Posts by Alex Brett 137 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2007
I don't know how this works, but if Apple have e.g. a UK office that actually handles the transactions, do they pay corporation tax on UK profits, and if so how does that compare with rates in the US?
Not trying to defend them (I'm a long distance from being an Apple fanboi!), but wondering if there is a possible reason here that they charge slightly more so they make the same post-tax profit or whatever...
I kind of expected the sensationalist reporting on other (less technical) sites, including comments like "reboot the internet" etc, but I did hope the Reg would get it right...
"rebuilding the digital map used to route traffic on the internet" - DNS has nothing to do with how traffic is routed, that's managed by routing protocols, the primary one in use being BGP.
"to guard against the possibility of surfers being deceived by forged web sites or spoofed emails" - DNSSEC does not stop someone seeing a spoofed e-mail and following a link - what it protects against is DNS cache posioning and the like, it will make absolutely zero difference to the multitude of phising e-mails that exist.
They don't actually have to do the campout procedure, they used to just do a load of prebreathing of the right concentration of oxygen to purge the nitrogen from their blood, but have discovered that it's difficult to don the suit while maintaining this protocol (you can only breathe 'normal' air for a small period of time without having to start again etc), so the campout makes life much easier for them...
Unfortunately this is something most people fail to understand - it's why I have to start going in to long explanations to potential customers of why my email2fax service doesn't accept .docx files - even though they may claim to be an ISO approved standard - in reality they're not, and there are no 3rd party libraries that properly implement decoding them!
How do they prove with a mobile average speed camera what the distance between the two cameras is - with fixed ones as I understand it they go through a long survey and testing process before a new site goes live to ensure they've got this right.
If you get the distance even slightly wrong, the average speed will be wrong - if you do it on a multi lane road for example, you might measure the outside lane as that's where your cameras are, but if the person drove in the inside lane at all times except for where the cameras were, and the road always bent one way, then would actually have covered less distance than the camera thought...
In any sensible DC the aircon can be supplied by the generators (not normally the UPS, as the brief interruption while the generators start isn't really a problem) - what's the point of having generator backup if everything's going to melt if you leave it running for more than about 10 minutes!
While "I didn't do IT" did say "capable of attracting ferric materials to it or attracting the satellite to the material", I note that in various places where orbital debris is discussed, a lot of people don't take in to account the fact that attracting something with a magnet is going to make you move towards it as well as pulling it towards you, so you're either going to have to use a *LOT* of fuel in thrusters to keep yourself in your current orbit, or have your orbit degrade at an unknown and variable rate (making it incredibly difficult to work out when you need to do burns etc to deorbit in the right location, and even to avoid colliding with something and adding to the debris problem!).
That's quite apart from the fact that it assumes all the debris is ferrous and will actually be attracted by your electromagnet - satellites generally have a lot of aluminium in them because it's nice and light etc...
With their SPLA (service provider) licensing, they say you have to license every CPU the physical box has, regardless of how many are exposed to the VM (e.g. 10-CPU box, you'd have get 10 per-CPU licenses for each VM, even if you only gave them one vCPU each!)...
They then get very confused trying to claim that you have to do that because you have to license the version running on the physical hardware, but if you're not using Hyper-V, but some other virtualisation solution there won't be a version running on the physical hardware!
It's companies doing things like this, where they've tried to jump on the VoIP bandwagon, found it's actually not as easy as they thought to provide, and so decided to just ditch it that gives VoIP a bad name.
Fair enough deciding to discontinue the service (business decision etc etc), but how hard would it have been to do a deal with one of the bigger VoIP providers to just move the customer base across - good for the customers (they get continued service), and in fact good for Thus (they could almost certainly find a provider willing to pay them for the business, or even an ongoing royalty etc!)
For anybody in this situation, I don't know how Thus provided their service, but assuming they used one of the big VoIP wholesalers rather than direct interconnects with BT etc themselves, then you might have a chance of being able to port the number out...
These studies always have one core assumption, that every song/film/whatever downloaded illegaly would be purchased if it wasn't available to download / the person didn't want to breach copyright. In most cases, this isn't the case - a lot of people wouldn't buy the song, and in fact in some cases people actually get a 'dodgy' version to see what it's like, then if they like it go out and buy the real thing!
Many mail servers on the web (including mine) will reject e-mail from 'home' mailservers, as it is all too often a source of spam (and the number of legitimate uses is negligible). I use the Spamhaus XBL list, which blocks all 'dynamic' IP addresses, so unless you have a business class connection, with your own netblock etc, you'll find a number of places you simply can't email...
The shuttle's most likely failure on ascent is a main engine failure - if that happens relatively soon in to the climb, then they can essentially continue until the solid rocket boosters burn out, then fly around, drop the tank and glide back to a runway - it's known as a RTLS (Return To Launch Site) abort. It's never had to be done, but they have had a main engine failure before - on STS-51-F which was high enough that it could ATO (Abort To Orbit), i.e. end up in orbit, but at a lower altitude than planned.
If a nuclear missile lands on the wrong side of the street, it's not exactly going to make a huge amount of difference.
Also, anything requiring precision is normally laser guided, or at least a combination of GPS to get to roughly the right area, then a laser target for the final accurate positioning...
While yes, the principal is fine that with cable you can still get an address, the article describes getting "a line identity number, which would allow a reverse directory lookup to retrieve the address of the caller" - if it's cable, there is no line identity number, so you'd have to have some way of getting the address directly, which isn't mentioned / described...
It's not just liability laws in the US, in the UK for example it would be a breach of the computer misuse act, as you are causing unauthorised modification of of the contents of a computer, with intent to impair operation of a program (even if the program is malware in the first place!)
...there's always the story of Patrick Combs, who paid a junk mail cheque for $95000 in, and it legitimately cleared (the company had accidentally created a valid cheque). It's quite a good (although rather long) read: http://www.goodthink.com/writing/view_stories.cfm?id=11&page_id=2
The statement says "The only diapers ever in her car were toddler sized pampers, unused, in the trunk of her car that her twin daughters used".
Now, either that statement is meant to mean the nappies were used by her twin daughters, at which point they weren't unused, so it is inconsistent, or, that they were found in the car that her twin daughters used, which wouldn't tally with the fact her twin daughters were four in 2005, so presumably are only 7 now, at which point they shouldn't have use of a car...
"Did she urinate in her suit?"
She will probably have urinated, although probably not quite into her suit. Astronauts spacewalking (and even during launch and reentry) where what is tastefully described as a 'Maximum Absorbency Garment' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Absorbency_Garment), basically an adult nappy to absorb urine (it will absorb faeces as well, although they generally wait until getting back inside to do that)...
Otherwise, it could make it a darn uncomfortable 7 hours or so if you needed a piss after a couple of them!
Surely this report is nonsense (I'd expect better from the Reg) - the thing they've changed it to is granting them the license to use it "solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available", and the license "will terminate at the time such Content is removed from the Site.".
Since this is for content uploaded onto a site (presumably either ISP provided webspace or a portal or what have you), that seems perfectly reasonable. The big thing about the Chrome EULA was that it was a "perpetual, irrevocable" license on anything that you "submit, post or display" through Chrome. If the AT&T license applied to anything sent using them as an ISP, then yes it would be a problem, but the license above seems absolutely fine to me (however, IANAL)..
They only load the payloads at the launch pad (if they didn't, then they'd have big problems maintaining power and cooling connections when they moved everything out (not to mention vibrations - obviously the payload has to survive them during launch, but that's a different type of vibration to the ones you get while going along the crawlerways)).
They send the payloads out to the pad before the shuttle, and then load them in once the shuttle gets there - I'd assume therefore they can just not load it and keep the payload in the rotating service structure if the rescue mission is needed, or just 'extract' it (ultimately if the rescue mission is needed, the likelihood is the shutles won't fly ever again, so the payload is basically useless at that point...)
This still wouldn't help in all cases, as a lot of readers (e.g. the ones Shell petrol stations use) read the magstripe at the same time as the chip, so it would be trivial to modify one of those to read the stripe and get the pin, at which point the attacker's sorted.
Having two pins wouldn't work, as it's hard enough convincing people to remember one without writing it down, for two the number of people who'd either write it down, or keep getting their card locked etc would be ridiculous...
Also, to Dex - personally I don't like carrying around £60-£70 for a full tank of petrol, as if I get mugged or lose my wallet, that's a lot of money to have lost!
Personally, I'm in favour of chip and pin vs signatures, as it makes it far quicker at the till, however, I'm not in favour of the liability shift that's happened as part of it. If it really is reducing fraud as APACS clame, why should it mean that the banks become less liable...
"Booen told Flight that the wavelengths involved are the same used by commercial cell phones, which - apparently - means there is no risk to airliner avionics."
So by that logic, I could point my phone at a missile and it'll be deactivated!
If it's powerful enough to disable the guidance system in a missile that's most likely shielded (at least slightly) against this sort of thing, then what chance has a commercial airliner, that isn't designed to withstand these sorts of attacks going to have...
Surely encouraging people to log in to their online banking following a link from a website is just going to encourage phishing. You could just set up a link that says "Pay by POLi", get the user to choose their bank account, and take them to a fake page to grab their details. You could even get an SSL certificate that has POLi somewhere in the name which would convince a lot of people etc...
In Pakistan they put out a more specific (i.e. for a smaller set of IP addresses) route announcement for the Youtube IPs - this (as others have said) was then accidentally propagated outside of Pakistan.
BGP works on the principal of longest prefix match, so this more specific announcement would have matched before Google's own less specific one, and all traffic would have gone to it, so a problem in Pakistan can cause worldwide routing issues, due to the fundamentally trusting nature of BGP...
So, why do these datacentres have an EPO button - I can understand having emergency stops for the things with large moving parts (the aircon units), but why have a button that turns off all the power to the servers - the only two situations I can see you would have to legitimately use this are a) if someone is getting electrocuted or b) fire.
Now, for a) if your power supplies are correctly set up with appropriate breakers then if someone gets electrocuted the power will trip out anyway, or if it doesn't surely a large wooden stick could just be used to push the person away.
For b) if the fire alarm goes off, then most people aren't going to be on the datafloor anyway, they'll be in the NOC, hear the alarm and so could quite easily go to the power area and switch stuff off there.
I'll admit that the fire argument does give some justification, and at least in this case there was a glass cover to prevent accidental activation (I've read stories of someone accidentally pressing one thinking it was the door release switch!) - but still if you look at the risks I'd personally have said they cause more problems than they solve...
One of the major reasons for saying no to phones on planes is due to problems it could cause to the phone networks.
A plane travels very fast in comparison to everything else, e.g. walking, car journeys etc. This means the phone goes between cells very quickly, causing lots of cell handovers for the network to cope with.
With just one phone, it's not really a problem, but imagine a 747 full of people all with phones, the handover traffic could easily flood the network and cause significant problems for people on the ground (especially around busy areas like Heathrow where you have lots of planes) ...
"The interference usually just caused the equipment to misread the heart's pacing"
I'm assuming they determined this by using one of the monitoring devices that receives data from a pacemaker by a radio signal, could it be that what the iPod was doing by placing it that close to the pacemaker is simply physically blocking the signal (after all it is just a large (in relation to a pacemaker anyway) chunk of metal) and hence making it appear the pacemaker was malfunctioning?
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