* Posts by Henry Wertz 1

3137 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

EE still has fastest, fattest 4G pipe in London's M25 ring

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Jealous

Jealous 8-). Verizon LTE, I have huge amounts of coverage (last 1000 mile road trip, I had about 950 miles 4G, about 40 miles 3G, and this one valley road had no service for a good 10 miles or so.)

But, the speeds... I just ran a speedtest and got 7.2mbps down and 5mbps up, and have seen 3mbps down and 1mbps up a few times. That's not terrible but not great for 4G. You'll hit one site and get like 20mbps and the next, not so much; VZW is running their LTE on a single 700mhz 2x10 channel right now, with AWS (1700/2100) being rolled out for capacity. They said a while ago 60% of their data traffic was going over LTE.

Office 365 goes to work on an Android

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Hardware requirements seem high.

No other comment really. 1GB of RAM and a Tegra 2 can't run a office app well?

'Occupy' affiliate claims Intel bakes SECRET 3G radio into vPro CPUs

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Do have a extra CPU

I don't like to dismiss anything out of hand.

As discussed a few times on semiaccurate.com, these later Intel chipsets *do* have an ARM CPU on board to do some kind of various functions (i.e. it is in fact a black box that Intel says is for security.) Does it have a 3G radio? I really don't know but to me it seems doubtful.

It seems like to be addressable these'd have to have an MEID (the replacement for CDMA-style ESNs and GSM-style IMEIs) and someone would have noticed by now some cell co would have a huge number of extra subscribers if these 3G chips existed and were actually active.

As a thought experiment, suppose it exists. An inactive portion of the chip could be enabled via some malware, but otherwise Wake On Lan type stuff is LAN-only. To have any chance of knowing *which* 3G radio you've turned on you'd need the MAC address. IPV6 had the MAC encoded in part of the IP address (exposing your MAC address as part of the IPV6 address), but Linux uses an IPV6 privacy extension to throw a random value in there instead of MAC, and Windows doesn't put the MAC address there either (since some XP patch, and out of the box in Vista and 7 AFAIK). MAC addresses by original IPV6 design would have been visible to anyone on the IPV6 internet, an actuality fact they aren't (except possibly on Macs...) It'd be very difficult then to determine which device needed to be turned on, with no particular info (over the internet) on even what brand computer you're talking to.

Also, a right on the CPU (or chipset) on a motherboard, inside a case, with no antenna, is the worst possible RF environment, you'd probably have to be within a block of a cell site to have a chance of it getting service.

edit: As a practical matter, there are photos (micrographs?) of the chip, and there's an ARM on there but no radio.

Sofas with a roof and Star Trek seating: The future of office furniture?

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Nap mode?

Nap mode? No way they'd permit that kind of option here in the states.

No luck at all for BlackBerry as Messenger apps launch stalls

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Analyst results

Not that it would improve Blackberry's ultimate outcome any... but, the fact that Blackberry missed analysts' estimates by 48% just shows to me that the analysts are some kind of idiots. The phone was released in January, did they think the sales of the phone would SUDDENLY shoot up 2 quarters after it was released? Just where exactly did they think this money was going to come from then?

‘Priceless’ unique Palm ‘FAILEO’ laptop goes under the hammer

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"Dear Linux fanboys, most people don't care at all about the OS their machine is running. They care about the application they use and don't want to learn more than one OS. If they're used to Windows and Office, they'll want Windows and Office unless the device is nice enough (iPads...) to learn a new one."

You contradict yourself by saying they don't care, then that they want Windows. Also what Philip Story said.

What I'm finding happening is... People have computer where XP or Vista install got completely wrecked (ocassionally 7) and they have no install media. If there's no recovering it, I'm like "no I don't have copies of Windows lying around. It costs". I suggest they try buying media from the vendor (Dell or HP or whoever), if they can get a media copy from the vendor for $20 or something they generally do it. Otherwise, they plan to replace the computer in a while and want to do something until then. I've thrown Ubuntu (set to Gnome Classic on and flash and video codecs installed*), and it's a little different than Windows but less different than Windows 7 or 8 are, people don't have much trouble getting used to it. Generally they decide to put off buying that new machine since the old one is suddenly working great.

*If you don't install flash and codecs, the first time it needs them, firefox or the movie player pop up a nice friendly box saying it needs a codec, click next an it'll install it for you, but it's even easier to just install them ahead of time and not do that 8-).

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"The attempt to run Linux on netbooks failed as well (but for Linux aficionados), while most users preferred to run Windows (or MacOS)."

Really, Linux itself wasn't the biggest problem. The problem: (per wikipedia) 416mhz ARM, 128MB RAM, 256MB flash (with 126MB available for the user.) It wasn't some full distro, it was Opera, a phone-sync-only E-Mail app, PDF viewer, and office suite (after all, only 130MB of software on it..). The price was just a little too high with a little too low specs I think.

You thought slinging Photoshop into the cloud would fail? Look who's laughing NOW

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Ambivalent

I'm not a Adobe customer (other than having a copy of flash..) so whatever happens happens. If I were a customer I would not be happy about going from boxed copies to a subscription model.

From a business perspective though... they have lower revenues and lower units subscribed compared to total sales of boxed copies. Short term drop. But, they will now have a fairly predictable cash flow from these subscribers, whereas before they'd (I assume) get a big bunch of sales when a new version of Photoshop or whatever came out and relatively low sales "in between" versions. They would have felt pressure to keep coming out with new versions of what are after all by now very mature pieces of software, whereas now they will get revene either way so they can put out a new version when it's ready. The real downside, if a serious competitor takes away market, I think subscription sales will drop more quickly as the person (psychologically) thinks "Well $xx a month" rather than "I invested $xxxx in this software!", and so will switch back and forth more easily.

Official crackdown on Apple fanboi 'shanty town' ahead of London iPhone launch

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yobs and shanty towns

". I think he thought he were yobs and told us to take our greenhouse shelter down, saying that a lot of people pay huge sums of money to rent the shops on Regents Street and that staff as well as shoppers shouldn't have to look at a shanty town."

I think they are yobs too, no normal person will wait in line for days for a phone where (by all estimates) sales will be low enough they could just walk in day of and walk out with a phone.

Plus, Apple "forgot" to get them a permit? Isn't it the job of the people erecting a shanty town in front of the store to get a permit, not the store itself? Just saying...

City of Munich throws Ubuntu lifeline to Windows XP holdouts

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"There are a couple of guys in this thread that really need to shake your heads a little. My comments were an "example" of what a newbie might just have to go through when installing [insert favorite distro here].

One or two of your answers were exactlly the kind of "I'm an expert let me show you how to do that properly" neck beard kind of answers which genuinely do not help newbies or anyone else for that matter.

It is an unfortunate fact that there are relatively few *nix users on forums that actually know what pedagogy actually means. I can see that you are happy keeping up the tradition."

But this "This MIGHT happen when installing a distro" stuff is useless. Honestly, for each example someone comes up with I can probably come up with 5 ways Windows could blow up, in much more confusing and unhelpful ways. The fact of the matter is if you have a Linux distro CD, and you have a OEM Windows CD for your machine, you probably just click "next" a bunch of times to install for both, reboot, and (if you didn't have Ubuntu pre-install the updates) then run a ton of updates. I think no noob should run a OS install without someone to help "just in case", since both Linux and Windows if something goes wrong fixing it may be over their head.. and then once it is fixed it will not be a problem.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

The fantasy of hardware support

"Therein lies the problem - the eight hundred thousand slightly different distributions. Most people don't want to try them. They just want their computer to work, which is why XP has had such a long life."

Yup, but people who say "they want their computer to just work" and then say Windows is the way to do this gloss over that, in the Windows world (assuming enough RAM and CPU power), the XP-compatible hardware may or may not work in 7, newer systems are compatible with Windows 7 but not XP. Of course the really old ones would have 95 or 98 or 2000 drivers but no support for XP. This idea you can just stick whatever verison of Windows on whatever hardware you want and expect it to run is sheer fantasy. You can keep running the same version for ever if you want, but of course, you can do this with Linux too.

Ubuntu tossing out some compatibility, I do give them a "thumbs down" for this, and just saying "you can run some other distro" is not helpful, but the fact of the matter is you DO have the choice of an up-to-date distro that supports older hardware rather than just sticking to an old distro (as happens in Windows if a newer version drops support for older hardware). BTW, I'm pretty sure Geforece 4 MX440 is now supported in 12.04 at least by NVidia's driver.

"The idea that rpm and dpkg are anything like as user-friendly as setup.exe is a joke. Truly, this year and the next hundred years will not be the year of the Linux desktop."

Yeah, it's easier. Pick the software you want to install and it installs, versus finding the exe, scanning it with a virus scanner (wait, you don't do that?!), and then persuading the installer "No, I don't want a toolbar, no I don't want this 'extra bonus software', and no I don't want you to send my E-Mail to a spammer". Then it will also be yet another thing that pops up to hassle you when there's an update, since there is no central update mechanism like a package system like rpm or dpkg have. Not running a random executable to install software takes major getting used to, but your argument against it is basically you don't like it because you aren't used to it.

Anyway... I'm a little mixed on shipping Ubuntu 12.04 to people. Unity is AWFUL, the first thing I did was install the "gnome classic" desktop --- except they call it's package "gnome-session-fallback" so if someone installs Ubuntu 12.04 out of the box, they are unlikely to figure out how to find it. (Basically, similar to Microsoft trying to shove a tablet interface down people's throats with Windows 8, Canonical tried to shove what is clearly a tablet interface down people's throats in Ubuntu 12... once you kick the tablet interface to the curb everything is quite nice however.)

I've got several people now running Ubuntu... I didn't replace *working* XP for them, but virus-shredded non-functional XP (and of course they have no recovery partition and no CD.) A surprising number of people have a "laptop" (which they call it that even if it runs far to hot to ever put on a lap), they use it to do junk on facebook, play facebook games, watch streaming videos, and watch downloaded videos. Seriously, that's it. They have enjoyed having their machines run faster than they were before even when clean, having only *one* thing hassle about updates, and not getting viruses so frequently (I assume from porn sites, but maybe misclicking on free video sites.) They don't miss a thing from not running XP, and these systems would run 7 VERY poorly.

One day we'll look back and say this was the end of the software platform

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"Nokia miscalculated on many fronts: they didn't predict an all smartphone environment and were heavily dependent on low margin dumb phones; they didn't recognize the importance of mobile apps "

Well, there were several factors I think killed Nokia:

1) They actually were well aware of Symbian being antiquated, but (per recent Register article) they had competing projects working on a replacement. But, with no technical management outside these teams to stop the dead ends from just soaking up resources. This was pre-Elop.

2) Elop, instead of doing this type of assessment, killed everything off (so they spend all that time on development and ship *one* phone based on it...) and went with Microsoft.

3) Indeed, Symbian was antiquated and ready to be put out to pasture by 2010, BUT, they were still selling well in the low end market, and making Nokia enough money to get by for a while. Until Elop said that Symbian phones were crap and everyone should stop buying them and buy the phones they'll have eventually instead -- all of a sudden, no sales! And they didn't have a replacement product actually ready yet -- brilliant! Once Windows phones didn't sell how they hoped, that was that.

iPhone 5S: Fanbois, your prints are safe from the NSA, claim infosec bods

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"He said: "Why is a fingerprint sensor on an iPhone such a violation of privacy when laptops have featured them for years and no one even blinked? Giving our fingerprints to Wintel PCs and various border control for years but Apple = NSA? This is crazy.""

On the notebook computers, it was clear what was being done with the fingerprint data, it was fed into the password prompt and that's it. On the IPhone? Well until I read this article it was not clear at all what the scope of it was. I could have seen "just swipe here to log into I(insert only Apple service)" which could be exploitable. I've never given my fingerprints to border control or anybody else, even though I've left an re-entered the US, and I plan to keep it that way.

Intel touts 2-in-1s, the 'new' reincarnation of convertibles

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Aren't they trying to clear these out already?

Aren't they trying to clear these off the shelves RIGHT NOW? The "Windows RT" versions of course ran a crippled Windows that only runs a subset of apps specially rebuild for ARM, as opposed to running Android or Linux. But I thought they had churned out some x86 versions too -- which are also not selling.

A lot of people aren't interested in having a touch screen on what is otherwise a portable desktop computer. (I know I'm not!) The rest who are interested, when they find out what it costs compared to a computer without touchscreen, all of a sudden most of them lose interest too.

Intel, what are you thinking?!

IETF floats plan to PRISM-proof the Internet

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

IPSec?

Wouldn't ubiquitous use of IPSec or the like do this? This operates at IP level, so in theory you can set it up IPSec on your end, and as it's enabled on the other end it'll be used automatically (i.e. applications would not need to be rewritten to use IPSec.) Ubiquitous use of ipsec would have a similar effect to increasing use of https, even if NSA has shortcuts the time involved would still make it so they would have to target individual sessions rather than ubiquitous sniffing and cataloging.

Private Dell: We will not suddenly try to cut out the middleman again

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"Cutting partners is a good LONG TERM strategy, but they will need to eased out gradually. If you use partners, the only way Dell can compete is on price, and partner/channel selling is the road that led to the failure of so many computer makers. Direct sales is the only to control the whole experience, and is something no other company actually has been able to do. Compare HP and IBMs atrocious eCommerce and fulfillment setups."

That's the trouble; if a company that goes all direct misexecutes anything, they end up with a poor user experience. If you have channel partners, then I would think the best channel partners rise to the top and people get a good overall experience. I personally have just ordered from Dell directly though...

"Partners just gave Dell more revenue at a lower margin. And since margin is dropping everywhere, the best strategy is go completely direct. "

It really depends, revenue per unit would certainly go up but if quantity dropped too much it'd be a problem.

So WHY does Huawei's enigmatic boss shun the West's spotlight?

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Huawei and Cisco

People in US suppose that Huawei has backdoors as requested by the Chinese government. I point out to them (pre-Snowden even..), Cisco is just as likely to have backdoors as requested by the US government. I actually think it is rather unlikely either one is tampered with, as people have analyzed the behavior of network equipment well enough to know if it was doing something untoward. As a full-function router, however, they can be made to do all kinds of naughty things with your data without any backdoor needed at all. After all, China's "great firewall" runs on standard hardware.

Steelie Neelie calls for TOTAL BAN on EU mobe roaming charges

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Seems absurd

This seems absurd.

On the one hand, the current roaming rates (from most carriers) are pure profiteering, and are absolutely ridiculous. International rates should definitely be reduced significantly from where they are in general. Clearly, a company that provides 5GB for $10 (or even the US's rather poor 2GB for $30 or so), it doesn't magically cost like $1000 a GB to provide that data to a roamer.

However, setting this to zero is rife with abuse.

There are situations where almost all traffic goes in one direction (customers of carrier A roam much more heavily on carrier B than carrier B customers roam on carrier A.) In the US, at least, although the customer is not charged roaming (within the US), between carriers they have reciprocal roaming agreements so if the traffic is almost even, the cost is zero; if it's uneven, the carrier with more roaming minutes and data pays the other. These rates are very very low, though, and perhaps should be a model for what is charged in the EU.

With this cost forced to zero, someone could put up one single cell site, claim they are a cell phone provider, and then get service from those carriers who bothered to build out a network at zero cost.

Flying in the US? Remember to leave your hand grenades at home

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

A) I seriously doubt the soldier accidentally packed the grenade, he probably wanted a nice souvenir. The slap on the wrist is still fine as far as I'm concerned.

B) Saying you can't bring a fake grenade USB stick or whatever is stupid. So, with an XRay machine if something vaguely looks like a grenade, but (since you can see the insides) obviously is not one, you still must pretend it is? This is the supidest thing I've ever heard of and is true security theater.

Microsoft's swipe'n'swirl pic passwords LESS secure than PINs, warn researchers

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

What I'm amused by...

What I'm amused by is, ok, Microsoft has a blog post on making a secure password where they suggest pictures with many points of interest, and mixing up the gestures and so on (linked towards the bottom of the article.) This is good advice! And yet, on the "Sign in with a picture password" page (the first link off the article), they suggest *few* points of interest (" it's easier to draw on a close-up photo of your favorite pet than to tap the right individual tulip in a garden scene each time"), and simple gesture ( "It's easier to tap one person's nose than to trace a city skyline.".) No link to any kind of article (or that blog post) on making *secure* picture passwords. So, I'm assuming if you see this in action the password will almost always be tapping on someone's nose.

To me, this is just as though they suggested (for text passwords), keep it short (for instance, one letter like "a") and stay away from those tricky mixed caps and punctuation! 8-)

Torvalds: 'We're not doing Linux95 … for a few years, at least'

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

LinuxXP

I saw a distro years back actually called Linux XP. It was amusing. Get this...

On startup, it looked like XP (said "Linux XP" but had very similar bootup screens.) When done booting, it was themed to look just like XP, including a start menu laid out just like XP. It also appeared to have wine integrated. At a casual glance it appeared to be XP (i.e. if you didn't read where it says "Linux XP" rather than "Windows XP") They actually went to a reasonable amount of work to make it behave like an XP system.

Oh yes, it ALSO had a activation popup (in the lower right just like in an unregistered copy of XP) reminding you to activate it within 30 days! This was supposed to be done by giving some fine Russian gentlemen your credit card info so they could bill $20 or so 8-) . Was this a ploy to get card numbers, or legitimately would be billed $20 and have this activated? Obviously I did not find out.

ZTE Open: This dirt-cheap smartphone is a swing and a miss

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"And that's the thing about Mozilla building a smartphone OS based solely on web technologies: we've been there already, and we didn't like it. Remember in 2007 when Steve Jobs told developers that all they needed to build apps for the iPhone was the Safari browser? They all scoffed. Just four months later, Jobs admitted Apple was working on a native app SDK, and the entire industry has been moving that direction ever since."

This is what I see as the main problem. Once again, IPhone was by no means the first to try this. Devices have come before and after the iphone that were straight up just a browser, or support some kind of "web apps", and it always turns out to not really be enough. Sounds like this phone is no exception.

Firefox is also a nice browser but (last I saw), the Mozilla Foundation's main method of getting firefox to run on lower-RAM systems was to turn the image cache and other RAM caches down, and turn the garbage collection thresholds down too. This works, but then when you DO try to run some web app, javascript will be going crazy with the garbage collection, becoming sluggish.

TWO can play this 64-bit mobile game, says Samsung, crossly

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

""“This will not be true with Android, by the way. The Android Java app and native app environment will need support from Oracle, who owns the Java environment as well as 64-bit support from the Android kernel. Android has a lot more moving pieces to coordinate, and will take longer to go to 64-bit.”""

This is nonsense, though. Oracle does no work on Dalvik, despite it being basically Java. This is a clean room implementation of (basically) Java. Nothing in Java itself ties it to 32-bit, and in fact there are 64-bit Java implementations shipping right now. Dalvik will need work, since it uses some JIT (Just In Time) compiler tech, it will not currently emit ARMv8 code even if recompiled for ARMv8 (although the compiler and such itself would run a little faster.) The Linux kernel supports 64-bit ARM too. Even if Dalvik was kept 32-bit, each app runs in it's own copy of Dalvik, so you'd be limited to 3GB or so per app rather than 3GB for the complete system (although presently the point of a 64-bit CPU is not for more RAM.)

As for userland, other than Dalvik, basically everything else on the phone is not CPU intensive (and only runs at bootup or special circumstances) so it wouldn't hurt if it stayed 32-bit (although rebuilding it for 64-bit should be trivial.) For NDK (native development kit), there are very few libraries included with Android so having to have both 32-bit and 64-bit versions is not a big deal.

Apple’s iOS 64-bit iUpgrade: Don't expect a 2x performance leap

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Regarding a >4GB limit on 32-bit ios. ARM is not x86, and I do not think it has any PAE-like kludges.

Anyway, recent enough gcc has a ARMv8 target, that takes care of taking advantage of the extra registers and all that. In many cases, there'll be nothing to do to take advantage of speedups of 64-bit instructions but rebuild the application. I think video players on ARM tend to use the DSP rather than main ARM CPU anyway, so they may not need much done either, otherwise you'd want different hand-optimized assembly for some of the decoding and scaling code.

As for Android -- Linux kernel has supported 64-bit ARM for about a year. Dalvik would have to be upddated to take advantage of ARMv8, almost everything runs under Dalvik on Android. The userland available to NDK is very minimal, there's very few libraries to need 32-bit and 64-bit versions of. I would assume 32-bit NDK code may be limited to 32-bit 3GB or so limit (1GB is reserved for kernel address space), and if Dalvik ended up staying 32-bit for some reason, it'd be limited to 3GB too, but per-process rather than system-wide.

ATTACK of the ROBOT BANKERS brings stock market to its knees

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"It's not like the bots are manufacturing money, or creating any real wealth. The only way for them to accumulate real money (and what else are they for?) is to insert themselves as the middleman in any genuine transaction and steal money from one or both of the ends of the desired transaction.

They need to be fast to get in ahead of any transactions representing actual interested parties."

It's even worse, using flaws in the trading platforms, the high speed traders can see trades going into the queue, use unusually formed trades to put themselves AHEAD of stuff already in the queue, and therefore extract a profit in transactions that they in no way deserve.

Psst.. Wanna Android all-in-one PC? We have the chip tech, says Intel

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Outdated

"But how does "play media files across the network" get outdated in terms of the hardware? If it's powerful enough to do it today, I don't need to upgrade it."

I've found with smart TVs, dvd players, etc., that they typically NEVER update the file formats it supports, so in a few years you'll end up with a set that will not play your H.EVC/H.265 files, even if the CPU in the TV is plenty fast to do so. I'm really not hating on them, they work pretty well at least for some years.

Anyway, I'd love to get one of these and stick Linux on it, or more likely one of the ARM sticks.

For PITY'S SAKE, DON'T BUY an iPHONE 5S, begs FSF

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Lots of good reasons not use IPhones

There are lots of good reasons not to use IPhones... restrictive licensing, restrictive user interface, inflexible, substandard RF performance (a really good reason for a phone!), plus it's overpriced and generally technologically obsolete by the time it's even released. It would be good to know if the fingerprint data is used ONLY on the phone or if it's sent all over the place. This should be easy to verify though:

1) Turn off cellular data

2) Turn on wifi

3) Sniff the hell out of wifi as you play with fingerprint scanner.

4)???

5)Profit

If this is sent out at all, it is unlikely it would hold onto the data and wait until it has a cellular data connection, so this should be good enough to tell what it does with this information. Indeed, if this is sent out it then providers no protection compared to having a plain text password sent out (i.e. fine if nobody abuses the password store, and useless otherwise.). I should point out, you DON'T need a fake fingerprint or even a reader to abuse this information, you just send credentials claiming a clean read with data matching the data obtained from your fingerprint, and as far as the other end is concerned you swiped your finger over a reader.

If on the other hand it's kept on the phone... well, not as bad overall, but hopefully nobody pulls your fingerprint store off the phone; if any other readers generate similar data then people could impersonate your fingerprint for those types of readers.

Parallels pledges roll-back fix after silent 'trojan' freebie install triggers punter outrage

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Haven't had that problem.

"Oh right, because it *was* yesterday that Norton AV tried to stuff some additional crapware into its latest update.

And the day before that.."

...

"And the day before that..."

...

"And then, to rub salt in the wound, people complain that too many users don't patch their machines against security vulnerabilities... well, yeah, maybe if the security updates were more trustworthy..."

I haven't had to deal with this in about 15 years, this is by and large a Windows thing. You know what is updated when I update my Linux systems? Exactly what the updates say they are updating. On my Ubuntu system today, I updated flash, it updated flash. I updated Java a while ago, it updates Java. If I do only security updates, those are ONLY security updates, not adding or removing functionality or changing anything around (other than patching the security flaw(s)). I find my updates quite trustworthy.

Brazilian TV show accuses NSA of spying on oil firm based on leaked docs

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Don't blame me...

Don't blame me, I voted libertarian. Ron Paul would have been dismantling the NSA by now. The activities of the US government are ill-thought out, and an embarrasment both within and outside the United States.

Five SECRET products Apple won't show today

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Production costs, and programming languages.

"At $SGD25 a pair, these 4GB beauties are under $US20 or just £12.50, a sum so small it is hard to believe it is possible to sell them at a profit."

Oh I believe it, and it makes it all the more ridiculous what Apple charges for them. I think you'll find the manufacturing cost for one of these to be closer to $5.

"Criticise Apple all you like:- all we ask is that it's a valid, rational and considered criticism - rather than the tribal "I'm too cool to like Apple & all Apple users are plebs" juvenile rantings"

I stay out of it generally, but the problem is the Apple fanbois then go on pro-Apple rants (claiming Apple "invented" or "reinvented" products they didn't, altering history to claim vendors copy features from Apple even when those features turned up in their products before Apple's, claiming they can do no wrong and that design flaws don't exist or are features, and on and on.)

"Macs are built on BSD Unix, mostly C++ and C (as Objective-C compiles down to plain old C) and as such is very secure."

BSD UNIX is secure because UNIXen have taken security seriously ever since the Morris worm of the late 1980s, numerous security flaws have been fixed in the last 25 years. C and C++ are probably the worst languages to use if security is the prime consideration.

"However put Java on it and the security has more holes in it than swiss cheese, hence why new macs no longer ship with Java preinstalled."

It was actually because Apple insisted on keeping control over Java updates for OSX, and were usually 6 months to a year (or more) behind the official Java version. Compared to C and C++, Java is a bank vault. Not that I disagree with the decision, if someone gets a Java-using app they can install Java then, no reason to have it sitting there being vulnerable the rest of the time.

NSA slides reveal: iPhone users are all ZOMBIES

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Apple and Nokia...

Wow, they referred to IPhone owners as zombies? They are not, they are raving reality-distortion-field* affected fanbois. Completely different! 8-)

Second, in 2010, Nokia != Windows, these phones would have been running Symbian Series 40 or Series 60 generally.

*Recall Jobs was still around in 2010.

'Beat the lie detectors' trainer sentenced to 8 months in jail

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Luckily for everyone else...

Luckily for everyone else, the employee polygraph protection act prohibits all employers *except* federal agencies from giving polygraph tests. The government exemption was really meant so people could get polygraphed when getting secret clearance and so on, not to go around polygraphing every new hire as they are doing now. Given the current sense of paranoia in the US, and bad job climate, I know that even minimum wage fast food jobs would probably be giving every applicant lie detector tests if they were not prohibited, which would be quite dehumanizing for everyone involved.

Verizon finally drags FCC into court fisticuffs to end one-speed internet for all

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Inaccurate title...

The title of this article is inaccurate -- ISPs are allowed to throttle, this is no matter of "one-speed internet for all". The ISPs can throttle based on usage, either on a bucket or monthly basis as they wish. They don't take advantage of this, instead in some cases running a "hard cap" (what they call it if they charge huge cash overages if you go over a limited number of GBs.) What is not allowed is claiming to be an internet service provider, while in actuality blocking services, blocking web sites, and throttling based on services used rather than quantity of data used. This is as it should be and it's important the FCC stand their ground on this issue.

That earth-shattering NSA crypto-cracking: Have spooks smashed RC4?

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I'm curious if this is true or not...

I've seen articles like this before speculating on weaknesses introduced to cryptosystems, being able to crack them, etc. (Of course for Clipper chip it was no rumor, it was in fact very weak to the point that the initially released chip was cracked wide open within like a day by researchers.) I'd say it's possible the NSA has introduced weaknesses in various devices or has technology to crack some cryptosystems. I'd also say it's just as likely that this is a misinformation campaign -- that the NSA likes to let hints of weaknesses float about, so people will either 1) get all fatalistic and not use crypto anyway -- why bother if it's readable anyway? or 2) Try to roll their own, which is plenty likely to be a terrible cryptosystem (if they invent their own crypto system) and probably will have implementation flaws too, unless it's written by a true crytpo expert and peer reviewed.

Tor traffic torrent: It ain't the Syrians, it's the BOTS

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Not Pirate Browser...

"Anyone remember the Pirate Bay punting a special version of FireFox with Tor included recently??

Maybe it is more popular than expected."

Unfortunately not. The register article doesn't mention this, but the blog post they link to has this quote:

"Others have speculated that it's due to massive adoption of the Pirate Browser (a Tor Browser Bundle fork that discards most of Tor's security and privacy features), but we've talked to the Pirate Browser people and the downloads they've seen can't account for this growth"

AT&T helping US drug cops in 'vast, troubling' phone snoop scheme

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

AT&T very complicit

Oh, AT&T is very complicit in these types of operations. The initial leaks regarding the NSA's illegal and unconstitutional spying programs leaked out about 10 years ago, about the NSA having equipment within some AT&T switching centers. (It was assumed that other companys probably had similar equipment except Qwest.) But, articles at the time also pointed out AT&T did initial development on the R programming language (which is a nice statistical analysis language) for analyzing call records, and handed this work over wholesale to the NSA et. al.

This is the one part that bothered me about none of the telcos being found accountable for their cooperation in illegal programs... it wasn't like EVERY phone co that participated, one at least did refuse. Qwest, the CEO of Qwest refused to participate in these programs, pointing out handing over data without a warrant is illegal. The feds cancelled a few big upcoming contracts, then about a year later got him removed for insider trading, claiming he knew BEFORE HE EVEN TALKED TO THE FEDS that these contracts would be pulled. The courts pulled the same tricks they are pulling with the ACLU's ongoing case (where they claimed even the information published in the New York Times is classified and therefore inadmissible as evidence), so when the CEO tried to point out when he'd talked to the feds to establish a timeline, this info was deemed inadmissible.

DON'T PANIC says Hynix, China fab explosion is no big deal

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

May be fake.

The link to "local media" in the article, if you look at the comments, a commenter linked to an article from 3 years ago (they claim -- I can't read Turkish enough to tell for sure) with the same photo of the building up in flames. I'm assuming there in fact was a fire, but in that case of the photo of the building being like engulfed in flames is false, Hynix may well be telling the truth that the fire wasn't so bad. Someone trying to crank up DRAM futures prices maybe?

South Carolina couple cop cuffing for shed shag

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Indecent exposure?

Indecent exposure? I'm wondering if that will stick, if he was not actually exposing himself to anyone until they popped the door open. But anyway... *shrug*.

The potentially bad part for them, Megan's Law is quite overzealous, so they may find (in common with people that got caught taking a pee on a tree while drunk and actual pedophiles) that they are excluded from living within 1000 feet of schools, and.. .well, I don't know what else, but rather than excluding some areas, in a typical city everything is excluded but a city block or two (if that.)

Look out ARM, Intel, here comes MIPS – again

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

It'll be amusing...

It'll be amusing to me if they come up with some "tons of MIPS cores on a board" type solutions, and SGI (as a vendor now of mainly massively parallel computers) started shipping a MIPS-based system again.

Anyway... MIPS is a bit odd, it's *REALLY* RISC, it makes ARM look laden down with excess instructions. I've used a MIPS-based DECStation, as well as several SGIs. My WRT54G access point is also MIPS, and I know some of the wifi chips have embedded MIPS so I've probably got a few non-user-accessible ones ticking over in the machine I'm using right now.

Apple tries to trademark the term 'startup'

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"Startup"? For a store name?

"Startup"? To me this strictly means, you know, starting up my computer (or of course a tech startup which is an actually new company). Talking about it in the context of a store name to me sounds like the same kind of nonsense as people saying they made their computer "bigger" if they added some RAM or HD space to it.

Tor usage up by more than 100% in August

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Why are people using Tor?

"Why are you using Tor?"

"None of your business" 8-)

All kidding aside, people now realize the gov'ts are not even going to pretend to respect your privacy (as some have known for years), and they like to have a private life. More Tor, more PGP, more https. Maybe IPSec will start being actually used. This is not a bad thing, illegal spying programs aside this will help you avoid having your traffic sniffed at public wifi hotspots and so on.

I know at this point someone will assume this privacy will be all for black market dealings. It is not. I'm quite sure the very same people who think anyone wanting online privacy have something to hide, would not want a camera in their bathroom... even though they have nothing to hide, they are surely going in there to rock a piss or take a dump. Well, I'll respect your privacy and not pop a camera next to your toilet and you respect mine, thanks.

Keep on truckin'... Qualcomm sells OmniTRACS for $800m

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

In the US this is known as a "tattler"

US truckers know this as a "tattler". In good hands it's nothing but upsides (you can get word of road trouble down the road and go around it.) In the hands of a micromanager, it apparently is pretty bad... get done with a 2000 mile trip and get grilled over why you went the extra 1.8 miles for a nice diner instead of a greasy spoon along the highway.

Google adds 'Differential Snapshots' to cloud storage

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Snapshots are quite nice

Snapshots are quite nice, I've used them in VirtualBox a fair bit, and they could *significantly* reduce your storage use (and so, costs.) This will save Google the cost of storing potentially thousands of copies of the exact same data too.

Silicon daddy: Moore's Law about to be repealed, but don't blame physics

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: its already here...

"I think what we need to do is redesign software and get back to the days of 1000 lines of hand crafted assembler to replace 10,000 lines of C++ :-)"

Go look at some open source projects. It's not like it's a magic bullet (if you open source a project and almost no-one looks at the code, there won't magically be improvements made to it.) I've seen a few that are, well, not good, but in general the code quality is a lot higher than you might expect.

1) Speed critical sections *are* in hand-optimized assembly (see every video player, I think the font library, crypto, even some bits of glibc that don't need to be in assembly but are for speed.) 2) Certain projects are blooooooated, but in general on these projects people get called out for bloat and the worst programming practices get kicked right out of the code. 3) The compilers now can do tricky stuff that wouldn't occur to a human trying to write optimized code.*

*Amusing bug report for gcc-4.8, when building glibc some optimization flag has to be turned off, otherwise the compiler recognizes the code for memcpy is trying to copy a block of memory, and optimizes it into a call to the memcpy function 8-).

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"Colwell postulated a future chip designer who accepted the fact that Moore's Law had run its course, but who used a variety of clever architectural innovations to push the envelope. "

ARM? They've tended to ignore Moore's law to some extent, in favor of having *much* lower cost chips that are still lower power. Not the exciting answer Intel's looking for (since they are just assuming max speed I assume.)

Anyway, I don't know if he's right but he has a point -- these foundry's cost billions of dollars these days, and occasionally the next shrink is cheap (some tweak like change the wavelength used etching wafers or something) but then the one after *that* involves basically starting from scratch. Each costly shrink has cost more than the last one. I can see a point where the next die shrink is physically possible but not even close to economically viable -- at which point it just won't happen.

Thought the PC market couldn't get any worse? HAH! Think again

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"People may dislike Windows 8...

...but they'd rather not buy a PC at all rather than install Linux, according to these figures"

More like Linux doesn't need a new computer to run, so people buy a used one to run it on.

Well, not really -- the economy is still terrible so people just aren't buying, period, unless their existing kit breaks.

Three axes data-roaming fees in SEVEN countries

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yeah, it's surprising...

Yeah, it's surprising to me that only Three (not Vodaphone, Orange, O2, etc.) takes advantage of having a network in more than one country to provide a low roaming rate *on their own networks* at least. I realize that roaming is a bit profit source for them but I would have assumed one of them would have "broken ranks" years ago.

What Surface RT flop? Nokia said to be readying WinRT slab for September

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Too bad for Nokia...

It's really too bad Nokia keeps doubling down on Microsoft. I think they make nice hardware, but limiting their phone & tablet options to Windows only really hurt them I think, and now they are continuing on the same path.

ISPs scramble to explain mouse-sniffing tool

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

This does provide potentially useful information

This does provide potentially useful information; if they realize people are taking a long time to find some side menu or dropdown or whatever on the site sometimes the person moves the mouse around to the areas they think it would be as they look, suggesting areas to move the non-obvious bit of web page so people find it easier. It surely could come as a surprise if you didn't know sites could track the cursor though.

'Symbolic' Grauniad drive-smash was not just a storage fail

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Prime Minister

To me, it sounds like the Prime Minister said "get these disks destroyed", probably was told "Well there'll be backups" and... well, insert appropriate action from "Yes, Prime Minister" and here we are. 8-)