Posts by Fred Flintstone

the ability to clip my windows to each side of the screen

Maybe try Popup Window from CatalysTwo? It's a bit fickle (works really on about the last screen pixel of the edge) but once you have it set up it's very helpful IMHO.

Re: Not so smart; desperate housewife is desperate.

I don't seem to recall Jobs presenting snake-oil-merchant slides to diss the competition

I agree - it was always seen as bad marketing to give competitors airtime. Personally, I found it a bit petty (but I'm not a marketeer, clearly :) ).

Re: *cough* *cough* *cough*

The Merkins are still pissed off that the French don't seem too bothered with the bluster and merely throw cows at them from the castle walls.

Massive upvote for the Holy Grail references (and on a Friday as well :) ).

Must dig out my copy of that movie and watch again..

Not really, all that lobbying's got to pay back sometime...

Actually, it is. FB is using the Art 29 working group as a single access point to all regulators, basically doing the exact opposite of Google who ignored them and is now facing problems in 27 countries simultaneously and independently. So that is indeed a very smart move.

Having said that, I hope FB gets given a firm "non" - through WhatsApp they have acquired the mobile number of practically everyone in the world without permission.

Re: Don't Panic!

Sadly, Firefox is about to be compromised from a different angle. Which reminds me, any statement by Google on this?

Actually, it's an excellent cough remedy. I'll leave you to ponder that one. Picture it.

/tiptoes away..

Re: Fog Computing

As a mac user, I did not upgrade to Mavericks because they removed sync services to force users to sync calendar and contact accounts via their cloud server.

It was actually stripped from iTunes. The latest (just released) update has returned that functionality, but you could also have solved the problem by using some hosted groupware as a less NSA intercepted version of iCloud.

And what the hell do you do when you're off-line for any reason?

It gets cached locally..

Anyway, it's now back to local/normal/usable (i.e. without any need for anything hosted). When you try and sync it will also ask you to identify which of the records you want to keep (at one point I had to choose between the record in Contacts, the iPad and the iPhone as they were all different). As for being offline,

Re: Start wrecking

Star Wreck is a Fan Group in Finland that put out a Full Length Babylon 5 / Star Trek crossover parody movie. Check them out at: http://www.starwreck.com

The movie is (or was) available on DVD.

The first release you could download from their website - the whole merchandise thing came later. It's still available on Youtube too - well worth it IMHO :).

Re: Fanbois.....

he didn't try the inbuilt voice dictation software

Dragon is offline, local. AFAIK, the built-in stuff is not really built-in insofar that it ships everything off to a service - not the kind of thing you want if you're working on anything sensitive :).

Re: Secure?

Read again - they have revised the OS. I would be the first to agree with you, but the fact is that it's presently one of the few platforms you can actually gain access to so there is a chance they may have fixed some of the issues (in which case I'd love to see that released - isn't this supposed to be Open Source and verifiable by any independent party?).

I personally would have preferred SailfishOS to be used like Jolla does, but I have as yet not seen anything emerge from that corner..

Re: "No humans"

No human is doing it

Please don't repeat Google excuses for an reasonably intelligent audience. How did you think that code came to be? Skynet? It's a human who controls what is being searched for, that argument (which comes straight from the Google lie help files) is entirely irrelevant.

Re: Truly impressive densities.

Wouldn't actual transfer speed be a factor too? This must also take some rather special heads to address that density - would be interested in how they go about constructing those. The medium is only one part of the equation.

Interesting development.

Re: 3D printing inception

Cool: recursive printing..

Re: insane

Exactly my thoughts. In my (long gone) youth I used to put Velleman electronics kits together if I was too lazy to design the circuitry and PCB myself, and generally used the box it came in. It appears I may have prior art here, and so has probably half the planet.

What happened to the non-obvious requirement?

Also: Linux is evil cancer that only nerds with no lives would ever use and Microsoft is unicorn farts that tastes like rainbows.

I'd stick to writing excellent articles - trolling doesn't really seem to work so well for ya :)

Re: the burden on the government would be substantial

Mete out the (harsh) sentence to themselves and incarcerate themselves at their own expense, in not-so-rare instances injecting themselves with an appropriate lethal concoction and burying themselves, hopefully abroad, to save the State cost of a burial.

I think you have just nailed why they have not been able to implement proper gun control laws. Thanks, it had me puzzled.

Re: Why I'd never use this...

You're one of the few people who actually looked at the legal context. I'm not surprised by the omission, though, most technical people tend to focus on technical problems and privacy is actually not a technical problem at all, that's just tweaking in the margin of the current global problem (the NSA is but one of the issues, and is actually distracting from the bigger context).

I'm happy they have put some good thinking into the tech aspect, because that widens the choices you have for SECURITY. But security is not the problem: broken law enforcement is.

In this context it's much better to have data under German law than under US law - if it wasn't for the fact that it isn't, as far as I can see. Even if Amazon stores in in a EU location, as it's a US company it can be compelled to supply that data, irrespective of that causing them to break the law in the nation the data is hosted (hence the copious disclaimers for their service in that respect). As I have mentioned before, from a perspective of wanting to protect personal data it's a really bad idea to touch any outfit with a US HQ as they are legally compromised.

So, good marks for coming up with more tech approaches to security, but more work to do on the business framework until this is viable. IMHO, of course.

Re: Is there...

Nice reference to Total Recall :)

In other news .. :)

Re: Am I missing the point or is somone else???

You're actually both correct and mistaken. Mistaken insofar that you assume that logic dictates routing, whereas BGP routing between autonomous systems is actually something that is frequently, umm, "adjusted" (I think there are some setups that collect evidence of that - I would welcome a pointer where this is accessible). I recall from quite a while back that we saw quite often traffic route via the US whereas the shortest and most efficient route would have indeed been direct.

Where you are right is that we should indeed not consider ANY network trustworthy, and use encryption by default (provided we find a way to trust endpoint certificates - as quite a lot of CAs are US based there is plenty of scope to issue certs for man-in-the-middle activities by whatever 3 letter agency feels the need). That way, it doesn't matter if you use a wet piece of string, an airport WiFi link (which is practically always intercepted) or a serious fibre to the desktop connection that takes seconds to deliver a whole DVD worth of data. Personally, the latter is the only way we can address the problems, but there are an awful lot of protocols that still default to cleartext. SMTP is one of them.

Re: well personally

Are you waiting for another offering that absolutely, totally promises not to cooperate with these organisations?

If they're US based that would be a lie, or a very short-lived organisation. Planning upfront for defy a legal notice is not exactly a sustainable business model :)

Good question. At least it doesn't seem to have a problem with rear end collisions.

Any idea what tyres they use? :)

Re: Nice try

In order to defeat the Trojan that the NSA has installed on your PC, they'll need to encrypt the data before it gets to your keyboard. And then the NSA will initiate a covert program to have us all chipped.

Err, no, the "duh" here is that MIT has become yet another set of propellor heads that fixed what didn't need fixing. The security of Lavabit and Silent Circle was OK too. They didn't close shop because there was a technical problem, they closed because they discovered themselves legally defenceless against lawful demands for data - which they had to provide unencrypted.

It really doesn't seem to sink in that the current issues with security are not technical at all (or maybe there is such a large amount of technical noise to camouflage the real issue): whatever brand of crypto safe you use is entirely irrelevant if you can be legally forced to open up the damn thing for any official who feels like having a peek.

This has actually been a massive problem for a few years for US providers, but it's only now becoming very clear after the EU decided not to yet again bow to lobbying and blackmail (IMHO, the US political position was dramatically weakened by the Snowden revelations). Technology is not the problem - US law is. And as we are dealing with federal law it will take YEARS to fix, if ever.

Re: They're not paying you $100

they panic and realise that the low opinion of it has become so deeply entrenched that the risk becomes apparent that this may break the chain of Windows (and therefore Office) license revenues that has kept the moolah rolling in for so many years now.

Actually, they are panicking already. The Swiss office of data protection told them to clean up their act of face problems with selling Office 365 in Switzerland. In something that is IMHO totally unprecedented for especially a *LARGE* US company, Microsoft agreed to not only make their contracts subject to Swiss law, but also give clients a choice as to where to host their data. (translated link, original article is German).

Re: oscilloscope

A logic tester? Luxury!

Ah, the delight of the Yorkshire men sketch.. :)

I switched to using the CMOS 4011 as soon as I could. You could do a lot more with a single battery that way :). Heck, I even used it in SMD form, a good thing I had a Weller soldering iron because they demanded a bit more quality from my then meagre soldering talents :)

Re: You get what you pay for...

If you like the functionality of WhatsApp, use Threema.

That's secure, runs over Swiss servers and the guy who developed it actually has a clue about security.

Now THIS is where OBEs belong

Personally, I would not just congratulate the boy, but also the headmaster who was willing to give a kid the chance to do this. I know plenty who would have said "no" on the basis of perceived risk, but he did two things right:

1 - he trusted the kid (no doubt he did his own checking, but I like the fact that he expressed this trust in the press too)

2 - he helped with the project.

Could we please give one less OBE to someone for their ability to extract money from the population, and hand it to this guy? This is what teaching should be about.

Re: "Arrested and charged the man"

Why did they not arrest and charge both?

That wouldn't fly :p

Re: Ah the mightly psion

OLP => OPL (Organiser Programming Language)

Re: Great headline!

Yup - I know that addiction well. It even gets worse if you're into electronics as well :)

My best buy ever there was a remote control which elegantly solved the problem of losing it under the cushions on the sofa by being laughably large. I don't think I've bought anything of true *practical* value since :)