-sickening travesty

Blain Hamon
Coat

Yes, yes, but

What's Qatar's policies on Vuvuzelas? This might solve the buzzing!

Google ends 'do be evil, if you want a top ranking' policy

Blain Hamon
Boffin

I'm guessing

...that I'll see half a dozen similar posts above mine, but posting just in case. It's called nominative determinism.

So did Windows Phone 7 'bomb in US'?

Blain Hamon
Unhappy

Why on earth do you publish these stories?

Because we click on the stories, then click on the forums and rail on it. And we fall for it each and every time! I don't begrudge El Reg for making a bit of ad revenue, heck I've got them on my flash blocker whitelist. But yeah, we're suckers for this.

US smartphones – Once you’ve had Android there’s no going back

Blain Hamon
Headmaster

Let's take it to numbers in terms of land mass.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=size+united+kingdom+vs+size+united+states

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=size+europe+with+Turkey+vs+size+united+states

The US can contain 38 United Kingdoms and perhaps an additional Ireland or two. Or, all of Europe, including Turkey, has less land mass than the United States (And yes, the US has less land mass than Canada). Yes, the US still lags in many ways, and there's many parts that are backwards. But if you want to consider something on the same difficulty to grid as the US, and consider the US as a single entity, you'd have to count all of Europe, grouping the UK with Serbia, Lithuania, and Croatia, as a single technological entity.

Airport screeners go for the groin

Blain Hamon
Black Helicopters

Actually...

Remember Shoe-fitting fluoroscopes? There people who got their feet xrayed once a year did not suffer nearly as much radiation as the person who operated the machine day in and day out.

It could be that those biggest hit with the radiation are those who get prolonged exposure, even if they're not in the direct beam, being the TSA goons themselves.

Fans roast Microsoft for Silverlight demotion

Blain Hamon
Joke

So wait,

Does this mean that Active X is NOT the wave of the future?

Dell takes aim at Apple with upmarket pledge

Blain Hamon
Alert

An Intervention

Dell, look, yes I'm an Apple fanboy, but it hurts even me to see you stumble about like this. You're going to hurt yourself and others if you keep this up. Look, put the intel subsidy down, you don't need another drink. It's time we talked about your real problem: Support.

No, adding pink won't help this. Listen. It's more than just hardware. Do you think Apple's getting all Intel's secret stash of good chips? Of course not. Macs break just like any other computer. It's what happens after the hardware breaks.

Yes, your hardware breaks too. But it's important what happens after it breaks. And frankly, we're all tired of having to call some poor schlebb working minimum wage with a script that asks to reboot the computer and reinstall Windows. And when a lot of hardware breaks, do you do a recall? Do you extend the warranty? Or do you deny everything until you lose the court case?

That's what Apple has been doing right, with the genius bar in the Apple stores. Yes, I know you installed a kiosk next to them, but one person going, 'buy a computer' isn't support. It means training your users, having actual ability to repair systems, maybe even a taste of the enterprise support.

No, don't add new speakers on it! Guh.

Foxconn faces leaked report of worker abuse, violence

Blain Hamon
Unhappy

While you are right in that UK/US had the same thing,

I fear that waiting for it to sort itself out isn't the best answer. Outright boycott and grandstanding aren't the answer as you rightly mention, but the socialism and unionizing that arose last time around won't be the answer for the portions of Foxxconn that are in Communist China.

It's really easy to simply ignore it, or wrap it up into the usual pointless Apple/Anti-Apple flames, but that simply sidelines it. One possible partial solution is indeed public pressure. Remember Nike and the backlash of their third world factories using child labor?

A less altruistic leverage, I suppose, is to make it an advertising point. although this works more for small shops and with software where manufacturing is low. That is, "Made locally, so there's no language barrier/lead/bad karma!" may put pressure to clean up offshore factories to remove the FUD. Perhaps, even, we can use jingoism for good purposes and not just bad ones.

Finally, I suppose, would be a cultural shift is required in the developing countries. Nothing so extreme as an armed revolution, but enlightenment-era concepts and beliefs are necessary (although not sufficient).

Then again, it's easy for me to say these things without actually doing anything about it.

Microsoft pays licence fees for 74 smartphone patents

Blain Hamon

Who says they aren't?

To be fair, the defining feature of a patent troll is that they don't actually make any product, which makes it even harder to defend as there's nothing to countersue. MSFT makes its money through Windows and Office, not litigation.

I'm hard pressed to think of a large tech company that DOESN'T play this patent lawsuit game. It's like a mexican standoff, each company not willing to lower their software patents until the others do so first.

Iran boasts of Stuxnet 'nuclear spies' arrests

Blain Hamon
Alien

Pah.

It's just a cover. We all REALLY know that Stuxnet is just the start of the Martian invasion, and amanfromMars is here as a mole.

Ministry of Sound floored by Anonymous

Blain Hamon
Badgers

Plus means "we've removed the sucky bit!"

iTunes Plus doesn't have DRM, save for the email being embedded in the file. That, and a higher bitrate, is the big selling point of them. While I'm rambling, here's the full breakdown:

iTunes music, non plus: DRMed, due to RIAA demands.

iTunes music plus: non DRMed.

iTunes video: DRMed, probably because Jobs has a second hat labeled Disney.

iTunes iPhone apps: DRMed (called code signing), probably to make sure devs pay that $99 yearly fee.*

* There are valid reasons for codesigning, and it's less of a royal pain than it used to be, but still, yeesh, such a headache when provisioning profiles expire.

Hybrid drives: the next generation

Blain Hamon
Joke

And in related news...

Floppy disk drive makers have announced a hybrid drive, allowing for 512MB of flash embedded into their 3.5" drives in order to save space.

Coders tip Google Android for eclipse of the Steve

Blain Hamon
Badgers

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!

If they really were rabid fans, they'd be writing in Objective C or Java exclusively, not using Titanium, and wouldn't be in the survey.

Blain Hamon
Boffin

Yes and no

(Still work for Appcelerator, still not representing anyone but myself.)

There was a survey done around the iPad launch, but this recent one was done Sept 14-16, so to give a comparison, trend, what-have-you. By the way, http://www.appcelerator.com/company/survey-results/ gives several surveys taken over the year.

While having pieces that center on Appcelerator is nice and flattering, it would be super-awesome to see surveys taken elsewhere. Understandably, these were surveys of Titanium Developers, who are more middle-of-the-road given that they're not writing their apps in pure Obj-C or Java. I personally would like to see other surveys to give a deeper context, especially asking questions that Appcelerator either didn't think to ask or were not in a position to examine.

Blain Hamon
Boffin

The key words are Statistical Significance.

(Disclaimer, yadda, I work for Appcelerator but don't represent them, I haven't asked Scott for info on the survey, as I've been in my hidey hole coding all this time.)

The actual survey itself does note sample sizes, in general (2363) and individual charts (>1.4K-2K). If the selection is random enough, you can accurately predict without lining everyone up. While this survey was limited to Titanium developers, it's a rather safe statement that these people are more middle-of-the-road than those hardcore who know only Obj-C or Java.

Come to think of it, there's 250K apps in Apple's app store. Even with the unlikely 1app:1developer scenario, the survey would be 1%. That may sound tiny, but compare it to the <0.022% of the Neilsen ratings sample size.

World's first pedal-powered ornithopter takes flight in Canada

Blain Hamon
Dead Vulture

Metric? Standard? Bah! We're on El Reg!

I won't have any less than noting that it flew a full Brontosaurus, going a full 3 Brontosauruses (Brontosaurii?) a minute, weighing 10.15 Jubs despite having nearly a 3.5 double-decker bus wingspan!

Much thanks to http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html for ensuring that the proper measures can be expressed!

Blockbuster winds itself into Chapter 11

Blain Hamon

Obligatory Onion link

http://www.theonion.com/video/historic-blockbuster-store-offers-glimpse-of-how-m,14233/

Google cools data center with bottom of Baltic Sea

Blain Hamon
Coat

So wait...

Are you telling me that Google has put a Spanner in the works?

Czechs stop Google Street View

Blain Hamon
Stop

The spycar doesn't work that way

From what I've seen, the car (and camera) itself is moving while the camera is taking photos every dozen meters or so, otherwise it'd make for horrible traffic jams. Not only that, but it has a spinning mirror, so make the number of exposures about six times that. Ironically, it means that the 1s exposure would make the buildings, signs, and everything that people WANT the street view for would be blurred out, with only the license plates of cars (going the same way) perfectly readable.

Makes the second requirement easy: Just have the car horn constantly on as it drives for hours and hours on end.

IE captain flees Microsoft for Google

Blain Hamon
Coat

You're worried about Chrome?

This does not bode well for office chairs!

Linus Torvalds outs himself as US citizen

Blain Hamon
Troll

Could be worse, you know.

He could have been a computer pioneer and saved many lives in the UK during WW2. Didn't do Alan Turing much good, either.

At least the Japanese Americans or their descendants lived long enough for the US to apologize to them and pay them $1.6B in reparations, a good 20 years before Turing's nieces got a sorry without even a pound.

Besides, there's more valid and more current reasons to dislike the US, like TSA security theatre.

Salvador Dalí style floppy iPad on the way, seemingly

Blain Hamon
Dead Vulture

Flexible pressure-sensative skin,

Something that really can help people who use prosthetics (or even in space, where you can't have unshielded hands), and all you can think about is making yet another iDevice reference?

US military builds laser backpack for 3D indoor mapping

Blain Hamon
Joke

"just how many tunnels do the military investigate?"

Little known fact: The Taliban in Afghanistan are not in bunkers and caves underground enough to block GPS and radio, but instead they're holed up in pleasant Ontarioan buildings with all the records up to date for Canadian fire services.

Furthermore, drug smuggling tunnels on country borders are actually used to carry puppies and kittens, and do not need mapping nor monitoring at all.

Apple: third-party iOS dev tools OK after all

Blain Hamon
Boffin

Mmm! Pass the kool-aid!

Full disclosure: I work for Appcelerator, but my opinions are my own, yadda yadda.

"Really? Which ones? What does the sound of Apple getting increased attention sound like?"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/03/doj_and_ftc_exploring_apple_antitrust_inquiry/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/10/apple_gov_probe/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/11/eu_investigation_apple/

It sounds like web links, really. Although in all honesty, I doubt that was the primary motivator. While the "No. That is all." comment is technically correct, the issue isn't facts in as much as perception. The app store rules (Or rather, their unknown state and the verbiage about interpreted code) served as FUD against Apple. Apple is heavily pushing the iPod touch as a games platform. But most games DO use interpreted code, from entire setups like Unity to more minimal embedded interpreters like Lua. This is done everywhere, in all platforms, not only for portability but for rapid development and stability (so you don't have to worry about memory management of dialog trees), so the specter of an app being rejected for this is enough to scare prospective developers away. And that's bad business to both devs and Apple.

I am led to believe that Adobe's income of CSS for the Mac is significant, and that Adobe would not cut off its nose to spite its face. More accurately, I think that various teams inside Adobe are independent, and so Photoshop would not sacrifice its revenues in revenge for Flash.

And while the Flash issue did hog center stage, it's a bit of a red herring in terms of interpreted code. Or rather, the fact that it has code interpretation is orthogonal to most issues mentioned in Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash." One of the 'painful experiences' mentioned may be referring to when Mac OS X came out, and some third party layers, even non-cross-platform ones written in C or C++, were slow to support the changed API.

What will be watch-worthy is how Adobe reacts, and moreover, the fate of flash-built apps going forward. Will they go through unscathed? Will they be rejected for different reasons? Will they be stuck in review limbo, neither approved nor rejected? Issues of stability, speed, and UI are all valid reasons for rejection that ensnare native apps, and could possibly be used against flash apps.

Web-happy iPhone dev kit gets Jobsian silent treatment

Blain Hamon
Jobs Halo

And the very next day,

Appcelerator gets a love note in the form of 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 no longer banning interpreted code. Yes, I'm happy.

Samsung specs up 7in Android tablet

Blain Hamon
Unhappy

Bother me not with your vapor wares!

At least a month away for Vodaphone, no release announcement for the US beyond 'a few months later', no price, no demos, just some specs and a handful of photoshops. Samsung's own website isn't much better, either, with the two videos again only showing mockups of the hardware and faked screens.

Wake me up when there's an actual review of an existent device.

Page: