Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

Exposure to the iPhone?

I often find that exposure to iPhone _owners_ is far more headache-inducing than exposure to their fruity devices. But maybe it's just me.

NOT security measures

That's right the "security measures" in the airports have nothing to do with security. You often hear "well it's annoying but if it catches a single terrorist it's worth it". The point is, the "security" measures are not designed to catch terr'ists, they are designed to bother passengers. More specifically, they are designed to mildly inconvenience all passengers (that's the "if it tastes bad, it must be efficient" effect) AND to majorly humiliate a few of them, while making sure that the others can see (a combination of "I thought he looked funny, too" and "I'm glad it's not me"). That way the populace feels "protected" -from a threat that doesn't exist in the first place.

It's the old trick of the tiger-repellent stone. Governing efficiently is difficult. Tackling real issues is difficult. It's much easier to invent a fake problem, make sure that everyone takes it seriously, and throw in a few random measures, making sure they are as visible and intrusive as possible. Bonus points for advancing your civil liberty-suppressing agenda. And it works, of course. Look, since all passengers are treated like criminals, there has been no terr'ist crashing a plane in a large US building. Now tell me, how many of these incidents had occured _before_? In the almost 100 years of commercial airline operation in the US? Yes, this stone repels tigers indeed. Of course there was no tiger here in the past, there is no tiger here now, and there will probably never be any tiger here in the future. But hey, "if it repels even a single tiger, it's well worth it". Except that in this case the tiger-repelling stone is really a chunk of Uranium, and this strange diarrhea of yours is beginning to be a bit worrying...

Bwah f*cking Ha!

Honestly given the constant ¨war on terror¨ scaremongering lead by incompetent idiots I´m surprised it doesn´t happen more often... but again, maybe it does. I should read Playboy more.

The Home Office has said:

"bleh, whatever"

Corrected that for you.

Presumably not that bad

The license to register domain names is a rather good idea (look at what the web has become); as for the unregistered addresses not resolving, it's bad but can be solved by using a non-Chinese DNS. Or typing the IP address.

Missing ones?

I reckon the Phorm (and others) story as well as The Pirate Bay (and others) thing will have much, much more impact in the future than any of the ones you cited, while being very funny too (both Kent Ertugrul and Peter Sunde are very good at this shooty-footy game; the comparison stops there though).

Want.

Too bad it's going to be too late for Xmas

Disaster recovery?

Virtualization may be useful for a lot of things, but disaster recovery ain't one of them. Sure it can do "mild inconvenience" recovery (i.e. high-level software crash recovery), but come a water pipe rupture -or any hardware or low-level software problem, for that matter- and you're toast.

Why would they want to take control?

Taking control of the drones would be complicated, quite useless and frankly stupid; so the Iraqis might be able to do it but never wanted to. One can hope that the command link is somewhat more secure than the data link, and you would need a full-time pilot; to do what? Crash the thing on a merkin base and instantly lose all these handy, free sources of intel? It is much more useful to let the yanks pilot the things: half the gain is the free info feed, the other half is the ability to see which regions the merkins are monitoring. Priceless.

Go Finns go!

So Nokia has 10 hardware patents that everyone but Apple agreed to pay royalties for. Apple has 13 -probable- software or firmware patents maybe that are irrelevant to any phone other than their own and for which you could probably find prior art by the metric ton without even really trying. Hmmm, tricky one... but this will be decided in the US, so as mentionned in the article the validity or the range of the patents will hardly play any role at all.

80 tons over 2500 km?

Pah. An 124-150: 122 tons payload over 5250 km, which is more than 3 times the useful payload.range of the C17 by my book... ah but there is a catch: they're Ukrainian, and the UK forces like their killswitches American.

Another missing point (and it's valid for the Antonov too): if you know you will never have to lift more than 30 tons at a time, but on short bumpy strips, then maybe the A400 makes more sense than the C-17 (or, indeed, the An124). They are hardly equivalent and (hopefully) aimed at different missions.

Why not ext3?

Because any journaled FS is out because the number of write operations is limited. ext2 would be a much better choice than FAT, but MS is pushing hard... the compatibility with windows PC is actually NOT a problem *at all* (with emphasis on _NOT AT ALL_). Virtually all flash-based systems come with their very own (generally crappy) software/drivers bundle, and Joe Bloggs just plugs its camera to its laptop using the provided usb cord. He probably doesn't even know that he could change the SD card.

Admittedly, for small storage devices (namely, USB sticks), said software/drivers bundles are usually stored on the stick itself, so it would need to be accessible from a windows computer on first connection, hence the need for an additional mini CD-ROM... or a small FAT partition somewhere. Everyone has licenses for FAT (and they probably shouldn't even need them in the first place), so it would be very easy.

Well, if TPB went down...

... MS and Google should hit the dust too. Of course it's easier to smack 4 loonies than 2 multi-billion dollars globocorps so the courts might just bend over and declare the suit without merit, too-big-to-let-fail style.

Exhibitionism?

The amount of pubic disclosure mentioned in that email is disturbing...

McKinnon?

Please explain when McKinnon modified or published anything from the computers he accessed. The only thing he did was telling the operator that his system was full of holes. From inside the system. Oh well.

Cue a lot more Swedish...

... spoken on Freenet and co in 3, 2, 1...

+1 for Geoff Campbell's remark

So correct me if I'm wrong, but this guy is essentially saying that the "crooks" he can see because they don't use encryption, don't use encryption. Hey, we can't catch criminals who use encryption, but it's not a problem as no criminal uses encryption, as demonstrated by the lack of encryption use by the criminal we caught. Yeah right. Also, our investigations in pedestrian streets show without doubt that brittons don't own cars.

It just suggests that they are catching the simpletons, and probably some innocent people who were tricked in a way or another, while the hardened bad guys are laughing all the way to the bank...

No fur?

"The image - which clearly demonstrates Krupa sports no fur whatsoever"

I'm sorry I have to disagree with you on this one. The image merely "demonstrates" that Krupa sports almost no fur. The missing, erm bits of, erm, information might be documented elsewhere though, but I'm at work so I will refrain from investigating that crucial matter for now...

Legendary

Only lacks a few technical details... is someone getting old? Pah. Nevermind, nothing (and noone) beats the good old BOFH!

@ Nuke

"Pierre, tell me you're having a laugh."

Well, I thought the "I'll get me coat" icon was explicit enough... though honestly I hesitated, the pink hairdo would have been appropriate too.

The "The OS is fine, just buy a new computer" excuse for bloat is usually annoying me no end, so I thought that I'd try to see how it is from the other side of the fence.