* Posts by h4rm0ny

4560 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2008

Mystery bidder plunders the whole haul in Silk Road Bitcoin auction

h4rm0ny

Re: Black Ops

Well they have the means, the motive and the resources to do such a thing.

But that would be wrong.

h4rm0ny
Paris Hilton

Re: Not yet faced trial?

Interesting. Thanks for the response. It sounds like a bit of an exploit to be honest. He had control of the money (let's not debate whether BitCoin is money or not), correct? So they say if you're innocent, it was never your money and we still get to keep it. A website cannot own money. If the money were deemed to be property of the website, then surely ultimately it belongs to the owner(s) of that website. Was that not him?

h4rm0ny
Unhappy

Not yet faced trial?

How can his goods (the Bitcoins) be auctioned off if he hasn't yet faced trial, let alone actually been convicted?

EFF sues NSA over snoops 'hoarding' zero-day security bugs

h4rm0ny

Re: Side tracked

You can actually consider this a separate issue to the general NSA spying debacle. Supporting an illegal trade in something demonstrably harmful to security just because you have a need in common with the criminals, is a problem regardless of the use for it the NSA intend.

h4rm0ny

Re: Im all for bashing the NSA

>>"But this is a bit much. The NSA doesn't have any responsibility for eliminating Zero days - they are a comms spy agency for gawds sake."

I get what you're saying but the basis of the charges is not that the NSA are failing to protect something that isn't in their remit, but that they're actively causing harm. Stimulating a black market in exploits and trading in illegal goods is not a positive thing. Much like when the CIA funded their activities by drug dealing (still do for all that I know). It wasn't a problem because the CIAs job was to reduce the drug trade. It was a problem because they were trading drugs.

Microsoft thumbs nose at NSA, hardens crypto for Outlook, OneDrive

h4rm0ny

Re: Finding a scapegoat

>>These people are naive in thinking the USA tech industry industry is crumbling because of the spying and that it might have been " an issue that needed to be addressed but might blow over ".

I know for a fact of two large companies that have recently lost out on big contracts explicitly because of inability to reassure against snooping by the US government. Don't just write things because you think contradicting the article will make you sound more informed / insightful. I also personally recommended to a client against Azure in one instance because of US hosting not meeting EU data protection requirements for them. It happens and it's a significant thing. Do you really think Microsoft of all companies would go against the Three Letters if there weren't a monetary incentive for doing so? If you don't trust article writers or posts such as mine, surely you can at least trust in Microsoft's greed?

h4rm0ny

>>Just Curious... Why the thumb down ?

Probably someone took your post as not sufficiently condemning Microsoft. There's some round here who see that as reason to downvote even purely factual posts. (Now lets see who downvotes this post and proves my point!)

Anyway, I think we can thank Edward Snowden for this. Microsoft don't really do this modern faux-friendly faux-free evil, yet. They're just good old-fashioned greed for your money type of evil. It used to be that toadying up to the government got you the juicy contracts. But the landscape has changed and privacy is what lots of the public are demanding (whilst using Facebook, but only Economists believe in the rational market ;). And the public represent more money than the NSA. It is also a slight edge they can exploit over Google as MS still have a business model that isn't primarily about data harvesting. So they can take a hit to advertising revenues if it helps them position themselves ahead of Google.

Hey, Marissa Mayer: Flexi working time is now LAW in UK. Yahoo!

h4rm0ny

Good catch. Not sure why you're getting downvotes because you're not saying there's anything wrong with flexible or remote working - you're just pointing out the dubious logic in forcing businesses to do what's good for them. If they thought it was, they wouldn't need to be forced!

EXPOSED: Massive mobile malware network used by cops globally

h4rm0ny
Thumb Up

Re: Hacking Team?

Let's cut straight to the essential attribute and call them a Cheapness of Interns.

(Beautiful post, btw).

AMD details aggressive power-efficiency goal: 25X boost by 2020

h4rm0ny
Headmaster

Re: re: NOT ALL programs use gpu properly

>>"So loose the pedant icon and replace with a prejudice icon, it would be much more appropriate."

I was looking for a prejudice icon but I couldn't find one that was appropriate, so I went with the grammar nazi as it was close to English Snobbery which was what I wanted to convey. I dislike the Americanisation of the English language.

Also, the word you want is "lose". Unless of course you think I'm going to set some icons free.

h4rm0ny
Headmaster

Re: re: NOT ALL programs use gpu properly

>>"I have a little AMD-based lappie"

"Lappie" is not an abbreviation of "laptop". It's the same number of letters and the same number of syllables. All it accomplishes is to make you sound American or that you really wish you could have a pet but aren't allowed.

Microsoft hopes for FONDLESLAB FRENZY as Surface Pro 3 debuts

h4rm0ny

Re: Never ever going to buy any MS devices again

I use it absolutely fine and learnt it in no time. So either I'm a genius or you're an idiot.

The distinction between Metro and Desktop mode is not a difficult one to grasp.

How practical is an electric car in London?

h4rm0ny

Re: @ecofeco

Ah, thanks for that. I remember now so yes, ethanol fueled cars don't seem like a good idea any time soon. For air quality I was referring to at the car end. I'm well aware that it is just shifting the problem elsewhere but as far as I'm concerned, the entire chain should begin with Nuclear power and end with either batteries or (potentially better from what I've just learned) hyrdogen fuel cells.

h4rm0ny

Re: Hydrogen??????????????

Going by Wikipedia, the energy efficiency of a Hydrogen fuel cell can currently be around 60% with theoretical potential significantly higher. It also gives an efficiency for an internal combustion engine of about 25% in a modern car. I would love to see hydrogen fuel-cell powered cars take over. Wikipedia also gives energy densities of 46MJ/Kg for petrol and 142MJ/Kg for Hydrogen. Given petrol is already more energy dense than lithium-ion batteries by a considerable margin and hydrogen is way more energy dense than petrol, it seems to me to make massive sense to be pursuing Hydrogen. Why aren't we?

h4rm0ny
Paris Hilton

Re: @ecofeco

What would be the noticeable differences with an ethanol powered car? Is ethanol significantly more energy dense than petrol? So would we see smaller tanks? Or cars with much longer range? And would they be any better for air quality? That sort of thing...

Adobe all smiles as beret bods spaff cash on non-cloud Creative Suite

h4rm0ny

Re: The opensource stuff keeps getting better and better

Inkscape is excellent. Scribus I have used successfully but don't have enough commercial comparisons to comment. Seemed okay though. But GIMP really need to learn that some people just want a toolbar that bloody well docks.

h4rm0ny

Re: Why would the stock price go up?

There are two types of investors. Smart ones is one type.

London commuter hell will soon include 'one card to rule them all'

h4rm0ny

>>"It's a gigantic government IT project - what could possibly go wrong?"

Agreed. They should keep this as simple as possible. Create a protocol where start and end points can be costed which various transport methods can volunteer information with and make this publically available.

Private enterprise would take it from there with various phone apps and big players touting their own Door to Door software to create a travel plan and cost for you. Competition on these would be great and phones with NFC you could even use as the payment device as well as having them tell you where to go.

Microsoft poised to take Web server crown from Apache

h4rm0ny

>>>>Errm - you mean like the market #1 - Sharepoint Server?

>>No, that would be WordPress with over 60 million installations

Ah, that would be WordPress which you can run on IIS. So in answer to the original question of someone saying "can you name a CMS that runs on IIS / Windows", what you're saying is that both first and second most popular CMSs in the world can.

It's rare to see you supporting MS as a viable platform. Glad to see you're becoming more open-minded. ;)

(Now where the gun-foot icon? :D )

h4rm0ny

Re: That subheading

Only if your aim is to prove something about Open Source vs. Microsoft, rather than to compare different webservers.

US Marshals seek buyer for Silk Road's Bitcoin

h4rm0ny
Coat

Bitcoin drug buying...

Forgive me, but has anyone ever made the obvious joke about using Bitcoin for Silk Road purchases: "Here's my hash, now give me yours."

.

.

.

I'll get my coat.

h4rm0ny

Compensate the victims

I am intrigued by this. In what way will the proceeds be used to "compensate the victims" of Silk Road.

Silk Road was a market, primarily drugs as I understand it. So what victims can they compensate. Sellers who lost business when the authorities moved in? Well no, they're obviously not going to compensate those. Buyers who got what they paid for? Well if you take the view that drugs are harmful and that addiction reduces ones ability to say no to them as the government puports, then these people are victims to your mindset. But again, I can't really see the US government compensating drug buyers for having received their drugs. Which leaves buyers who didn't get what they paid for. These are probably the true victims from my point of view but again, I really can't see the US government going to people who got ripped off when buying drugs and saying 'sorry you didn't get the hash you paid for, here's some money back'.

What have I missed here in terms of "victims" who will be compensated. Or will the money, as I suspect, simply vanish into the labyrinthian accounting bureacracy of US law enforcement?

h4rm0ny

Re: Interesting!

Not if the sudden release of a large amount of Bitcoin onto the market causes the price to tip.

Microsoft promises no snooping in new fine print for web services

h4rm0ny

Re: Target advertising?

>>"Now, snooping your emails and chats to find out if you're having non-autorized chats with one of their employees, on the other hand..."

...is also not their business model. They make about 28% of revenue from OEMs, 22% from Server and Tools, 32% from Business, 5% from Online Services and 13% from Entertainment and Devices (XBox et al). I don't see a large section in there where reading your emails provides a revenue stream. Ergo, it's not the business they're in

Seriously - this is a good thing for anyone who cares about massive online profiles being built about what they say or read.

Microsoft challenges US gov over attempts to search overseas data

h4rm0ny

Re: Illegal request

>>"Microsoft knows all that and knows what the result will be - this is being done purely for publicity reasons."

I don't think so. Failure here would be genuinely damaging to Microsoft (and many other US companies). As another poster wrote - they have to fight this.

If they fail, maybe they'd like to relocate their company to Europe. We could do with a $60bn turnover company in Europe at the moment.

We're ALL Winston Smith now - and our common enemy is the Big Brother State

h4rm0ny

There's a fundamental flaw in this article and it's a big one.

>>" Those guys slurping the Big Data streams couldn't give a hoot how we get our jollies, nor what our political beliefs are."

That can change. Very fast.

These companies can be easily suborned by the government or law enforcement. Once that data is gathered, good luck keeping it out of their hands next time there's a witch hunt.

And as to choice: I recommend spending a week trying to avoid all tracking. It's pretty bloody hard. Just blocking google-analytics at the router level causes about a third of the sites I visit to stop working. And so long as the information can all be joined up it doesn't matter if most of it is anonymous. It only takes the linking of one part of it to a real person to link all of it. And that's near trivial to do when you have so much information.

Egghead dragged over coals for mining Bitcoin on uni supercomputer

h4rm0ny

What would you need in terms of regular hardware to mine the same in the same period? I'm trying to get a feel for if this supercomputer was equivalent to thousands of dedicated graphics cards or a handful of mid-range cards on a single box. After all, a GPU will crunch through these far, far faster than a CPU would. Unless the super-computer is designed to do the same sort of calculations it could be a tremendously inefficient way to mine.

Anyone here know much about super-computers?

AWS breaks silence over Truecrypt's role in data import/export

h4rm0ny

Assuming the audit comes back okay, Amazon should fork it and carry on. If they release back to the community this would be an excellent thing for both Amazon (more feedback and fixes) and the rest of us (an Open Source and supported encryption tool).

h4rm0ny

They made recommendations for alternatives for all the main OSs. Bitlocker was the Windows one. They also recommended other approaches for OSX and GNU/Linux. What would YOU recommend as an altnerative to Truecrypt on Windows?

'CAPTAIN CYBORG': The wild-eyed prof behind 'machines have become human' claims

h4rm0ny

Re: STRESS TEST.

So let me guess, I could ask it questions that began: "You're in a desert, you see a tortoise on its back..."

h4rm0ny
Joke

Re: Wouldn't it be beautifully ironic...

>>"... if one day a cyborg materialised from the future and shot him?"

Even better if just before it fired it let out an anguished "Nooooo! You are not my father! That's impossible!"

h4rm0ny

Re: Not Turing's finest hour

>>"but he hadn't grasped the open-ended nature of human conversation, with its almost infinite number of possible variations"

At this point we find one of the biggest problems with the Turing Test. Not the limits of AI, but the limits of experience. We could create a machine that never made a mistep in terms of language use (in theory) but which we could still identify as a machine through the limitations of what it was familiar with.

Consider the following:

Questioner: "Where did you grow up?"

Respondent: "I grew up in Manchester".

Syntactically and stylistically a correct answer. However, if that is a machine responding we then get the following:

Questioner: "Was it sunny there?"

Respondent: "Oh yes, all the time."

Again, syntactically and stylistically correct, but the machine just doesn't know. We are identifying it as a machine not because of lack of intelligence, but because it is forced to lie because it doesn't have the same repetoire of facts and experiences as a real human being.

So the Turing Test really needs to be re-defined. If we can pass the components of understanding questions, using language correctly, then that should be a pass. Incorporating experience into the test pushes back any possibility of passing to absurd levels regardless of the sophistication of the program.

Redmond is patching Windows 8 but NOT Windows 7, say security bods

h4rm0ny

>>"LOL! My friend - I've done unix systems programming for over 20 years - I probably read Stevens when you were still in short trousers"

If you really want to go with the "I'm right because I'm an expert" argument with a side of sneering dismissal of the other person as inexperienced, then I'm actually about the same career-wise. UNIX programmer about fifteen years ago, still do some programming today though I've dipped in and out of management for the last ten years in between programming contracts. And what I said was absolutely right. What you wrote was rubbish - to dismiss backporting code to earlier OS versions. You ignore finite resource, regression testing.

And your response is essentially to try and claim superior experience over someone you don't even know and to build up your car metaphor even further - as if by showing difficulties with cars you can argue that deep-level OS changes are trivial.

I'm honestly inclined to call bullshit on your whole bigging yourself up.

h4rm0ny

Re: What better way to force people to upgrade..

>>"However, amongst sites that actually matter, the story is significantly different."

I'm sorry, but this is just too funny. Is www.notruescotsman.com one of those sites? :D

h4rm0ny

>>"I did a count of NEW and DELETE statements, and there are less DELETEs than NEWs"

You should be careful with humour like that in these parts. I bet half of your updates are from people who get the joke and the other half from the anti-MS brigade who will now be quoting you as an authority. ;)

h4rm0ny

>>"Right, because backporting lines of code in an IDE and recompiling is really on the same level of difficulty as designing and then physically adding new hardware to millions of vehicles isn't it. Idiot."

You're either not a programmer, have never worked at Systems level programming or you have management that never do regression testing or impose timescales.

Anonymous plans hacktivism against World Cup sponsors

h4rm0ny

>>"Why are these children targeting the sponsors? they are not the people responsible for bidding for the world cup, winning that bid then spending more money than they had on building stadiums!"

They are the people paying for it. At least in a substantial part.

Qatar is a nasty, nasty regime. Repressive, brutal, sexist and homophobic and staggering wealth disparity and corruption. That "popular uprising" in Libya not so long ago contained large numbers of Qatar soldiers on the ground, too.

It's good to draw attention to this and I find it highly unlikely that anything Anonymous do to highlight conditions there will be worse that what the Qatar regime gets away with.

Google to let Chromebookers take video content OFFLINE

h4rm0ny

Re: Do as I say...

>>"and Google Movies is a separate produc"

Ah, in that case downvote away. I misread the article and thought this was covering YouTube. Apologies to all.

h4rm0ny

Re: Do as I say...

>>"You're not quoting verifiable facts, you're quoting opinion. At least, that's their story, and they're sticking to it."

Personally, if I don't know if something is true or not, I refrain from downvoting someone for saying so. Russell's teapot not withstanding. I suspect you are being over-generous in allowing that people have downvoted because they think it is not true. They're downvoting because it makes Google look hypocritical.

Anyway, unless Ars Technica is no longer a reputable news source, here's a citation:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/08/microsoftgoogle-bring-back-the-good-youtube-windows-phone-app/

I said it was easily verifiable, didn't I?

h4rm0ny

Re: Do as I say...

Don't people ever question whether they're doing the right thing in downvoting actual verifiable facts?

h4rm0ny

Do as I say...

It wasn't very long ago at all that Google were insisting that the Windows Phone YouTube client wasn't allowed to do this. And in that case it wasn't even proper local storage, it was just a cached version like you do with any online images or content.

Nothing so fine as being able to leverage your dominance in one market (online video) to push your products in a different (OS, mobile devices).

Linux users at risk as ANOTHER critical GnuTLS bug found

h4rm0ny

Re: @h4rm0ny

>>Did you check your compiler, to make sure it didn't have a backdoor? If not, what makes you think a mere code audit of your source is enough to prevent Trojan code from being inserted?

One - that would not undermine the point I made. Two, the source code for the compiler I use, since you ask, is here: GCC. And before you start asking about who compiles the compilers, the answer is everyone does and it's verified by a Hash. GCC is very widely used and hashes of legitimate binaries therefore reliable and easily checked. So your point is not only not a response to what I actually wrote, but wrong as well.

>>"This particular security aspect of open source was blown to pieces by Ken Thompson nearly 30 years ago, when he demonstrated the addition of Trojan code using vetted, approved source code that contained NO TRACE of the Trojan code."

If you're trying to make the point (as far as I can work out) that it is possible for someone to introduce a backdoor that isn't immediately noticeable as a backdoor then that's neither in dispute nor something anyone isn't aware of. But your argument is akin to saying a task massively more difficult than another is equivalent because both have a chance of success. Adding a backdoor to closed source is bordering on trivial. Adding one to Open Source that isn't detectable is extremely difficult and constrained to a much narrower range of circumstances. NSA sort of managed to do it with RSA in a way, with their fiddling about with random number generation. And that's an organization of extremely bright people with massive resource working in an area where very few people were qualified to understand the code with a code-base that wasn't publically reviewed. As I say: extremely difficult. To equate 100:000:1 odds with 2:1 odds by saying both scenarios can occur, shows extremely limited thinking. Not to mention being biased as a pre-requisite.

>>"What is more, the USAF knew about this sort of thing 30 years ago - so you can bet that the NSA and GCHQ know about it today. There is probably a whole new layer of security exploits in Linux and open source software like OpenSSL, Apache, et cetera, that are based on backdoors in the GNU compiler. Simply hiring eyes to look at the source code won't help you find them."

Hiring more people to inspect source code wont help find things wrong with the source code? At this point, you're descending into nonsense. Also your invocation of "probably" to make your argument is just a way of trying to escape having to support your argument. In effect, you're just stating an (ill-thought out) opinion.

h4rm0ny

Re: Open Source movement are making the same mistakes ...

>>"Do you mean to suggest that the open source projects, the free stuff, dont have the same quality of developer working on them?"

You're obviously not as familiar with Open Source as you think you are. The majority of big projects (all of them?) have paid developers working on them. Do you think someone with Linus Torvalds' level of ability is sitting there working away on the Linux kernel and managing it for free?

h4rm0ny

Re: Open source was supposed to be secure

>>"That's a lot faster from exploit notification to fix than MS or Apple..."

Wow. I love how you managed to turn a really complicated set of metrics and as broad a category as vulnerability into such a simple and accurate summation.

Or I could be being sarcastic. Comparing patch times is complex. Here's a light attempt to do so: http://www.zdnet.com/linux-trailed-windows-in-patching-zero-days-in-2012-report-says-7000011326/

h4rm0ny

Re: Open source - crap code

>>"Of course, there are exceptions; there is open source code out there that is well written and understandable. But it is VERY few and far between."

I don't disagree with any of your points. But I do wonder why you limit them to only Open Source software instead of all of it (ime).

Evidence of ancient WORLD SMASHER planet Theia - FOUND ON MOON

h4rm0ny

Re: Simple question

Okay, I get that. But it doesn't resolve my question as to why there are useful differences in composition between the Moon and the Earth that they can attribute to a third body. If the Moon and Earth form from "the resultant mixture" as you say, what is the source of them being able to find evidence of Theia on the Moon, if you can only tell it is evidence due to its differences to rocks on Earth.

N.b. seeing all the replies that have been posted since mine, it's plain that this is contentious for some with accusations of "anti-science" et al. My questions are not me showing the theory is wrong. They're me asking questions. I must be missing something here.

h4rm0ny

Simple question

No doubt I'm missing something obvious, but if they're getting rocks from the Moon and saying: "ah-ha! these are different to the rocks on the Earth, they must be remanants of a different planet", then why aren't similar remnants found on Earth? After all, if the Moon is covered in bits of Theia, why isn't the Earth. And if it is, how can they know what is the baseline?

Has Google gone too far? Indie labels say it's crunch time for The New Economy

h4rm0ny

Re: They should probably call their bluff

>>"They'll type their search into Google and it'll appear at the top anyway as it's official content on a legit high-traffic streaming site"

Not to be paranoid, but are you quite certain that Vimeo or Veoh would be given equal priority in the search results as YouTube when it came to companies that spurned Google?

Devs get first look at next Visual Studio

h4rm0ny
Boffin

Compiler as a service?

I've been out of the low-level code game too long. Someone speak to me of this!

AMD tops processor evolution with new mobile Kaveri chippery

h4rm0ny

Re: The delusions of marketing

>>"Sounds like AMD's boffins have hit the spot on their design briefs - I just question how much of that design brief covers real world usage."

I think it does cover most of the real world usage. It unfortunately doesn't cover mine as I need raw power and not of the graphics kind (think webserver and database usage), so I'm probably going to jump to Intel for the first time in a very long time later this year. But I think they definitely have the right approach for the mass market. Most real world usage has long since had its CPU needs met. Few are the people that are limited in their Excel usage because of a weak CPU these days. Poor disk speed yes, low memory, occasionally. CPU? Not often.

AMD have the right approach for most people - CPU usage they give a moderate bump, GPU and graphics they give a big bump. Also more specialist areas. I have a FX-8350. It's a recent upgrade from an 1100T. In terms of raw CPU power it's a bit better but not huge. However it has built-in AES support. That makes an encrypted SSD go from something like 50-60% performance hit on what it would be without encryption, to about a 5% performance hit (based on my tests using Bitlocker). See - raw power increase only modest, but real world usage increase huge. You'll see similar with things in these chips - the fast wireless speeds because of in-built support, reallly good and low-impact video decoding because of the UVD and the refinements to that. Faster memory access...

I'm not their target market as someone who is very CPU hungry. But I also recognize that I am not the majority either. The only two mass markets where there's a desperate need for more power are games and virtualization. And what do we see with AMD's new chips? Built in and better GPU architecture raising the gaming baseline significantly and for an order of magnitude less cost. And high core numbers with shared FPU and lots of support for virtualization.

>>"Will they do "instant on" as well as haswell? Do I have week long standby power?"

For the former, that's far more a factor of the rest of your system - i.e. SSD and OS (Windows 8 has its hybrid hibernate solution). For the latter, I don't know but I can't imagine Intel vs. AMD makes much difference compared to other factors. I invite numbers on that.

>>Dear AMD less TLA and FLA nerdgasms more real world use cases please.

You have it precisely the wrong way around. AMD's new chips are the way they are because they're focusing on real world use cases. A tight focus on higher FP calculations, increased clock speed and similar metrics would be the direction that ignored majority real world usage.