* Posts by Tom 13

7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

ARM lays down law to end Wild West of chip design: New standard for server SoCs touted

Tom 13

Re: Color me unconvinced

Granted Frank doesn't make much of a theoretical argument. The problem is ARM/RISC has been making these kinds of promises since Intel introduced the 386. None of them have panned out. Why should this time be any different?

Man sues NASA: Mystery Mars rock is a UFO – an unidentified 'FUNGUS' object

Tom 13

Re: Elvis alive and living on Mars? No.

Shouldn't that be 'Maybe'?

After all, no less a person than Tommy Lee Jones told us Elvis didn't die he just went home.

BlackBerry makes its devilish Android trickery official in OS update

Tom 13

Re: enterprises can manage it via SCCM that they already have

Honestly, the only people I've ever seen using a Windows phones are the ones in the commercials or Ballmer during a presentation.

I don't even think half the WinPhone tollers have an actual Windows phone.

Angry anti-NSA hackers pwn Angry Birds site after GCHQ data slurp

Tom 13

Re: Looking at the permissions required by even paid apps

I'm thinking more in terms of long term market transformation, or even initial market formation.

The market as it exists is dominated by Marxist freetards. So the only way for software manufacturers to make money is to put in the advertising. Bifrucating the code to take the marketing code out is easy relative, redoing the needed permissions not so much. So what we wind up with is the flaws generated from the Marxist freetards stuck in the paid apps. If the market were dominated by paid apps, there would at least be the possibility of an incentive to write the code with only the necessary permissions required.

Tom 13

I sympathize with the attackers message,

but condemn their tactics.

And I'd suggest that the general solution is to be less freetard in your app consumption if you want your privacy.

Big tech firms holding wages down? Marx was right all along, I tell ya!

Tom 13

Re: It would be lovely if we could achieve equality.

Economic equality is the equivalent of the heat death of the universe.

New Doctor Who's new costume newly REVEALED by Beeb

Tom 13

That outfit doesn't work for me.

It looks like he bought it right off the back of a fashion show model. The Doctor can certainly be well tailored (Pertwee and Davidson come to mind) but there's always supposed to be something just a little off about his outfit (50 years out of date, or a stick of celery in the button hole). This one doesn't have something that is somehow out of place except for the Doctor making it his mark.

Accused fraudster Charles Shrem quits Bitcoin Foundation board

Tom 13

@I ain't Spartacus (Wednesday 29th January 2014 15:00 GMT)

My guess is the biggest differences between the BitCoin vendor and HSBC is

- the BitCoin vendor was an exchange not a bank, so he doesn't have accounts for others per se, at least in the banking sense.

- absolute number of customers

- percentage of customers who were laundering money

Governments tend to tread more lightly where criminals are well integrated into large numbers of non-criminals. You can thin the herds, but when you whack out too big a chunk things start to fall apart rather quickly. We're fast closing in on it being a millennium since someone in government could say "Kill them all, God will know his own."

Home-grown server kit saves Facebook 'a billion dollars'

Tom 13

Re: Its all hype.

Mostly hype, not all of it.

To some extent, suppliers have lost touch with their buyers. To the extent open architecture puts suppliers back in touch it will help the market. And certainly if you have large enough quantities to justify the design cost, you might be able to get some efficiencies by leaving things of board and chips that you won't use. But yes, it is a more difficult than the magic pixie dust approach they are pitching.

Prince sues 22 music file-sharers for ONE MEEELLION dollars each

Tom 13

Re: Not a Princely Sum to Obtrieve

Depends on the long term plan.Maybe he's planning to file a "joint and several" suite with unnamed co-defendants. Then after he's won summary judgement reveal that FB and Google are the co-defendants.

Tom 13

Re: Thats odd

A great deal depends on the artist. I was at a free Bo Diddley concert back when there were luggable video cams but no internet. At the start of the concert he announced that while this performance was free, he made his money by giving concerts and the arts festival committee had paid him. So if he thought anyone was recording it for bootleg purposes, he'd stop and leave the stage. In the middle of the concert he saw something he didn't like and stopped playing until it was resolved. And back in those days spreading pirated copies of stuff was even more difficult than today, so it wasn't likely to cause him what you or I would consider real harm. But it was his concert and I won't fault him for his choices. And yes, I had a helluva good time listening.

Tom 13
Paris Hilton

Re: MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated.

I think they would have had a better chance at staying hip if they hadn't stopped showing music videos.

Paris, 'casue she always seems to be able to keep the cameras on herself.

Tom 13
Unhappy

Re: Anyone

Technically I did. But please don't blame me.

I didn't get to pick the music for the Michael Keaton Batman movie.

Apple's Tim Cook: Fear not, worried investors, new product salvation is 'absolutely' on the way

Tom 13
Devil

@Arctic fox: not enough for the stripey-shirted-brigade and the rest of their fellow sharks

In all fairness, it is difficult to justify those triple digit P/E ratios without the exponential growth numbers.

Vice squad cuffs vice chairman of Bitcoin Foundation in $1m money-laundering probe

Tom 13

Re: being charged with deliberately selling BTC *knowing*

No, the first charge is failing to comply with anti-money laundering charges. Those are the ones where any exchange in excess of $10,000 gets reported to the US Treasury. There are additional charges for the drug trafficking angle. While the latter may be sexier for news reports, the fundamental charge is the first one. The first also makes it easier to justify the warrants and wiretaps to prove the additional charges.

Tom 13

@P. Lee

Nope. I can carry fiat currency from any number of non-US organizations and not get into trouble with the law. Getting a vendor in the US to accept it is a whole other matter. And when I decide to exchange it for US fiat currency in the US, if the amount I exchange exceeds $10,000 that exchange has to file the appropriate paperwork, regardless of my citizenship status. I believe international treaties in practice extend this to banks and money exchanges in other countries, particularly the EU, Japan, and our usual trading partners.

Tom 13

Re: "right", or "just" or whatever is the best word tends to be subjective

That's why the US was originally set up under the ordered liberty (negative freedom vs positive freedom in philosophy classes) concept.

To pass a law you had to have at least half the House and half the Senate adopt the law, then have the President sign it. Or if they both pass it and the President vetoes it, have 2/3rds votes to override it. In all cases you wind up with a good bit more than 50% of the population thinking the law is right or just. The more people who agree, the better you're able to maintain justice. For starters, you have fewer people who are likely to break the law. Where we've run into trouble is that we've moved away from that fundamental concept and now substitute SCOTUS decisions or worse, some unelected group of 12 making an executive ruling.

Tom 13

Re: spook customers and they start closing their accounts.

Yeah I read those reports. I'd be working on closing out my account with them if I had one. If I take out $10,000 from my account I expect you to just file the damn paperwork with the Dept of Treasury. Not that I've had $10,000 in my checking account for a long time. In fact, the last time I had anywhere near that much money to my name was as a teenager after my grandmother died and my mother put the inheritance money in my name and my brother's name with the expectation we'd use it to pay for college or other schooling. Which we both did.

Tom 13

Re: Criminal intent

Are you really that dense? Or just being argumentatively obtuse?

Charlie Shrem was arrested because they have records of him exchanging bit coins for cash deposits in excess of the amount specified by the US Treasury Secretary. Therefore he broke the law. This really isn't difficult.

Now, if the DEA was also wiretapping Silk Road exchange rooms were deals between Shrem's clients and advertised drug traffickers were doing business, they may also have him on drug running charges. Establish a pattern and we're now talking RICO. But these are additional links beyond the basic money laundering charge.

Tom 13

Re: Criminal intent

It doesn't necessarily break bitcoin, all it does is specify that any agency exchanging dollars for bitcoin has to comply with the US disclosure laws. The threshold on these things is set fairly high compared to a typical citizen: $10,000 on a single transaction the last time I dealt with it. Corporations run into them all the time, hence an assigned senior executive to deal with it. All the agency has to do is file the paperwork and they are free and clear. Assuming of course they aren't actually actively part of the money laundering scheme. I handled larger sums, in cash, and it never bothered me. In fact, the largest likely cash corporations that have these reports filed on them are the local grocery store/supermarket in the US.

Altcoins will DESTROY the IT industry and spawn an infosec NIGHTMARE

Tom 13

Re: I think the pressure point is actually fairly obvious

and the very day I post that comment they were busy working that very pressure point:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/27/feds_collar_bigname_bitcoin_trader_in_moneylaundering_investigation/

Tom 13

Re: And ...

The legitimate use case is that these crypto currencies are in some sense like gold: their rarity isn't controlled by governments, but by natural availability. They attempt to correct for the one problem of gold in that their rate of discovery is reliably predictable. Diamonds have an even worse problem than gold in that that their production is known to be controlled by a small number of suppliers.

Personally, I don't see it happening. I believe the author should have written 'Libertarian' instead of 'libertarian' because it's the hard core crackpots who push this ideologically. The crooks have thrown in precisely because it so far is anonymous and the cops haven't figured out a way to control it (I think they will, and I think the pressure point is actually fairly obvious). And the opportunists are looking to make a quick buck/pound/yen while the making is good.

Now the knock on effects described in the article are a different story. At some point the tulip bulb market in graphics cards will implode. So long as you haven't actually mortgaged the house to buy one, I don't regard that as a bad thing. But the advancements in password cracking are a whole other story.

Tom 13
Black Helicopters

So what you're saying here

The combined Bitcoin world is generating over 14,000,000,000,000,000 codes a second. Devices which can generate 10,000,000,000 hashes a second now fit on a USB stick.

Bitcoin, and all the other alt-coins, is training a skillset for building password-cracking hardware that is both powerful and portable.

Is that this is yet another fiendishly clever NSA program that has stupendously backfired?

Fancy a little kinky sex? GCHQ+NSA will know - thanks to Angry Birds

Tom 13

@Destroy All Monsters

Zoom! Right over the head.

I guess you missed the Mel Gibson movie.

Tom 13

Re: So once again the advertising companies s**t over your privacy

Yeah. I'm actually more upset with the company that introduced the vulnerability than the NSA. The NSA was only doing what came naturally. It was the idiot company that left the screen door unlocked.

Apple declares war on PAYPAL: Pay-by-bonk + iTunes = profit, right?

Tom 13

You'd think that after Target and Nieman Marcus

the head honchos would start re-thinking these sorts of grandiose plans to use the One Ring to bind it all together.

Tom 13

Re: even if only 25 cents is profit that's an 80+% margin.

If you think that's impressive, wait until you see their numbers once they manage to become full fledged money handlers like Visa and Mastercard.

Apple now spends more on chips than top three PC makers combined

Tom 13

@Ken Hagan

A fair point, but it comes with another. I was under the impression the CISC chips had a higher margin on them than RISC chips did. So Intel make more money shifting fewer chips than Samsung.

Tom 13

Re: Self supply

No, you exclude the production because you don't want to double count. You either count all of the production or all of the consumption, but never parts of each.

Facebook debunks Princeton's STUDY OF DOOM in epic comeback

Tom 13

Re: It's not dyslexia either.

It could be. Or at least it could be the same root cause in the brain functionality. I'm very mildly dyslexic. I've noticed that these days my brain can get so far ahead of where I'm typing that you'd have no idea what I've mangled. So I'm trying to be more careful.

Tom 13

Re: Of great didactic value.

Even if FB is history by 2016, the paper is still discredited.

Tom 13

@AC: Friday 24th January 2014 21:50 GMT

If you think anybody other than the ad-men were ever FB's customers, you're even more confused than those guys at Princeton.

Tom 13

attempt to gain 15 minutes of fame

I'd say they've garnered a good bit more than 15 minutes of fame. This makes the second El Reg article they've generated with a fair number of comments on both.

A BBC-by-subscription 'would be richer', MPs told

Tom 13

Re: The quality would improve greatly....

You've only got 8? Wait until you get 300. Then you'll really know how bad it can get.

Tom 13

@Adrian 4

Oh they might be able to make more money, then again they might not. A lot would depend on how they did it. If they think their survey numbers are rational, they are stark raving bonkers. If they expand they subscription beyond GB, I think they could wind up with a fair chunk more money. I think they'd certainly wind up with programming better targeted at their audience.

Tom 13

@ John Smith 19

The numbers they gave suggest otherwise. The claim is that based on the survey everyone would keep it if subscription = license fee, but some other lunatics would pay up to treble the cost. That just doesn't pass the smell test.

Tom 13

Re: Oh?

People say one thing in surveys. What they do when the rubber meets the road is frequently different. I read the statement and took it with a shaker full of salt.

1.1 MILLION customers' credit card data was swiped in Neiman Marcus breach

Tom 13

Re: Yet more XP related issues

I wouldn't necessarily tag it to only the POS providers. There's a fair bit of corporate foot dragging that goes with it, and it becomes a viciously re-enforcing process. A buddy of mine did fast food, learned the POS system, then went to work for the POS vendor. They were constantly looking at new systems and deployments, but customers (the actual POS users) only moved so fast.

But yeah, it's gonna keep getting worse.

Patent-holding firm's lawsuit against Googorola kicks off

Tom 13

Re: Pot calling the kettle black?

No, you don't have it straight.

The difference between a legitimate patent holding company and a troll is that a legitimate company has actually licensed the software to at least one company making product before suing others. The first sign of a patent troll is that they started life as a law firm and then bought a bunch of patents at a fire sale.

Facebook coughs up $33.5k... its BIGGEST bug bounty EVER

Tom 13

@AC Friday 24th January 2014 18:33 GMT Anonymous Coward

That's a strange socail media site you've created Dr. Falken. The only safe way move is not to use it.

UK.gov to Google: Kill impostor taxmen ADs hogging top spot in YOUR search results

Tom 13

I see nothing wrong with this.

If HMRC want to be at the top of the paid ads they can do so. They should certainly be able to outbid any competitors.

Google, Netflix ready next weapon in net neutrality battle: The fury of millions

Tom 13

@ Vociferous

No, yours is the vapid comment. David Kelly is exactly right. He paid for the service he should get it. I do the same. If you're getting shafted by your local ISP, you need to vote for less corrupt local politicians too.

Tom 13

Re: because there's no one else to "buy internet" from.

Then you should vote for a different mayor and city council (or appropriate equivalent thereof for your locale). Because that's where the problem is not with some cat stroking villain running the ISP.

Tom 13

Re: playing whack-a-mole

Except, that's not at all what the Verizon et al have talked about doing and the FCC is preventing. They're talking about QOS for types of traffic, and/or peering arrangements to move loads off the backbone. Which is what makes this a really EVIL Google stunt: they've already done what Verizon might ask Netflix to do.

Tom 13

Re: Ummmm

No, no, no, and I say again no.

The US Constitution governs the government, not the corporations or the people.

Tom 13

Re: Broadband is a -very- -very- low tech service.

Broadband is anything but low tech. Yeah the old cable companies were low tech, but not switched digital communications. It may be slow to change because introducing instability into the system could down the whole country, but that isn't the same thing as dusty.

Why should Congress or the FCC force the rest of the country to subsidize freetards who don't want to pay the people who produce their entertainment?

I'm all for forcing the broadband suppliers to comply with the terms under which they sell their services. If they say "unlimited" there should be no '*' after it, or at least it needs to be spelled out in letters just as large in close proximity to the term. But that doesn't mean we should force untenable contract terms on those private companies. I'm a Netflix subscriber. If their business puts too much stress on the high speed network, I should pay for it (either directly or via an increased fee to Netflix). And yes, I actually have been thinking about talking to my roommate about upping the limit on our broadband speed because of the number of appliances we now have on our home network.

Tom 13

Re: when their interests coincide with ours.

But does it?

I sure as hell don't want your Cat lolz gumming up my phone calls. And me streaming an old episode of Chuck on Netflix shouldn't gum up your phone calls. Prioritizing services can guarantee that. Net Neutrality destroys it.

US govt watchdog slams NSA snooping as illegal, useless against terrorism

Tom 13

Re: couldn't get over their unique roles in the American intelligence community

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

They didn't share data because the f*ck up Clinton appointed to oversee them wrote rules that prevented them from sharing it.

GIGO

Same thing in Ft. Hood. Hassan was protected because it was politically incorrect to say a Muslim might just be a terrorist. It is completely laughable that this event is still classified as workplace violence instead of a Terrorist attack.

GIGO

Tom 13

Re: unashamedly funded by North American

That would be unashamedly funded by Teddy Kennedy and his buds which are the same buds standing alongside you in this argument. Clean up your own house before blaming me. My grandfather on my Dad's side fled Ireland because there were too damn many idiots killing people.

Yes, there were problems in the intelligence community. Put there by Democrats who didn't want them sharing information without playing a tedious game of Mother May I in pursuit of people who changed phones more often than Imelda Marcos changed shoes. Focus on the wrong problem: amount of data collection and you can't fix the right one: empowering honorable people who are trying to protect the country to do their jobs.

Tom 13

Re: so a person that no-one would argue against monitoring

But that's where the problem is. You can't monitor the man you have to monitor his phone. Only you don't know which one he's using today so you have to monitor them all. And you know it has to be all of them because you know the drug traffickers use disposable phones for their work and his counter-measures are going to be at least as good as the drug lords. And yes, prior to the Patriot Act the courts specifically ruled the sort of roving wiretap you need for that sort of surveillance illegal.

Yes there were other problems in processing the data. Problems put in place by the same people who are now the loudest screams that we shouldn't be gathering as much data as we are. If the spies are gathering too much data to be effective they'll have to cut down. And you have to assume at least some of them are moderately competent or the whole exercise is pointless to begin with.