* Posts by OziWan

38 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2009

Juror jailed for looking up rape defendant on Google

OziWan
Facepalm

Unless is actually a better translation

"Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat" means "the burden of the proof lies upon him who affirms, not him who denies".

It contains neither unless or until but unless would be more appropriate IMHO.

--

Ian

Anti-piracy laws will smash internet, US constitution - legal eagles

OziWan
WTF?

re Humph

The choir we run sings 'O Holy Night'. Written in the nineteenth century and sung with a simple piano accompaniment, it is claimed on YouTube (every time) as being the intellectual property of Sony. Utterly Bizarre. We have the same problem with 'Silent Night' (only the Warner Bros I believe).

I respect their right to protect their IP but they have gone completely insane with these sorts of laws (and make no mistake it is the corporations who have 'sponsored' this bill). America, wake up, the land of the free has become the land of who can pay congress. Seriously wake up, I am no pirate but this stuff is wrong!

Cambridge puts Isaac Newton's notes online

OziWan
Thumb Up

This is what the Internet was always about

Well done. I hope others will be inspired to publish the many works of just as equal importance that are out there.

Climategate 2.0: Fresh trove of embarrassing emails

OziWan
FAIL

Register stop giving airtime to views like this

There are so many good factual reports that can demonstrate beyond any doubt that the anthropological effect on our planets CO2 levels are real. This will effect us all in the long run.

The body of evidence out there is overwhelming yet some still insist on comforting themselves with the opinions of the ill-informed and the politically motivated.

I have said it in the past but I say it again. There are also people out there claiming to be 'experts' that will make very convincing arguments that black people are more stupid than white people, that the world is flat, that God created the world in 7 days, and that jews in some way deserved the holocaust. the list is endless.

Just because there are crackpots in the world does not mean that we have to give them any airtime.

Huge PDP-11 in a lorry: How I drove computers into schools

OziWan
Thumb Up

Ueber Cool

Nothing more to say. Brings back nice memories I am sure for many of the old gits on the register. Loved reading it.

Colossal dead black neo-sphere approaching Earth

OziWan

Re: Near Earth Object eh?

The moon is not held in orbit by the earth's gravity. If you were an alien you would see our world as a dual planet not a single one.

Google dumps + from Boolean search tool

OziWan
Facepalm

Uh oh!

Marketing speak is sometimes so bizarre it is funny (even when like today it insults ones intelligence).

Facebook: 'We don't track logged-out users'

OziWan
FAIL

Groan

This is a tech site so I presume the majority of people placing comments here are actually people working in the tech industry. Don't get me wrong there are a few comments that indicate people understand what is really going on here but the rest..... If the bunch of losers are running the computers of the world then God help us all :). (and as for the author ....)

Facebook deletes hacked Pages, destroying years of work

OziWan
FAIL

Come on

I tool the time to read all the comments ....

You really want to have to ask the permission of the guy/gal you just fired to update you fFB page (as company/organisation/charity whatever).

People think before you spill this sort of unthinking bile!!

Microsoft, McDonald's absolved of tracking cookie abuse

OziWan
FAIL

What a world we live in

This practice is wrong whether or not someone loses $5000 or not. Is that how western society has become that good and evil are decided by monetary loss or gain and longer on morals?

A fail for mankind.

HTC hurls more patent spew on Apple

OziWan
Thumb Up

Agree 100% with the article writer

Not much to say after the subject line really ....

Has Google wasted $12bn on a dud patent poker-chip?

OziWan
Flame

Well it's crunch time

A group of you think that Google is evil and this justifies that opinion. Another group thinks that Google is not and this just proves it. Well this time we will know.

I think they have gone for really low level patents to protect the handset makers but I have to admit (as others have pointed out) that the numbers do not add up and there must be something else at play here.... we will see!

Flammable because this might turn really nasty.

BBC testing fix for iPlayer on iPad ... 6 months later

OziWan

Re: Commercials

The possibility exists for the foreigners and expats. You can pay I think 9 Euros /month and then the adverts go away (at least that is the case in NL). The app works fine on my ipad but in common with most people in NL, I have a very good quality internet connection.

Marketer taps browser flaw to see if you're pregnant

OziWan
Stop

If you repeat the same lie enough it will become the truth

This is not a privacy bug built into major browsers. It is how html works and is damned difficult to fix (and despite being told this by numerous people, the Register continues to repeat the lie).

This is silly. The fault does not lie with the browser makers but with the idiots marketing people who are happy to invest so much effort to scam one person in 100,000,

Hacked Sun site greatly exaggerates Murdoch's death

OziWan
Happy

Re: Title

You do realise that they are after the security industry and not the sites per-se I hope :).

CERN 'gags' physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment

OziWan
FAIL

re: You've earned your name → #

I can also post links I guess that will tell you Jim Morrison is alive, God created the world in seven days, sex with children is really quite OK and that men never landed on the mood. The list is endless.

The evidence for the anthropological effect on CO2 level is absolutely insurmountable. CO2 levels can be measured in Antarctic ice over thousands of years, To argue against it and call it an 'hypothesis' like the article writer did is no different than the creationists calling Darwin's work a 'theory' in some hope of debasing it by using terms that most non scientific people do not understand.

There are other factors. There have been regional warm ups and even cool downs over the time we are able to measure, no one disputes that. Ccosmic rays, sun spots etc. do play their role as well, no one disputes that. The influence that mankind has, is however the one part we can control, should we wish to.

This is not political correctness, the scientist in question is simply pointing out that some people will be quick to misuse such research so 'be careful'.

Many parents are only on Facebook to stalk their kids

OziWan
WTF?

Re. I bet some commenters → #

I am astounded at the level of paranoia here. The funny thing is, I have never invaded my kid's privacy and, I am friends with all of them on FB, they have no problem with it.

EU cloud data can be secretly accessed by US authorities

OziWan
FAIL

RE Adding Fuel to the Fire → #

I think intercepting all forms of packet based communication by law enforcement is definitely got some prior art on it :).

(Fail not aimed at the poster but by the patent requester).

Oracle: Quit messin' and marry Hadoop!

OziWan
Stop

No Please

Not Oracle, anything but Oracle .... will the author of this article kindly delete it? Please, pretty please ....

TomTom sorry for giving customer driving data to cops

OziWan
Thumb Down

The do have reason to collect the data

In NL Traffic jams are a big problem. This data allows TomTom to provide very uptodate info back to motorists. This info is too of course useful and saleable to the people who manage the roads (it is also of far better quality than the data they themselves have). There is no invasion of privacy here, the only thing that went wrong is that the bonehead Dutch police saw this treasure trove of data as nothing more than a way of increasing their income.

OziWan

Is all so backwards in many respects ....

Firstly if it transpires that the data has not been anonymized then Tom Tom are in big trouble under Dutch law but it will have been I am certain. Secondly, even if it wasn't this sort of data would not be admissable for any sort of prosection.

The police have used the data to identify stretches of road where the maximum speed limit is structurally being ignored and indeed have used that information to determine where they can most effectively place speed traps. I find that odd because that could also be indicating that a given speed limit is incorrect (most people do drive safely, the loonnies are thankfully a minority, albeit a very deadly one).

On the other hand, on the way home a spokesman for motorists stated that TomtTom had sold this information to the number one enemy of motorists. I find that also a little suspect. Whilst part of the police's job is simply collecting the 'speed tax' they do also serve a useful role in reducing road deaths which makes them far from the motorists worst enemy.

The information has also been used to identify junctions that need redesigning, confusing signposting, traffic hotspots, causes of jams etc. It is not all bad ..... I would say do not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

Windows phones send user location to Microsoft

OziWan
FAIL

Stunned again

This is standard behaviour - noone is tracking you guys! Apple and Google cache the mast locations so, everytime you hit a new mast it will store it. So your home mast will be in there, the ones on your trip to work also etc., but you *cannot* use this data to track people's movements, only where they may have been in the past. I have not read the article on the 'doze phones but I am quite certain it will be the same. This is how GPS works. Dan - come on dude!!

BBC IT project to save £17.9m cost it £38.2m net

OziWan
WTF?

A Government criticises a failed IT project

Pot, kettle, black

Attack hijacks sensitive data using newer Windows features

OziWan

Re; Stunned

Got some private replies which suggest my comment was not constructive :).

http://sourcedaddy.com/windows-7/understanding-isatap.html

Is a good place to start. You really do not need dhcp, dns or any of the protocols you are used to. You need a machine to answer wth a certain name (which can be auto discovered in an ipv6 network).

The 'exploit' described in the article remains a corner case to a large extent but let's face it, our hacker/malware friends have demonstrated their imagination too many times for us to not take all threats seriously.

OziWan
FAIL

Stunned

Guys and gals, do some research and then post, not the other way around!

Channel Islands VAT loophole shut, petrol prices cut

OziWan
FAIL

The Video

Whilst funny the film really does demonstrate that our sense of society is decreasing. You see someone outside your house struggling. Traditionally you had two choices, pretend you did not see them or go and help them. Today, you have a third. Film them and humiliate them on the public Internet,

What the woman did was of course plain daft but the behaviour of the people filiming this is just anti-social. You have my friend weakened your srgument by posting this (which I by the way largely agreed with).

Google gins search formula to favor its own services

OziWan
Thumb Down

I know bashing success is popular in the UK but ...

If you search for 'videos' it seems logical that YouTube results will dominate (because it is the most popular video streaming site on the net).

The same can be said for maps and to a lesser extent for gmail.

These results could quite easily be appearing not because Google is doing aything untoward but simply because they are the market leader in a number of areas.

In short google returns what we mostly want to see. It is mob rule not google rule.

(Though this is not always the case, google for Operating System and the first 'named' one you see is OS/2 ;) - was a great OS but hardly the market leader).

Facebook: Why our 'next-gen' comms ditched MySQL

OziWan

Weird units here → #

Large scale computing just does not work like this. There are so many examples of people who think they can apply 'enterprise' ready solutions to distributed web based apps and have failed - even with basic web sites (see the france.fr debacle for an excellent example).

I mean you no ill will but have been working in this area for many years and you really do have to think in a different manner than simply transactions per seconds.

Some simple examples (some mentioned already in the article). Think in terms of mtbf of kit when you are running a farm that contains as few as 1000 machines. Hardware failures become normal events that you have to engineer for. The idea that you can accept the 4 hours downtime per two years onb your database server and still hit you 99.9% SLA does not apply.

What about backing up 100s of TB of data? A distributed model can eliminate the need for backups.

latency - these database backends also need to return your profile page, your unread messages count and so. Cache solutions need to recalculate.

Creeping death. One node in a cluster goes down, increasing the load on the other nodes and causing the whole lot to go down.

Etc., Etc.

Google's Street View broke Canadian privacy laws

OziWan

Aww come on

You know there was no malice intended. Noone has denied it, noone has pretended it did not happen. Why in God's name is everyone so quick to believe that any successful company will sudeenly start actig in some sort of psychopathic way?

I read my own argument back and have for the first time doubts ....

Hackers hijack internet voting system in Washington DC

OziWan

Oh come on

This is basic stuff. These sorts of flaws are easy to guard against, why do people keep asking boys to do a man's work? It is perfectly possible to write a secure website. I despair;, it could be breached with basic lack of escaping, and probably sql injection and/or xss. I really begin to wonder if there are real progammers left.

Also, Register, as others have pointed out this is just bad journalism. The while point of the site was to see if it could be hacked, it was never used for real votes and did not need to be 'pulled'.

OziWan

Write out 1,000,000,000 times, please: → #

Is i not amazing that people still need to be taught this .......

I am ashamed of the industry I work in sometimes

Youth jailed for not handing over encryption password

OziWan

however

Police interviews are recorded in the UK

Terry Pratchett computer sniper-scope deal inked

OziWan

How?

But it will affect the bullet

Canada prostitution laws pulverised: politicians apoplectic

OziWan

IF I ROB A BANK...

I have rarely seen so many logical fallacies in one post since the glory days of usenet. Well done!

Should I say something about Nazi Germany now?

Removing SCADA worm could disrupt power plants

OziWan

Because SCADA data is important

And mostly required by analysts and traders in real time

Google patents search that tracks your mouse moves

OziWan

Oh no not again

It's an algorithm!

Germans devise attacks on Windows BitLocker

OziWan

Do not worry

The attacks described are not suitable for opportunist attacks so, for simply guarding against theft Biltlocker in combination with TPM is quite fine.

Remote IT support tool hijacks customer webserver

OziWan

I despair of this industry

1. If you are going to use remote management software (let us stress this - software that is giving you elevated management rights remotely!!) you must understand what it does and how it does it in detail. You cannot simply trust that the latest 'enterprise-ready tool de jour' will be secure. If you think you can, then find a new career!

2. If you call your self an IT professional as another already pointed out, working out that apache cannot start because port 80 has already been taken by another process it frankly trivial to solve. If that takes 90 minutes - find another career (windows or Unix it makes no difference).

In Holland we have a word for this sort of individual - it is 'prutser'.