* Posts by h4rm0ny

4560 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2008

Oracle's Larry Ellison claims his Sparc M7 chip is hacker-proof – Errr...

h4rm0ny

Re: Can we ditch the silly political correctness in reg articles

>>"It's insulting to women, actually, they're not stupid, and can, of course, tell that what the idiot is doing."

Actually, I don't find it insulting at all.

h4rm0ny
Paris Hilton

Re: Can we ditch the silly political correctness in reg articles

I like to see "she" and "her" mixed in. It doesn't harm anyone. It reduces a low-grade feeling of exclusion for many of us which is a good thing. So why not? You seem to be starting from the assumption that it's some special effort to use "she" or "her" sometimes. I don't find it an effort, it's just something I do. And in any case, it's not your effort so why are you complaining?

Don't tell me it causes you some cognitive difference to have the hypothetical stand-in be female sometimes? Because if it does, that's not our problem.

Also, your "99%" figure is wrong.

By 2019, vendors will have sucked out your ID along with your cash 5 billion times

h4rm0ny
Childcatcher

Re: No thanks...

I bet the cost of this system (both purchase and running) are far, far more than the cost of fraud by schoolchildren illegally eating meals.

h4rm0ny

Re: What about security of voice biometrics?

However, getting samples of people's voices should be a lot easier than getting their passwords (excepting TalkTalk customers, obviously). Just get someone talking online or on the phone for a few minutes and you have a decent sample. Reproducing someone's voice to a degree sufficient to fool an ID system may simply not be done yet because there's no need. But I reckon you could extrapolate the necessary indicators from a few minutes talking once we really apply ourselves. You'll have the pitch, tremulousnouss (word?) and be able to take a good stab at accent.

Remember voice analysis to id someone is just the other half of the coin to reproduce those qualities in a voice used to id someone. It's the same technology, just run backwards.

Biometrics are only secure so long as the "private key" is secure. And people think the private key of biometric security is the thing itself but it's not, it's the digital representation of that thing.

TalkTalk attack: Small biz customers may also have been targeted

h4rm0ny

Re: This keeps getting better and better...

>>TalkTalk's competitors would have been thoroughly enjoying the last couple of days (and more to come?).

Well their CEOs and boards are probably enjoying it. Their IT staff are probably all collectively going "thank fuck that wasn't us" whilst wondering if this means upper management will actually now approve that security overhaul they've been asking for over the last n months.

It's all Me, Me, Me! in Doctor Who's The Woman Who Lived but what of Clara's fate?

h4rm0ny

Re: Osgood is back !

>>"I'm guessing that they will retcon it so that the Osgood who Missy killed was the Zygon one, and not the human one."

I would prefer it the other way around. Osgood the friendly Zygon sounds much more interesting.

h4rm0ny

Re: I don't understand the negative comments about the "jokes"?

>>"I was disappointed though that Ashilder didn't shoot any squirrels."

Which squirrels?

h4rm0ny

Re: I thought it was a great ep

>>"Although I would have preferred they made him less boisterous with his death imminent"

I thought there was a nice edge of desperation to this humour. Could you not see the edge of panic when he was struggling to think of any more jokes to delay his execution? Of course the jokes were banal - it was a man floundering for any way to get this mob of people to stop baying for his death. It seems odd to me that both you and Kelly have taken this for a comedy scene. It didn't strike me as one, although it made me like the character and his efforts to cling on for just a few more minutes of life. It made a strong thematic contrast to Ashilda.

I disagree with Kelly on this. I found this episode far more interesting than the previous one. I liked seeing what Ashilda had become and I liked seeing someone failing to cope with their immortality and there were many nice little touches such as when the Doctor asks her why she hasn't torn out the pages about her children dying when she destroys other bad memories and she snaps back "to remind me not to have any more". There's some dark stuff in that character and I enjoyed it.

Russian subs prowling near submarine cables: report

h4rm0ny
Pint

Fascinating post - thank you!

So, in light of TalkTalk's meltdown...

h4rm0ny

Re: So, in light of TalkTalk's meltdown...

I need way more speed and reliability than 4G can give me! I was more fishing for what ISPs people have had good experiences with... If there are any.

h4rm0ny

So, in light of TalkTalk's meltdown...

What ISPs would anyone here recommend instead, for those bolting from the stable right now?

Chaos at TalkTalk: Data was 'secure', not all encrypted, we took site down, were DDoSed

h4rm0ny

Re: Actual e-mail received from Talk Talk

>>"Thank you for your further response, in regards to a question where you asked what is stopping our staff accessing you details and taking them out of the office. We are a paperless company so sensitive information cannot be written down. And all of our systems are monitored to prevent situation of fraud occurring."

What? Do they have monitors walking up and down between the desks ensuring that there is no paper present and no pens or pencils? I don't believe that response for a moment. Surely they must have been laughing when they wrote that response.

TalkTalk: Hackers may have nicked personal, banking info on 4 million Brits

h4rm0ny

Re: What about ex-customers?

I highly doubt sympathy will go down well right now and I'm not exactly going to let them off the hook, but I did just watch the BBC interview with Dido Harding from TalkTalk and to be fair, she came across extremely well given the circumstances. Interview.

Experts ponder improbable size of Cleopatra's asp

h4rm0ny

Re: Scientists

I'm not sure they have debunked it. Most snake bites would be in the calves, I would guess. And because a snake starts injecting the venom the moment it penetrates something, if you're wearing loose trousers half of it gets squirted down the inside of them rather than the inside of your leg anyway. Does that have exactly the same chance of killing you if you held the snake to your throat for example? Most snakebites are dry without venom? Presumably if you keep goading the snake and keep getting more and more bites, you'll get it to inject some venom at some point? They seem to be ignoring the circumstances that this was a deliberate suicide attempt.

Plus we know little of what Cleopatra's state of health actually was at the time anyway. Ancient people's were ignorant of a lot of things but that's not the same as stupid. They knew a lot about the environment in which they lived and I imagine the people in Cleopatra's time knew a lot more about what as poisonous and what wasn't than laypeople today. The understood things like poison and it working its way through the bloodstream. They understood that you had veins and arteries and that a wound to one of these was a lot more dangerous than a wound to a calf or arm muscle. For example, your tongue is filled with blood vessels right near the surface. Want to commit suicide by cobra? Hold it to your mouth, stick your tongue out and keep provoking it. I don't know how likely that is to kill you but I bet it's far more likely than normal statistics on snake bites and it's hardly beyond an educated Greek or Egyptians brain power for the time period.

Anons blow Japanese airports off-course in dolphin cull protest

h4rm0ny

Re: At some point the dolphins will just be gone

>>"So long, and thanks for all the fish!"

Actually given the massive over-fishing, there probably wont be any of them left, either.

Sadly, not all environmental causes are as stupid as deploying wind farms everywhere because we think nuclear power will create Godzilla. Some causes, like trying to stop catastrophic collapse of our marine ecology, are real. :(

UK MPs have right old whinge about ‘defunct’ Wilson Doctrine

h4rm0ny

Re: The MPs seriously missed the point

Case in point, MI5 infiltrated the UK Green Party some years back - that's a matter of record. Power seeks to preserve itself.

h4rm0ny

A "number of misconceptions"

I bet the "misconceptions" she talks about are her suggesting the MPs think they're being specifically targeted and she wants to say it's okay because it's mass surveillance. Which is a rather bizarre argument to my mind. It reminds me a quote from Saint Yossarian of Catch-22 fame:

"They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.

"No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried.

"Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.

"They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone."

"And what difference does that make?"

So really, Theresa May, what difference does it make? I don't say "oh, I'm okay with being spied on and having all my communications scanned because they're doing it to other people too", and I don't think the MPs will be either. But I bet that's the play Theresa May is trying to make here. How do I get out of this Joseph Heller novel? There's a lovely Terry Pratchett book the next shelf over that I'd much rather live in.

Temperature of Hell drops a few degrees – Microsoft emits SSH-for-Windows source code

h4rm0ny

Re: POSIX

I believe the point you were contesting was that the default UNIX permissions system is less maintainable and less capable than Windows permissions. Like the other two posters, you keep trying to argue how you can use other systems on Linux if you choose. That both doesn't refute what I wrote and also glosses over the fact that only a minority of GNU/Linux installs and userbase actually makes use of such systems. The reason being, of course, that they are kludgy and ugly and fiddly to manage. Windows ACLs are built in at a very deep level to the design and are consistent across file systems, processes and configuration options. SELinux is something built above the default UNIX permissions system as a patch, an overlay. It doesn't matter if it's implemented in the kernel or wherever, conceptually that is what it is. Now you can try and dress it up in different language as you are attempting, call it "a modular hierarchy" wherever the Hell you got that from, but it remains what it is. A late addition that exists above the conceptual model that is the UNIX permissions system and manipulates that still existing lower model to get what it wants, it does not replace it as you attempt to suggest. It's all still there - turtles all the way down. Whereas ACLs are a basic component of Windows and universally used. Because they're easy and everything integrates with them naturally.

Re-phrasing something as "a modular hierarchy" or missing the point / confusing things by going on about it being implemented in the kernel, doesn't change what it is nor alter the fact that you're shifting ground from what I actually did which was compare Windows ACLs to default UNIX permissions - you know, those things that most GNU/Linux installs actually use in practice.

h4rm0ny

Re: POSIX

>>"SELinux is built into the kernel. It may appear to be 'a patch' because ordinary users can be set to operate in an 'unconfined' domain where the usual permission system operates"

You don't seem to understand. It is a kernel module, yes. That has no bearing on it being a patch over the default UNIX permissions system. "Patch" = "thing that papers over the original conceptual model with a new conceptual model to try and graft on some modern functionality and security". Being in the kernel has no bearing on that - you haven't understood the context or argument.

h4rm0ny

Re: POSIX

>>"These are far more complicated, whether they are 'easier' or 'harder' to work with depends entirely on what you are used to and whether you know how to use the facilities correctly"

No it doesn't "depend entirely" in what you are used to. A pretty massive component of hiw easy or hard it is to work with them depends on what you use them FOR.

UNIX permissions are simple and adequate for basic scenarios. They can be made to work for more complex scenarios with a lot of expertise and a tolerance for people emailing you every other day to say such and such needs to be added to this group or the other for some obscure reason. A proper system if ACLs is what you want for any moderately complex environment however. Easy management of nested groups and hierarchical, trickle down permissions is a basic requirement for a capable permissions system. Amongst others.

These are not things that "depend entirely" on which you are most familiar with. I don't see your part about inodes having any bearing on this, either.

h4rm0ny
WTF?

Re: POSIX

>>"I smell someone that can't convert Octal in their head..."

I smell someone who hasn't noticed that computers moved on to 16, 32 and 64-bits since the days of ancient IBM mainframes (hint: octal doesn't make sense except when you have a word length that is a multiple if three, e.g. 12, 24, 36-bit machines and you don't seem to have been told we don't use those any more). As it happens I can convert to octal in my head seeing as it's just counting in binary, but I figured as my aim was to explain something rather than score Internet Points, I'd use the friendly notation that GNU/Linux systems themselves actually display it as. Or are Brian Fox and Richard Stallman similarly people who "can't convert Octal in their head" seeing as they chose to use the same notation I did in my post when they put together Bash back in the day?

I don't know which is sadder - your godawful attempts to score points or the implication that a knowledge of octal being an aide to using a permissions says anything positive about the permissions system in question.

h4rm0ny

Re: POSIX

>>"LOL. If you think Powershell is more powerfull than BASH, you need to have another think. Although I will concede that I am inferring BASH is on a mostly-proper *nix system like Linux or the BSDs with all the attendant utilities. I would imagine BASH on a Windows box would be about as useless as Powershell on a Linux box."

This has been debated before on El. Reg. Yes, Powershell is not a good fit for GNU/Linux and Bash is not a good fit for Windows. This is because Windows is an OO environment and GNU/Linux is not. But your comment about Powershell not being more powerful than Bash is woefully misinformed. It is not only better designed and more self-consistent, but it has vastly more capabilities. MS looked at Bash, Python, et al. and created a scripting language that really took advantage of the last thirty years of progress in a way Bash never could (because it's very old). The below is a good starting list for advantages of Powershell over Bash and that's before I get into the far greater standardization of it. The below list was posted by TheVogon. I claim no credit for its excellent summation:

1) Object oriented pipes so that I don't have to format and reparse and be concerned about language settings.

2) Command metadata. PowerShell commands, functions and even *script files* expose metadata about the names, positions, types and validation rules for parameters, allowing the *shell* to perform type coercion, allowing the *shell* to explain the parameters/syntax, allowing the *shell* to support both tab completion and auto-suggestions with no need for external and cumbersome completion definitions.

3) Robust risk management. Look up common parameters -WhatIf, -Confirm, -Force and consider how they are supported by ambient values in scripts you author yourself.

4) Multiple location types and -providers. Even a SQL Server appears as a navigable file system. Want to work with a certain database? Just switch to the sqlserver: drive and navigate to the server/database and start selecting, creating tables etc.

5) Fan-out remoting. Execute the same script transparently and *robustly* on multiple servers and consolidate the results back on the controlling console. Try icm host1,host2,host3 {ps} and watch how you get consolidated, object-oriented process descriptions from multiple servers.

6) Workflow scripting. PowerShell scripts can (since v3) be defined as workflows which are suspendable, resumable and which can pick up and continue even across system restarts.

7) Parallel scripting. No, not just starting multiple processes, but having the actual *script* branch out and run massively parallel.

8) True remote sessions where you don't step into and out of remote sessions but actually controls any number of remote sessions from the outside.

9) PowerShell web access. You can now set up a IIS with PWA as a gateway. This gives you a firewall-friendly remote command line in any standards compliant browser.

10) Superior security features, e.g. script signing, memory encryption, proper multi-mode credentials allowing script to be agnostic about authentication schemes which may go way beyond stupid username+password and use smart cards, tokens, OTPs etc.

11) Transaction support right in the shell. Script actions can join any resource manager such as SQL server, registry, message queues in a single atomic transaction. Do that in bash?

12) Strongly typed stripting, extensive data types, e.g first class xml support and regex support right in the shell. Optional static/explicit typing. Real lambdas (script blocks) instead of stupidly relying on dangerous and error prone "eval" functions.

13) Real *structured* exception handling as an alternative to outdated traps (which PowerShell also has). try-catch-finally blocks.

14) Instrumentation, extensive tracing, transcript and *source level* debugging of scripts.

15) Consistent naming conventions covering verb-noun command names, common verbs, common parameter names.

h4rm0ny

Re: POSIX

>>"But the most widely used Linux distribution, Android, uses something even better than Posix ACL, namely SELinux. That makes SELinux very widely used in the *nix world. SELinux is way more powerful than ACLs, be it the Posix or MS variant."

I have worked with SELinux. It's a patch over the UNIX security model that is constantly tripping people up and not well integrated into GNU/Linux itself. SELinux on Android I have no experience with. However, in either case it's basically a layer over the top of the UNIX permissions system to try and wrap it up in something more usable. It's odd how all I initially wrote was that Windows permissions were much more capable and maintainable than the default UNIX permissions systems and the first two replies I got were people immediately responding with alternatives to the default UNIX permissions system. You and they are both really reinforcing my point that the default (and most commonly used on GNU/Linux) permissions system is limited and hard to work with.

As to SELinux being "way more powerful" than Windows ACLs, I find that not to be the case at all. What is it you think makes SELinux superior to Windows ACLs?

h4rm0ny

Re: POSIX

>>"No it is for older versions at least, fully POSIX compliant. There is no "not really". POSIX is a standard and Windows has previously implemented all required aspects. However support for it is now deprecated: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc754351.aspx"

At the very least since Vista, Windows is not POSIX compliant. I'm not really interested in arguments that say Windows is POSIX compliant because ten years ago it was. Because, whilst not wishing to sound like Bill Clinton, that's a rather funny definition of "is".

h4rm0ny

Re: Good.

>>"But they're all just "Linux". I don't see the point in saying that they ported to this distro and that one when they're all essentially the same target assuming they use standard tools like autoconf."

Actually, this is a bit of a red herring. What Microsoft did was create an Open Source service and provide it as package for these distributions and the package is designed to allow people to manage those OSs using Powershell from a remote machine. They haven't ported Powershell itself to GNU/Linux and that wouldn't really make sense as Powershell is OO-based and GNU/Linux exposes little to none of itself as objects. The package is more like a proxy way of configuring things, monitoring, etc. It's designed to facilitate management of your GNU/Linux boxes in Azure. The source is available if you want to compile it on something else.

h4rm0ny

Re: POSIX

>>"Windows has been POSIX compliant for many years already."

Ehhhhh, in a sense, but not really (imo). It can offer a mostly POSIX-compliant environment. You can install Cygwin and have a POSIX world in which to play. But the functionality of Windows is a super-set of that. It would be a little like saying that C++ is C compliant. Not a fan of analogies, but I think that one works. So I concede you're sort of right, but would say that in practical terms it is not, nor tries to be.

h4rm0ny

Re: POSIX

>>"Get a clue. Posix means Posix ACLs which give fine-grained access control not unlike Windows ACLs. You can argue that Windows ACLs are better if you wish, but displaying your ignorance of Posix is not a good start."

I wrote "default UNIX -rwx/rwx/rwx approach". You seem to have disregarded that in favour of what you would prefer I had said. Sure, you can add ACLs to GNU/Linux or UNIX and some people do. But they are not the default and they see minority usage. They are also a great deal harder to work with and less capable than Windows where they are the default approach. I don't think you could shoe-horn the more capable Windows ACLs into POSIX-compliance. Feel free to show me how you could, if you want to try though. ;)

As to the other poster, yes, I perhaps should not have written "fully" OO as there are some non-OO APIs in Windows. My background is UNIX so I'm prone to the occasional misspeak on Windows. But they key word in my post was "environment". You can manage the entirety of Windows via Powershell in an OO fashion and whilst if you're programming on Windows you might use a non-OO API, what I'm getting at is that working within the environment, pretty much everything exposes itself with an OO interface. And I do not see why or how people want Windows to suddenly be "POSIX compliant" as they sometimes post on El Reg. I don't think they actually know what they're asking for or what they think it would gain. A little like a builder of row-boats looking at a car and demanding it have hooks added for the oars to go in. Perhaps Nigel 11 here would like to explain what advantage there is to Windows in tying itself down to being "POSIX compliant". How and why would you even want to handle files or processes in the way POSIX lays out when there are better approaches?

h4rm0ny

Re: Ugh!

>>"I just had a look at it. I picked a file at random - auth-passwd.c and looked at the Microsoft version versus the equivalent from the portable OpenSSH project. The Microsoft version is nearly twice as long (378 lines versus 216), with the addition of huge #ifdef hacks, converting back and forth between UTF8 and UTF16, and all sorts of other horrors."

I don't consider "nearly twice as long" as a file in OpenSSH to be a criticism. Maintainable code is often longer than hard to maintain code just because it's better structured. Your comment reminds me of ancient C programmers decrying Open Source with, well as it happens, exactly the same criticism - "but look, it's twice as many lines of code". No-one who is objective and knows about code should be making a criticism like the one above. As to converting between UTF-8 and UTF-16, well if one peer is using the former and the other the latter, what exactly would you suggest?

Anyway, you are surely not holding up the labyrinth that is the OpenSSH project as an example of clean, well-structured coding. Are you? :/

h4rm0ny

Re: POSIX

You say "POSIX compatible" as if it's a good thing. The Windows OS is a fully OO environment. Pretty much every part of it including its permissions system (which is a Hell of a lot more powerful and manageable than the default UNIX -rwx/rwx/rwx approach). So why the Hell would tying it down to the ancient POSIX standard which was developed for UNIX make sense or be considered an advantage for Windows?

Terror, terror everywhere: Call the filter police, there's a madman (or two) in town

h4rm0ny

Re: Filtering and removing

Informed people are difficult to manage. Uninformed people are much easier to manage. But you have to make sure they are uninformed in the right way so that it's you they are managed by. That is essentially the principle.

CIA boss uses AOL email – and I hacked it, claims stoner teen

h4rm0ny

I'm not sure which is funnier...

That they may have got into the director of the CIA's AOL account(!) or that they think US foreign-policy is too pro-Palestine!

h4rm0ny

Re: Typical teenager..

If teenagers didn't do stupid things we'd all go from childhood to being 45 and how depressing would that be?

GCHQ to pore over blueprints of Chinese built Brit nuke plants

h4rm0ny
Joke

Well if there wasn't spyware in the computer systems before, there will be after!

Connected kettles boil over, spill Wi-Fi passwords over London

h4rm0ny

Re: wow

Maybe it enables him to find when people are home and bored so he can pop round. Did you think of that?

Or anything, in fact?

h4rm0ny

Re: Which has more stupidity?

For an example, look at televisions. All I want from it is a good quality display and reliability. If I want to watch YouTube on it or Skype, I will connect one of my devices that does those things. UNIX philosophy - do one thing and do it well.

Except that I can't find any modern TVs that are like that. Everyone of them comes loaded with an OS and a pile of software that I don't trust to be patched and kept up to date now, let alone two or three years from now. The manufacturers have all decided that Skype / YouTube / FireFox v.27 is the vital market differentiator without which their product will sink like a stone.

As a consequence, if I want to get a 4K display right now, I have to buy something that three years from now is going to be a complete liability. And to the poster that says "just don't connect it", that gets harder every year as the manufacturers WANT to make it harder to not connect by tying as much functionality into connectivity as possible. That way they can "add value" and get your data.

Amazon Echo: We put Jeff Bezos' always-on microphone-speaker in a Reg family home

h4rm0ny

Re: More customization desired in these voice powered assistants

Or the Avon version: "That's an interesting question. Can a vacuum be said to have a temperature at all, or do we just consider it to be de facto absolute zero. Tell you what, why don't you float around outside for a while and see if you can tell the difference. I would suggest a spacesuit, but of course that would interfere with the experiment, wouldn't it?"

h4rm0ny

Re: Monopoly

>>"I for one would love to get into the oil tanker business. Isn't going to happen soon though!"

That's not a great analogy though. If you've been buying oil tankers from BigShips.com it doesn't give you any special reason not to buy your next one from OilForYou.com if they enter the market and sell you the same for less.

But with something like this or Cortana that's not true. They collect your data which you can't export to another provider creating a barrier to switching; and they also forge deals with their partners which others are prevented from doing. If you think Amazon / MS / Google / Apple wouldn't say to StubHub or whoever "we're a really big company and we'll pay a tiny bit extra per user if you don't also licence it to this new market entrant," then I suspect that's misplaced trust in big business. (N.b. for 'don't licence it' you can probably read 'price it too high for them' which is easier to get away with legally).

h4rm0ny

whilst you drive to the cantina.

h4rm0ny

Re: What always seems to get missed...

What I've always wanted, is simply the ability to pay for this stuff with money. But I seldom get that choice. For example, there are features of Cortana that I would very much like to use. Being able to speak to it and quickly add things to my calendar would be very valuable. However, I can't pay for the service, I have to sign over consent to read through all my txt messages and emails (amongst other things).

Or best of all with Windows 10 where Microsoft seems to want me to pay with money AND privacy.

Put some controls in place on this technology, ask me for money for it, and I'll be happy to do so. Unfortunately I think the sheer number of people out there who want / expect such services for free, seem to make me a minority market not worth serving.

Btw, I did read the article not just skip down here to the comments to rant about privacy like the author suggests, and to prove it, did anyone else read the following bit:

...distrust turned to uncertainty; uncertainty to excitement; excitement to disappointment; disappointment to acceptance; acceptance to affection.

and expect it to end with "I had finally learned to love Big Brother".

GCHQ can and will spy on politicos, rules tribunal

h4rm0ny

Re: Yet, have you ever met a politician......

Yes, actually I have. Though they tend to be the ones marginalized away from the centres of power in the party, excluded by the Blair or Cameron cabals in control of their parties. They're the reason Parliamentary Whips exist.

Fixing Windows 10: New build tweaks Edge, sucks in Skype

h4rm0ny

Re: preview on mouseover in Edge?

Metro IE does it even better - the tabs are neatly tucked out of the way until a right-click or a swipe brings them up into view as a little carousel of preview images. Extremely quick to use. Very intuitive.

Edge is a significant step backwards in several ways. I particularly loathe the way when I open a new tab (which I have set to be blank by default) it moves the cursor into a near invisible search box in the middle of the page which I then have to grab the mouse, move it up to the top and click in the address bar before I can start typing my URL. Compounded by the fact that the address bar is white on a white background with almost no visible outline. I am unimpressed.

Google's .bro file format changed to .br after gender bother

h4rm0ny

Re: this really is nothing compared to what's coming. @H4rm0ny

>>"Due to "feelgood" legislation perpetrated in the name of "protecting" women, the ability of a judge to determine the sentence in these circumstances has been taken away from him in New York State."

You are confused mandatory sentencing guidelines are not the same thing as "automatically guilty". There are mandatory sentencing guidelines for murder as well but that doesn't mean that someone accused of it doesn't get a trial. Also, there's more to your post which goes on to condemn the idea that adults having sex with minors is wrong and blames feminism for the fact that the law is written that way. If you think that then you have a pretty low view of males as well as women.

Your rant about plea-bargaining and sex-offenders registers is not germane to anything I have said. It's really just attempting to shift ground into other areas easier to contest. Me: "laws against adults having sex with minors is not some feminist evil". You: "Get put on sex offenders register and your life is ruined". Me: "Huh?"

>>"The fact is that feminism is a leftist farce perpetrated upon men for the sole reason of revenge against men for the perceived wrongs that exist only in the minds of feminazi "wymyn".

Feminism is about equal rights and treatment in society for women. The above is paranoid delusion. Wanting, for example, to be treated the same in job interviews is not motivated by a need for revenge against men.

>>"Stop blaming men for all your own personal shortcomings. If you don't like men, then stop trying to hurt them and ruin their lives. Find something else to complain about."

The usual nonsense about feminists hating men or feminism being compensating for shortcomings.

>>"The only time I get PO'd at or think less of women is when they play the gender card, expecting men to fawn over them in order to get an unfair advantage."

Well this is demonstrably not true from your posts alone. You sound desperately bitter, to be honest.

>>"You wanted equality baby, suck it up you can have all the equality you want, you just have to live with the consequences. No one owes you a damn thing now. You made your own bed and woke up with fleas. I don't care if you don't like it, TFB. You deserve to be treated the same way a man is"

And yet all too often, we're not. Are you saying there is no sexism in the world? If so, you're delusional (you may be anyway). If not, then why are you spewing all this bile at people who oppose sexism?

>>"If you had bothered to read my comment before your hindbrain reaction to my "male oriented" statement kicked in, you would have seen that the statement about a lawsuit was hypothetical. Here it is again."

It is hypothetical because there is little to no demand for a male-only gym, which is what I wrote. You can't rant about how feminists are stopping you from having a male-only gym if that has never been the case. And if there were such a case, why would that make sexism against women okay?

>>"That's called REVERSE DISCRIMINATION, in all caps because you still don't grasp the concept!"

Discrimination is not Momentum. You can't add two opposite vectors and say there is no discrimination any more. Your issue is that you see this as two sides battling: Men vs. Women. Plenty of men are feminists. Most I would say, in the modern Western world given that feminism is essentially a belief that women should have equal opportunities to men. The real sides are Sexists (against men and women) vs. Non-Sexists. You are currently strongly in the former camp and I believe increasingly marginalized.

h4rm0ny

Re: this really is nothing compared to what's coming.

>>"The "automatic guilt" is already in place in any case in New York state that involves a minor girl and an "adult male" even if she actually initiated the sexual relationship, and said so in court and there is only 4 years difference in age. That's your "zero tolerance" in action."

What are you saying here? That if someone is accused of sex with a minor they are automatically found guilty without trial? Because that is what is meant by "automatic guilt". And if this is the case, I'm going to have to see a citation that trials are suspended in New York State. Or is your argument that feminism has led to adults having sex with minors being a crime? I didn't realize you had to be part of the Feminist New World Order to believe that.

As to a "men only gym" being shut down by lawsuits, any evidence of that? Or indeed evidence that there is demand for a men only gym in the first place? I think you get a few men only saunas - they're gay hangouts and I've never heard of women suing to shut those down because they're not allowed in. You're contriving examples. On the other hand, you do occasionally get women-only gyms. Or more normally you very occasionally get a women only time in a gym or swimming bath, tends to be a small period of time, because there's actual demand for that and usually because it's the only time some Islamic women can actually use the facilities. Now I don't like Islam much, but I'm not against women in Bradford being able to enjoy swimming or using a treadmill for a couple of hours a week.

I honestly do not know what the world must look like from inside your head with the way you see feminism as such an extraordinary threat to you.

h4rm0ny
Paris Hilton

Re: To others...

I opened the comments section to say that as a woman I found it insulting that people thought a file extension would upset me. Having just read through the comments, especially yours, I feel pretty alienated, actually. You call it "a feminist myth" that co-workers are rude or unhelpful to women entering the field. You attribute objection to sexism to "fat humorless women" because apparently objection to sexism comes from not being successful as a sex object... That's the same charge, btw, that has been levelled at feminists ever since we actually started to achieve change. 'Oh, they're angry because men don't want them.' Not, the more accurate, 'we're angry because we face prejudice and double standards'.

It's not a myth that women in the tech sector face prejudice, it exists. You're not likely to encounter it much in Germany .You might encounter it in the UK from time to time. You're almost certainly going to have run into it in the USA if you have worked in the tech sector there for any length of time. Most men I work with are fine, but there are enough people like yourself who share your attitudes, that you encounter this hostile sub-culture from time to time. Up to and including interviewers who are plainly more interested in the possibility of getting laid than in my technical skills. All things that can happen to men, but are far, far from commonly challenges women face in the tech sector.

Personally, I wouldn't give a damn about a file extension being .bro. It should be as much of a non-issue if it happened to be .fem. Except I come here to say that and find all this story has really done, is provide an entrance point for angry people to spew grievances about how "feminists should leave the tech sector alone". As if feminism isn't something that should be normal across all sections of society. Tech is not some refuge for males to defend. It's (or should be) a meritocracy based solely on skill and passion for the subject. Unfortunately it's not. For the most part, people are fine and non-sexist. But only the deeply naïve could think it doesn't have problems (especially in the USA). Or the deeply biased. And someone who throws around nonsense like feminists are motivated by men not wanting them is in the latter camp. Your post is its own counter-argument and a sterling example of the culture that I occasionally encounter. Deeply unpleasant.

Hillary's sysadmin left VNC, RDP exposed to the internet - report

h4rm0ny

Re: There is no need to read her email for it to be a disaster

>>"Anyone know what a FAT check is?"

Checks length of the diplomat's name is under 255 characters, I think.

Hurrah! Doctor Who brings us a bootstrap paradox treat in Before the Flood

h4rm0ny

A bootstrap paradox may be acceptable so long as there is a way into the paradox. To take the Doctor's own example, suppose Beethoven did exist, you go back in time and accidentally kill him, and now must impersonate him and "compose" his symphonies yourself. That's okay - you have a route onto the M25 loop of eternity, it doesn't matter that you can't get off. Maybe, anyway - it's as decent a theory of fictional "Time Travel" as anything else.

What I disliked about the episode from small to large, is firstly the Doctor finding the bootstrap paradox a mystery. I would have thought the Time Lords had a pretty solid grasp of the mechanics of all this. Seems a backtracking to learn that they're just dabblers who find such things every bit as mysterious and head-scratching as everyone else. But more significantly, I really disliked the direct talking to us the audience. The show did it a couple of weeks ago again when the Doctor asked us pointedly "where did I get the tea? I'm the Doctor, just accept it". There was at least a thin conceit that he might have been talking to the Daleks at that point though it seemed more like a direct order to the audience. This week's completely abandoned the pretence and made the Doctor our own narrator and presenter of stories.

I do not like that. I like fiction to not acknowledge that it is fiction.

Playmobil cops broadside for 'racist' pirate slave

h4rm0ny

Re: Interesting complaint

Then you may be over-simplifying what you are teaching your children. They weren't random scum who suddenly decided to steal for a living, for the most part. Press-ganging was common for much of what we consider the pirate era in the popular mindset. Pirates could be and often were, people who had been abducted from the streets and forced into a country's navy against their will. On a successful mutiny, they may well turn pirate with some legitimacy - they now had a death sentence on their head anyway. And many pirate crews were actually fairly egalitarian and run as collectives. They could even, occasionally be quite progressive in terms of sexual equality (occasionally). Look up Anne Bonny who was a female pirate captain. They were certainly on the whole more racially tolerant. The times that pirates lived in (if we're talking Johnny Depp stuff) were not equitable times where they acted out of casual desire to steal for a living instead of working.

Whoever hacked Uber's driver database wasn't our CTO, says rival Lyft

h4rm0ny

Re: "Lyft denies any wrongdoing by its employees."

I don't know about that... I could see myself doing what the CTO did: "They published their own private key? They didn't... *looks at source They did! Muppets!"

Silicon Valley now 'illegal' in Europe: Why Schrems vs Facebook is such a biggie

h4rm0ny

Re: Mainly a public sector issue

It's not necessarily goodbye to those tools. Google might have a bit more of a problem technically (educated guess, not fact), but MS could very easily spin up a distinct European Azure and I'm certain that Amazon wouldn't find it any harder. Indeed, both already have the infrastructure in place and putting the necessary data segregation in place would be fairly straight-forward (at least for the architects of such epic projects as AWS and Azure it would be).

And if the question is a legal one, well MS could certainly licence the Azure technologies to some European countries. They essentially already do this as MS Server and many of their own commercially available tools are the same as in Azure. In business terms, licencing "AWS" might be a little harder but again, hardly insurmountable. In both cases, find a large European company as a front, and away you go.

Microsoft's HoloLens: Here by 2016, mere three THOUSAND dollar price

h4rm0ny

Re: and then there is the Microsoft Surface book

>>"Looks are subjective; I think they're about as ugly as each other. The Surface Book presents a minor problem for me though: it grabs my leg hair if I use it on my lap when I'm wearing shorts... rather like those stretchy watch bands that grab my arm hair. You may not have that problem, h4rm0ny"

Well not to get too personal, but no, I don't have that problem. However, posting mainly to clear up that when I wrote "looks better than..." I was referring to specifications and design considerations, rather than aesthetics. I find both a little drab visually as I have never much liked brushed aluminium finishes.