Poettering got tired of Microsoft copying UNIX, and decided to seek justice by copying them for once.
Unfortunately, he started with their business model. :/
Posts by h4rm0ny
4560 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2008
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Debian ships new 'Jessie' release with systemd AND sysvinit
Monday 27th April 2015 07:38 GMT
Re: Choice during install
I haven't tried this yet, but I understand the new Gnome has dependencies on systemd so unless you remove that, you're stuck with systemd. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are others in there that depend on it. So someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I believe you're basically stuck with Wheezy until Devuan is available.
Monday 27th April 2015 05:40 GMT 
All hail Systemd.
And he causes all distros, the small and the great, the funded by Shuttleworth and the funded by none, and the personal distros and the enterprise-ready, to be given a package in their binary repository or in their source code, and he provides that no one will be able to boot or to start a daemon, except the one who has the package, either the name of the package or the number of his process. Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the id of the process, for the number is that of a man called Poettering; and his process id is six hundred and sixty-six.
C++ Daddy Bjarne Stroustrup outlines directions for v17
Celebrated Pakistani female online activist Sabeen Mahmud dies in shooting
Dev gives HBO free math tips to nail Game of Thrones pirate leakers
Sunday 26th April 2015 21:41 GMT
>>"What about the matter that making all those encodes will take time since they're HD and each forensically unique meaning they can't be shortcutted? Plus the fact that a one-off is not worth making a ROM-Marked pressed copy?"
That's up to the distributors in each case if it's worth their time or not. Which I guess would depend on how many recipients they had (ten, a hundred, two-thousand?). It wouldn't be worth pressing these discs en masse - you'd churn them out individually. My educated guesstimate for encoding, assuming you had semi-professional hardware, would be about an hour and a half to two hours per hour of actual program / movie. But if you wrote encoding software specifically with this in mind you could do multiple files in parallel introducing the custom markers to each as you went. You'd still need to burn those files to disc individually of course, but the encoding could, if you were serious about this, be done in about five hours for a hundred or so variations. Hardware would run you somewhere around the £3,000+ level, in large part enterprise / custom NAS. I could probably modify libav to actually do this and I'm almost tempted to go and give it a go. I wonder if anyone would actually be interested in a working version of this...? I wouldn't want to be the low-paid workers who sat there burning two-hundred blu-rays in a row, however. Though on the other hand - lots of time for reading The Register. ;)
But anyway, I can't answer this last question of yours - it's a value judgement of the distributor based on how much time they want / can afford to spend doing this stuff and how much of a concern tracking leaks actually is to them. These are things I don't know. I just do maths and software. ;) But I hope this was interesting at least.
Sunday 26th April 2015 07:57 GMT
>>"That depends on how they're forensically identified and how one goes about removing the traces"
No it doesn't. You should really read some of the previous comments here. It doesn't matter how you remove the frames or pad them out, it only matters that you can only do this for the cases you are aware that they are different. And you can only do that between the compromised copies you have available. If you have two copies, you can see the differences between those two. You wont know about the differences between them and a third copy that you do not have. Because you do not know about those differences you cannot obfuscate them. Therefore your "merged" version clearly indicates that you had access to copies A and B but not C. Therefore the distributor knows which two studios were compromised.
>>which would basically whittle down the forensic tagging to the point the studio won't be able to tell which studio got raided
It doesn't work like that with them unable to work out "which" single studio got raided (or sold them out). They get a list of all the ones that did and by doing the exercises you are talking about all you are doing is ensuring that list is complete.
>>"Oh, speaking of third copies, if the pirates obtain a third copy, they can probably defeat the signature reliably by using a "two-out-of-three" rule, keeping the clip length that appears in two of the three copies (and in the event of a three-way-tie between cut, extend, and nothing, keep the nothing)."
Again, no. You are assuming that the copies do not have markers in common. That's not how this works. The pool of possible markers is huge (derived from the number of frames in the movie) and all copies will have markers in common with all but one other meaning only a complete compromise of all recipients allows one to complete obscure / remove all markers and all that tells the studio anyway is that all parties were compromised.
PLEASE, read the other comments first before responding with confidence that you know better how this works. You actually don't get this. And if I sound a little short with you it's because whenever something like this is touted there are a half-dozen or so people who all just assume that they all have spotted a flaw in this that the mathematicians haven't and rather than ask if it is one, they confidently make assertions about their way of beating this as if the creators had never considered it. It's frustrating.
Thursday 23rd April 2015 06:55 GMT
>>If the pirates obtained TWO copies, they could run a picture delta analysis to determine off frames and work from there: keeping edits from BOTH copies to throw off the forensic identification"
This has been covered in detail. The above is possible. But what it achieves is to tell the distributors that TWO studios have leaked. And which ones they were. Basically, you think using n sources hides which one of n was the leak. It doesn't, it provides a list of thise n studios that have been compromised.
Monday 20th April 2015 07:32 GMT
Re: If they really are serious
>>"About stopping leaks and piracy release the damn thing when its done rather than waiting. If the English language version was ready why sit on it?"
Well it only leaked ahead of the official release by about a day so they were hardly "sitting on it". And if you're suggesting releasing all episodes at once, that's far worse from the point of view of advertising revenues so the producers would make far less money. It's also arguably worse from the public experience as for many the What Will Happen Next community factor of people getting excited waiting for the next episode, discussing it, is a big part of the experience. Millions of people discuss Game of Thrones (and enjoy doing so) in a way that simply would not happen if it were released as a big blob like a movie with breaks.
>>"Also regional delays are unecessary. If the latest episode of X is already out in Y then Johnny Pirate will download it. With on demand TV im sure most people would forgo piracy and just watch it on demand. Unfortunately the choice isnt there."
Getting rid of regional segregation and just having a single sales model for shows would certainly be a cost saving for we in the affluent West. Basic economics is you charge what the market will bare. And that figure is different in India to what it is in the USA or the UK for example. So if there's no regional segregation the price will average. That means cheaper for we in the West, but much more expensive for people in India, Pakistan or wherever.
Monday 20th April 2015 07:21 GMT
>>"And should I re-encode to a different frame rate, all is lost."
No, because your new encode will still have length variations in scenes that relate to the source copies. You can average scene lengths but that brings us back to having successfully narrowed down a short-list of those recipients that were leaks. Think of your re-encode as adding 2 to every number in a sequence - it does nothing to conceal the original pattern. To do that, you need to know which numbers in the sequence are different to other sequences and change those parts in a way that is special. And you can only do that with ones that have leaked so once again - the distributor knows which parties contributed.
>>"My point is that once someone knows how you encode something, they can mess it up."
That may be the point you are trying to make but what you keep doing is posting what you think is an easy way around this which turns out not to be. Everything you say is exactly what someone who is intelligent but lacks experience in the subject matter comes out with. The problem is that each time you do this, you assume you are right without having tested it against things in practice or against counter-points.
Thursday 16th April 2015 06:26 GMT
>>"But, as usual, most of the Reg commentators refuse to acknowledge the most basic principles of security, such as threat models and relative costs, in favor of making banal, sophomoric claims about why someone else's idea is stupid."
But if someone else is stupid, it means you must be the pointer out must be smart... right?
Right?
Thursday 16th April 2015 06:24 GMT
>>"How? If your method of identification is dropped frames and I drop more frames then you can only see the total dropped frames, not the number of frames I dropped thus"
Because I have the master list of which frames I have dropped for each recipient and can add back in any you have dropped which aren't on the list. Unless you magically coincide with the same frames by happy accident (and you have to win that lottery multiple times to really obscure the signature) then I can tell the difference between which frames you have dropped and which ones I have dropped.
Now obviously if you had access to all or many different leaked copies you could do comparisons and work out which frames I had dropped from each of them and then remove all such frames from a single copy thus anonymising it, or put ones back in making it look like it's from another. But you can only do this between sources you have copies from which returns us to the situation where you have to have compromised many recipients rather than a small number or one.
Basically, if you have only compromised one recipient, what you suggest cannot work. If you have compromised two recipients then what you suggest can obscure whether your copy originated from either of those but it doesn't help you because my inability to distinguish which one out of two gives me the same information - I know that these two recipients leaked. Your technique basically only works to obscure videos between leaked parties by which point I already have the information I want.
Windows 10 Device Guard: Microsoft's effort to keep malware off PCs
Sunday 26th April 2015 08:35 GMT
Re: Well it's "Trusted Computing" all over again
I don't know what is worse some days. The people who post confident assertions when they clearly don't know what they're talking about, or the people who mod them up because the poster speaks authoritatively.
There are basic errors in your post.
>>1. It will bring _no_ benefit to security, as it'll be working in the wrong places. For example you will still be able to exploit a browser to steal cookies and such or install any form of spyware/adware
It is a tool that verifies the software you have installed matches an approved version. Do you also object to signed packages on GNU/Linux? Someone who doesn't understand that there is a security benefit to being able to verify software has no business talking on the subject of security. And your operating principle of 'unless something solves all types of security problems then it provides no benefit' is stunningly flawed.
Also, the browser steals cookies? Okay. :D
>>"In fact certain players in the field will probably even get their malware propperly signed"
Modern malware goes through huge numbers of variations for all sorts of reasons, including getting past anti-virus scanners. If you have to get something signed for every small variation of your malware, that's a staggering limitation. In fact, just getting one version of your malware through instantly becomes much harder as you have to have an account to register it with. Once something you submit is flagged as malware that entire account and every other piece of malware you used it for is effectively scorched. Good luck routinely creating thousands of accounts, getting them approved and then passing off tiny variations in malware with each of them.
And it's fairly easy to recognize malware. Or rather I should say that there are groups that are extremely good at this. Most malware gets about because it's not picked up as malware by people's systems. You can put it up on some compromised site and trick people into installing it because they're ignorant of what it is. But with this turned on, you have to trick Microsoft's QC team into believing it's innocent. And that's a lot harder than tricking some average end-user.
And then of course there's the fact that once something is recognized as malware, its signature gets revoked. This process can happen extremely quickly meaning it's perfectly likely that by the time the malware actually reaches you personally, it's already reached someone else and it got flagged.
>>"No malware today actually accesses the hardware since that would be rather stupi"
Cough Stuxnet Cough. Plus there are entire families of trojans that infect the bootstack which, whether you call it accessing the hardware or not, is happening below the level of the OS which is what is relevant. Anyway, this is another of your basic errors. This security measure isn't protecting the hardware, it is hardware-based. A fundamental difference you have not grasped.
>>"2. As a side effect it'll limit the software you can run on those machines"
That's not a side-effect. That's what the technology does.
>>"For example FOSS will probably not run on such a machine as it will eventually not run any unsigned code"
FOSS software can be signed just the same as proprietary or closed source software. The process is no different. And for the minority who actually compile it themself rather than download a binary (kids today!), this doesn't affect that as the very fact that you're compiling your own code means you have a bypass on this system.
>>"There should be laws against this sort of thing"
Against what? Having an optional whitelist of software you can turn on?
>>"and actually in Germany that would clash with your basic right of "Integrity and Confidality of Information Processing Equipment"."
Complete and utter rubbish.
Saturday 25th April 2015 10:44 GMT
Re: not addressing the Core Problem
>>"That would do away with the need for admin rights for installers (which is IMHO one of the biggest problems in keeping things secure as you give far too much in the way of rights to an app that should not need it), and it would contain issues with the app to that one user environment. Adobe, for instance, should be be allowed to go near any admin rights."
This is not invalid, it's a common security principle in many areas. The problem with it though, is you end up with your user space starting to become a de facto admin space. There are so many things that software needs to do that can be harmful if subverted that you can only go so far down that road before you find it's not having much affect in terms of securing you. Userspace is not the panacea some people are starting to treat it as.
I agree about Adobe, however, and would actually extend that to not being allowed to go near a computer in the first place.
Thursday 23rd April 2015 19:18 GMT
Re: @Jason7 - You know very well...
>>"Security is the justification for taking away control from you like in UEFI Secure Boot."
Well on any x86 device so far, that's only meant taking away control from people who can't work out how to get into the UEFI BIOS and switch Secure Boot to "Off".
Which admittedly, may include you.
Thursday 23rd April 2015 19:15 GMT
Re: Identity badges don't guarantee good behaviour
>>"The trouble with this type of approach to security is that knowing (or thinking you know) what something "is" doesn't really tell you very much about what it "does" - or might do when it thinks you aren't looking."
That's not the way it helps. The point is that if it isn't what it's supposed to be, you're unlikely to be the first victim. It will rapidly be reported and its signature revoked.
Thursday 23rd April 2015 19:12 GMT
Re: But what about...
>>"Expect that to be implemented as enabled by default on home/consumer rated OEM installs and disabled by default only on volume licence distributions."
IF your unsupported assumption turns out to be true, then the user could, you know, turn it off again. And if a user can't manage that then they're exactly the sort of person who shouldn't be turning it off anyway.
Microsoft vs AWS: If you can't bark with the BIG DOGS get off the PORCH
Saturday 25th April 2015 12:55 GMT
Re: Azure is not easier to use that AWS; it's not true.
>>"As an IaaS platform, AWS is easier to understand and use"
This is true (though I would argue once you've got past the learning curve, neither is difficult). But Azure is more focused to PaaS and here it excels, imo. I don't have as much experience as you sound like you do with these, but I have used both professionally and this is how I personally have found it. And increasingly I find myself wanting PaaS more than IaaS for my needs.
China tackles vital strippers-at-funeral problem
Saturday 25th April 2015 10:37 GMT
>>"So the Arabs gave us numeracy and the cradle of civilisation, and in return we gave them the barbarity that is now so popular in Northern Iraq and Syria?"
I have never heard Arab or Muslim culture referred to as The Cradle of Civilization. That usually refers to the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, et al. Whilst geographically the regions overlap with the modern day Middle East, you're out by a couple of thousand years. Numeracy is also very distinct from mathematics - the West (and the East) both had numeracy. We (the West) did get several mathematical concepts from the Islamic world of the time. Though it should also be mentioned that the off-quoted concept of zero actually pre-existed in India and appears to have made its way from there originally and then VIA the Islamic world.
Anyway, much like Rome and some other successful empires, significant causes of the collapse of the Islamic "Golden Age" came from internal stagnation. There was a significant external factor but it wasn't us (speaking as a Westerner). It was the mongols who inflicted debilitating military defeats upon the Islamic world. The various Crusades - whilst not insignificant - had nowhere the effect that Ghengis did. So in so far as barbarity had to be imported, you can look Eastwards for that.
Of course if you're looking at the current situation, then yes - Western propping up of various convenient dictators and dynasties has badly held back equality and progress in the Middle East.
EDIT: I'd be fascinated to know why two people felt the need to mod down my original post about Viking funerals. Surely it can't be because it's "off-topic" given the story.
Friday 24th April 2015 08:33 GMT
There's an account of a Viking funeral (one of the few first-hand written accounts by an educated writer) by a 10th Century Arab traveller who gave the following account:
The dead chieftain was put in a temporary grave, which was covered for ten days until they had sewn new clothes for him. One of his thrall women volunteered to join him in the afterlife and she was guarded day and night, being given a great amount of intoxicating drinks while she sang happily. When the time had arrived for cremation, they pulled his longship ashore and put it on a platform of wood, and they made a bed for the dead chieftain on the ship. Thereafter, an old woman referred to as the "Angel of Death" put cushions on the bed. She was responsible for the ritual.
Then they disinterred the chieftain and gave him new clothes. In his grave, he received intoxicating drinks, fruits, and a stringed instrument. The chieftain was put into his bed with all his weapons and grave offerings around him. Then they had two horses run themselves sweaty, cut them to pieces, and threw the meat into the ship. Finally, they sacrificed a hen and a cock.
Meanwhile, the thrall girl went from one tent to the other and had sexual intercourse with the men. Every man told her: "Tell your master that I did this because of my love to him". In the afternoon, they moved the thrall girl to something that looked like a door frame, where she was lifted on the palms of the men three times. Every time, the girl told of what she saw. The first time, she saw her father and mother, the second time, she saw all her relatives, and the third time she saw her master in the afterworld. There, it was green and beautiful and together with him, she saw men and young boys. She saw that her master beckoned for her.
By using intoxicating drinks, they thought to put the thrall girl in an ecstatic trance that made her psychic and through the symbolic action with the door frame, she would then see into the realm of the dead. The same ritual also appears in the Icelandic short story "Völsa þáttr," where two pagan Norwegian men lift the lady of the household over a door frame to help her look into the otherworld.
Thereafter, the thrall girl was taken away to the ship. She removed her bracelets and gave them to the old woman. Thereafter she removed her finger rings and gave them to the old woman's daughters, who had guarded her. Then they took her aboard the ship, but they did not allow her to enter the tent where the dead chieftain lay. The girl received several vessels of intoxicating drinks and she sang and bade her friends farewell.
Then the girl was pulled into the tent and the men started to beat on the shields so her screams could not be heard. Six men entered the tent to rape the girl, after which they forced her onto her master's bed. Two men grabbed her hands, and two men her wrists. The angel of death put a rope around her neck and while two men pulled the rope, the old woman stabbed the girl between her ribs with a knife. Thereafter, the relatives of the dead chieftain arrived with a burning torch and set the ship aflame. It is said that the fire facilitates the voyage to the realm of the dead.
Afterwards, a round barrow was built over the ashes, and in the centre of the mound they erected a staff of birch wood, where they carved the names of the dead chieftain and his king. Then they departed in their ships
The account is published in a book by Steinsland & Meulengracht published in 1998 if anyone is interested. As you can see, China has little to worry about in comparison.
>Ring, ring< Hey Wall St. Yeah, it's Google. Yeah, bad news again, fellas
Teradata's Aster shows how the flowers of fraud bloom
Google versus the EU: Sigh. You can't exploit a contestable monopoly
Thursday 23rd April 2015 08:23 GMT
Re: So what next?
>>"Maybe you feel that they should be different, separate, services, but that is irrelevant. Both are Google products, and Google is entitled to use one to promote the other"
No they're not, that's where you are mistaken. The reason is because it is anti-competitive. Sticking with the Ford car analogy, suppose Ford not only made cars, but also owned a chain of petrol stations. Suppose they cross promote deals between the two with their petrol stations giving discounts or priority lanes to Ford cars. That means the car business is no longer competing on the quality of cars, but is affected by the number of petrol stations Ford owns. And if Ford is dominant in the field of petrol stations such that the overwhelming majority are owned by them, then that is anti-competitive. The car industry will be hugely skewed not by competition within it, but by the market dominance of the owning company in a different market sector. That is abuse of position which is illegal. Google are hugely dominant in search. Therefore using that to promote themselves in other markets can be anti-trust.
Also, this article is the usual biased polemic I expect from Worstall these days.
White House cyber-general says US must be able to cyber-nuke the worst of the cyber-worst
Mortgage data splashed all over the net. Thanks HSBC Finance
Tuesday 21st April 2015 13:12 GMT
My bet is that someone put it there to share with someone else (either due to technical hurdles on the correct way of sharing things, or bureaucratic hurdles that were inconvenient). That other person grabbed it off the webserver and then it was forgotten that it was up there.
It's at least plausible.
IT Person A: "Hey, I need to run some stats on your mortgage figures for the boss. Can you send them over?"
It Person B: "We're not allowed to send that stuff as email attachments anymore and we're not in the same group for the file shares."
IT Person A: "Can you put it on that webserver and just tell me the name of the file?"
IT Person B: "Can do."
Then Friday afternoon happens and the rest is history.
Microsoft absorbs open-source internal startup MS Open Technology
Monday 20th April 2015 11:48 GMT
Re: Not needed with the future direction ?
>>"The direction Microsoft are currently heading is for them to have most core applications running on their servers, your data stored on their OneDrive. And instead of people paying for an full blown OS on their own devices, for Microsoft to control everything."
Yet another thing the bastards have stolen from Google! >:(
Met Police puts iPads, Windows and Android mobes on trial
Monday 20th April 2015 11:26 GMT
Re: Rugged Android Equipment
My off-the-cuff opinion (which is probably worth as much as the final commissioned report but a few-hundred thousand quid cheaper, I expect) is that it should either be Android (but based on CyanogenMod) or Windows Phone. Apple is out of the running both for lack of customizability and lack of experience and support for the Enterprise. WP has been designed with Enterprise support in mind and Android can be made so because it's open.
Ruggedability should be something of a non-factor in the decision as it would be relatively easy to re-case both Android and Windows devices and with a lucrative market like policing / security forces, there would be no shortage of OEMs happy to do so.
Monday 20th April 2015 11:20 GMT
I know exactly how this will go.
An extensive investigation by an expensive third party that has little to no representation from the people currently involved and familiar with what is being done. This will culminate in a report that recommends whatever vendor the decision maker is friends with the CEO of.
Raytheon suspected of readying for Websense slurp
iPhone vs. Galaxy fight hospitalises two after beer bottle stabbing
Windows Phone 10: Less stuff that does more – plus IE-killer Project Spartan
Friday 17th April 2015 17:16 GMT
Re: Smaller screens
Agreed. I don't want more features. It does what I want very nicely already. And I like it because it is simple, efficient and clean to use. WP8 follows, in a way, the UNIX philosophy of "do one thing and do it well". At least as far as interface and apps go. Now it looks like it's throwing that out in favour of the usual headless chicken approach.
Will reserve judgement, but not optimistic.
Sysadmins, patch now: HTTP 'pings of death' are spewing across web to kill Windows servers
Friday 17th April 2015 14:22 GMT
>>"So what ? I was working on Vax VMS 27 years ago, you're not the only old fart around here."
I was asked where I had been for the last twenty years so I answered. It's not me trying to argue I'm right because I've been working with these systems for eighteen years, it's me answering a direct question from you. So don't pretend it's anything else.
>>Have you ever considered that patching and clearing up after cock-ups is actually what keeps a lot of admins in a job ?
I'm not in favour of writing bad code in order to ensure job security. That's a broken window fallacy.
>>"By the way 99.9% of comedy is laughing at someone else's misfortune."
I think when it's applied continually to a favourite victim, it's called something else.
Friday 17th April 2015 09:00 GMT
>>"You wonder why 'nixers are hostile to MS and laugh at their misfortune, where have you been for the last 20 years ?"
Well actually, around 20 years ago I was working on HP UNIX give or take a couple of years (1998). I've worked on UNIX and then GNU/Linux for well over a decade and didn't use Windows in any serious manner until around the time of Windows 7. And you know what? I still don't laugh at other people's misfortune. I judge things on what they are today, not the actions of fifteen years ago. I could actually dig out some old Slashdot posts if I chose where I was endlessly damning MS for various things (SCO, their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish with Internet Explorer), etc. But when the situation changed, I didn't cling to old opinions, I kept them up to date. MS today produce some very good products and I recognize that. Furthermore, I don't cheer when something bad happens or people have to pull an all-nighter because of a problem. What I have learned is that any complex piece of software has problems. Today it is an MS product, tomorrow it will be Apple or an Open Source project.
So don't tell me what I don't know or that I have to indulge in pointing and laughing because of old history. We move on. At least some of us do.
Friday 17th April 2015 06:17 GMT
The seething ill-will on these forums is really pathetic some days and this section is a great example of it. Almost nothing but venom and bile and for what? MS found a problem and fixed it and hackers reverse engineered that fix and are now targetting those who haven't patched. What do all these critics believe MS should have done instead? Not patched it and hope no-one else ever found the vulnerability? Patch it secretly and invent some sort of encrypted update system where no-one can see what MS are doing to your servers? Not technically feasible and unacceptable regardless. Seriously - if people are going to pour all this scorn on MS for this, what exactly do they suggest would have been the correct course of action?
No wait, I've already guessed the response - it's going to be some variation on "they shouldn't have bugs in the first place". Good luck with that! :/
Graphene spintronics crowned latest Moore's Law extender contender
Googley TENTACLES reach towards YOUR email
Wednesday 15th April 2015 18:09 GMT
Re: Opt Out?
Watch out for loopholes with that. I wouldn't put it past Google to try something like the following:
"They aren't sharing the email addresses. They are simply using our advertising API with your email address to generate ads you will be more interested in. This is initiated at their side and your data remains with the sole-party you have voluntarily shared it with".
Or similar technical dressing up the sharing of data as not actually be shared.
Microsoft points at Skype, Lync: You two, in my office – right now
Wednesday 15th April 2015 07:46 GMT
Re: Oh boy, probably continuing the ever-worse skype releases...
>>"Now it's just untrustworthy shite."
Skype sold out to the NSA all by themself, before MS got a hold of them. Check your information. Those joining PRISM the chronological order was something like Skype, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo. I can't remember where the others were but Skype was always crap and always untrustworthy. I used to argue with everyone I met about it that they should be using some open SIP client but few people listened. And now look where we are. :(
IWF took down over 31,000 child sexual abuse URLs in 2014
Wednesday 15th April 2015 10:25 GMT
Re: @h4arm0ny - I was wrong.
>>"Or has it simply not appeared in an obvious guise?"
Well I don't exactly frequent the boundaries of culture so I would not necessarily be aware of it if they are erring on the side of caution with borderline cases. But so far as I'm aware, no - it has simply not appeared.
Wednesday 15th April 2015 10:22 GMT
Re: I was wrong.
>>"It was Nirvana's Nevermind on Wikipedia that got blocked"
No it wasn't. It was an album by a band called the The Scorpions which had a young girl with her crotch covered by fake damage to the CD cover. I wont link to it but you can look it up.
The rest sounds accurate as I remember it, just the wrong band and album.
Wednesday 15th April 2015 09:09 GMT 
I was wrong.
I remember when the IWF were first set up and they hit the tech news due to that incident where they blocked an album cover. I haven't searched for my old posts but I recall being pretty critical of an unelected and uncontrolled (as I saw it) body making judgement calls on content and having the power to mandate the blocking of things on their say so.
A few years later and the tyrannical moral censor that I anticipated has failed to appear and instead they have done a lot of good work in dealing with child porn. Icon is for me and my getting caught up in mob-frenzy of paranoia and outrage.
Conservative manifesto: 5G, 'near universal' broadband and free mobes for PC Dixon
Wednesday 15th April 2015 08:53 GMT
Re: Some political minds might be concentrated if...
>>"Isn't that a bit like putting the responsibility of a scam on the victims rather than the scammers trying to con them?"
Yes and no. MPs who lie are obviously still culpable of doing wrong and this isn't absolving them of this. But the better analogy is like an interviewer that keeps hiring the wrong people because they never check references and never do any proper assessment of the candidate. They just keep giving the job to the person with the best suit.
Basically, our selection criteria is flawed. You can blame the people we select, but there will always be dishonest candidates and if we preferentially select them over the honest ones, WE have responsibility for that.
>>"Tell that to the MPs forced to quit after the expenses scandal. It sure changed things for them."
It changed things for them but it did not change the system. There will always be people who set short-term benefit (which can be years) ahead of the threat of eventual possible reprimand. And so long as we consistently elect the person with the grandest promises, we are selecting for such people.
Wednesday 15th April 2015 07:35 GMT
Re: Some political minds might be concentrated if...
>>"They do however have the choice of deciding what to promise, with most of them opting to promise the moon when they know it's not possible."
That's because the one's making promises get elected. Take a population of 20 candidates. 19 tell the truth, 1 promises everyone a pony. The one lying gets elected. It's immaterial whether you chastise MPs for lying or not because the system is set up to reward the liar. The only way to change that system is to get the voters to not reward lying - complaining about the MPs wont change anything. And to change the voter behaviour, you need more educated people.
Wednesday 15th April 2015 07:31 GMT
Re: What about...
>>"Calls on Vodafone frequently fail even if the phone claims to have reception"
I get that with Vodafone. My phone will show medium or even high reception but the call keeps dropping. It's only something I have noticed since moving to Vodafone. I have been trying to work out if it is the network or something wrong with my phone. If my phone is showing good signal, what causes the call to repeatedly drop and txt messages to fail?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
