Posts by Chris 155

Re: @macjules A Flagrant Rotten Denial of Justice and a Blot in the UKGBNI Landscape

Th US won't touch him anyway.

They'd like to, but there's too much risk for too little payoff. Even in the post Trump era of "fake news", the press still has the power to make life distinctly uncomfortable for politicians and even if they all hate him, letting Assange go down for receiving the Manning files would be massively against their interests.

An extradition from Australia or the UK would have political fallout for closely allied governments. Not necessarily a deal breaker, but when the chances of conviction are slim to none it's a big price to pay.

Mr Assange should probably assume his travel plans can't include any US destinations for the forseeable future, but unless he's done something other than what we know and he thinks the US can prove it, he's got zero chance of getting extradited.

Julian Assange's biggest worry is that the US won't extradite him and he'll be rendered even more irrelevant.

Re: Oh, the irony

Bitcoin is "safe" only because the government doesn't (didn't) have a decent enough set of mappings between wallets and real people. This is changing very quickly and may possibly already have changed.

Once the government has that set, working out where money is going and where it has come from is simply a matter of data analysis, the block chain literally gives you the entire history of that coin and every other coin in existence.

Creating extra wallets is completely and utterly pointless and even coin laundering services are only a data problem.

To repeat, if you're using bitcoin to escape the US government you're a fool. It's not anonymous, it just doesn't have real names.

Re: HFC

1. Connectivity to the NBN costs ISPs $17.50 per Mbps per month (it was $20 under the original Labor plan).

2. NBN Requires ISPs to be connected to all POIs regardless of whether they have any customes.

3. This means that ISPs have to charge somewhere north of $20 per Mbps/month to offer dedicated bandwidth.

4. Based on the prices I've seen (and paid). The highest costs for home broadband come in closer to $1 per Mbps per month.

If we apply a little bit of math to this, this means that ISPs are oversubscribing their lines by at least a factor of 20.

FTTN was stupid, not because it can't deliver the speeds it promised, but because it can't deliver the cost savings it promised. In the end it will end up being relatively close to what would have been paid for Labor's plan (which wouldn't have cost what they said it did either) for an inferior product.

The reason your connection sucks though is because the NBN Co charges ISPs too much for them to give you what you think you're paying for.

Re: That's open source or you...

Not it wouldn't.

This would be the case of an early adopter getting their data munched. This would have been found just as fast in closed source.

Possibly the cause was found earlier and a resolution released earlier because of open source. Possibly.

This is the kind of shit that shouldn't get through at all though.

Re: Tesla semi?

There's a very big difference between knowing how to solve a problem and knowing which problem to solve.

Smarter people than Tesla's engineers have built an amazing product that solves the wrong problem before

Re: Lumia

Nokia died because they ran themselves like they were a monopoly. They had 3 different UIs they were paying to develop simultaneously and they doled out the good stuff only to their top of the line phones.

That worked when Nokia was the biggest player in the market, just like it worked for Microsoft when they were the undisputed king, but when the iPhone came out and started eating their lunch they couldn't compete.

Nokia's fall starts before Elop and matches exactly with the release of the iPhone. Yes, the Windows 7.5 phones getting released and then getting an end of support from Microsoft within 6 months didn't help, but they were on borrowed time before they even signed the Microsoft deal.

Re: more needed than ever

Yes and no.

Most of Microsoft's "Spying" is feature analytics to allow then to improve their product. Google and Apple know so much more about what parts of the system their users use an how they use them than Microsoft does simply because of the huge amounts of information that they're siphoning up. It's very difficult for them to compete without that information.

Beyond that, aside from the fact that you're used to spying on mobile, there's really no functional difference. Most of what Google and Apple grab from you aren't necessary to deliver a mobile platform any more than they're necessary to deliver a desktop platform. You're not comparing apples and doctors at all. You're comparing an invasion of your privacy that you've become accustomed to and one you haven't, no more, no less.

Re: Microsoft murdered netbooks

Well yes, that's sort of the point.

If what you wanted was to consume content a tablet is infinitely better. If what you wanted as a laptop to create content the netbook didn't actually do the job most of the time anyway.

Netbooks felt cheap, they performed poorly, and they weren't actually that cheap compared to equivalent items. There was a period of time where tablets didn't exist and even the cheapest laptops were really expensive when netbooks shone, but they shone because of market failure, but because they were a good idea.

Re: Weigh the coins

All US currency ever issued is legal tender. A payment in legal tender may be rejected, but no penalty can be attached for failure to pay(the debt doesn't precisely go away, but you can't refuse payment and then fine the guy for not paying). If you're buying something any kind of payment can be rejected but for a debt already incurred it's different.

If this had been loose coins it would probably not have been legitimate, but since it appears he had them all in proper rolls it's a slightly different situation.

Honestly I would suggest they mostly wanted him to go away.

Re: Shodan is evil

Would not having it make a difference? Network scans aren't hard to do and they've existed a lot longer than Shodan.

Is a web cam secure because it's not listen on some web site that it's not? Is a MongoDB install secure because it's not listed?

Maybe not having Shodan would restrict some of the lowest level bottom feeders who don't actually have the capacity to do any of this themselves, but a better solution would be just to secure your shit.

Re: Aaron is a twat.

Sometimes the little Hitler is a prick, but most of the time he or she is just trying to keep a lid on things so they can actually do their job.

Supporting 30 machines is a doddle, if those machines are all the same model, running a standard environment, with relatively standard software which is still within support from the vendor.

When, as is more common, those machines are bought on the cheap from down the shops from 10 different vendors running 3 different OS versions, two of which are out of support, with each one slightly different depending on which bloatware the manufacturer installed and they're hooked into a domain controller from before the dawn of time it's much much harder.

If you want to get by on a shoestring IT budget you absolutely have to say no to anything your users don't absolutely need.

That doesn't mean Aaron wasn't a prat, but the reason your IT guy says no is because every time you ask for something special it makes his or her job significantly harder and if it isn't going to substantially increase the profitability of the business it's probably not worth it.

Re: Money raised for taxpayers?

By leaving one of the major bidders out you reduce the price which will be paid for the spectrum, potentially dramatically. The fact that Telstra have received payments from the government here for other purposes is irrelevant.

The question essentially comes down to whether setting a 20% maximum on the amount of this particular chunk of the spectrum is worth the lost revenue from the sale of this spectrum. This revenue loss will be significant as after Telstra, Optus and Vodaphone there really isn't anyone who is going to spend a lot of money on Australian spectrum.

In essence is it better to have one or two providers pay a lot of money for the spectrum and be able to deliver better services because they have more bandwidth available or to have 5 or more owners of the spectrum, with at least some of those companies paying very little and likely being unable to deliver much in the way of services.

Re: Cloud crack

It's all just another machine that goes ping.

Re: "According to some observers, there's still some way to go"

Except your analogy is completely wrong on both counts.

You change things in your computer all the time. You install new software, use it for new tasks, connect it to new devices. You and everyone else does this all the time. There are millions upon millions of different combinations. If you spent half as much time making modifications to your car it would break down all the time too. You may not understand what Microsoft is changing under the hood in the latest update, but you sure want the thing that uses it to work first time every time and fast.

Your mortar analogy is also bad, because unlike your house, your computer literally is under attack. All the time. In ever changing ways.

If you provided a list of what your computer had to do, and you never wanted to change any of that, and you disconnected it from the internet you could build a system that doesn't crash. A custom OS that only worked on that hardware, and only worked for that list of tasks and didn't have to deal with being attacked. You don't want that though, you want an OS you can install onto any hardware, and run any software on, and connect to the internet.

If you actually believe anyone else has better unicode support you're high. This kind of stuff exists all over the place and is missed by testing all the time. It's just that we only hear about it when someone like Microsoft does it because they're big and they're bad and they're easy to blame.

Re: I refuse electronic voting on principle

Australia takes a while partly because we give postal voters a long time to semd in their votes, which has arguments for and against, but mostly because we use an IRV system. When there's a clear winner we pretty much know what the result is in a couple hours, when the result is really close and a lot of people vote third party it takes a lot longer to work out.

Historically, only two elections in our history haven't had the result known the same night, they just happen to have been 2010 and 2016.

An electronic voting system could help with IRV, but not with late postal votes. An online voting system could deal with both, but as i know of no proven or even proposed mechanism for providing anonymous, secure, and unique per voter voting in an online environment, that's kind of moot.

That's not even counting forcing someone to vote in front of you.

Re: There's nowt wrong with supporting law enforcement

The ribbon analogy is actually very apt.

Apple did not create an iOS they can't decrypt. They could have, they probably should have, but they didn't.

That's the ribbon analogy. Apple can let the FBI in trivially, just like cutting a ribbon. They're refusing to, but tomorrow they could decide to. If they lose this court battle they will have to.

Re: Why are they always testing this stuff in Australia?

Android actually has that now, finally. Only in M of course, and vendors may take it away, but it is there.

No, they don't.

They yet again show that you can get incredible speed out of pristine copper over incredibly short distance with no interference. This isn't new or shiny or breathtaking. They've been getting incredibly high speeds out of uselessly short cable distances for years.

No one has ever shown anything like that kind of speed on real world copper, even newly installed real world copper, let alone the crap that's in the ground.

I've given up on having a land line because the copper in my neighborhood is so bad that you couldn't actually hear people. How am I going to go with FTTN next year? You reckon I'll get XG.Fast speeds? Do you reckon that the government is actually going to go out to every single node and upgrade it to G.Fast, let alone XG.Fast? Under FTTP you replace the units in the exchange and your home router and you're done.

Re: Hard sell, hardly selling, selling hard

Windows 10 is a no brainer update from 8 or 8.1 and it's a reasonable upgrade from 7. It's got its issues, but its actually pretty good. At the least it eliminates most of the stupid bits of 8 and 8.1 and without the stupid bits, 8 and 8.1 were solid upgrades from 7. I won't bother to talk about Vista and XP as if you're still using either of those you're insane.

You're not the product because you're still going to be buying Windows. The payoff for Microsoft is pushing more home users into current versions of Windows to accomplish the following:

1) Push enterprise users to update their deployed Operating Systems to ones their employees are more familiar with faster than they might otherwise.

2) so that Microsoft can spend less money on backward compatibility.

Essentially expect that after the 2016 releases the Office products won't be supported on out of date Microsoft OS versions.

Re: Oh Adobe...

Of course that's possible, however it's incredibly uncommon and not just at Adobe, the OpenSSL bug last year was the same kind of bug. It might be perhaps telling that we've known about these kind of exploits for 40 years and yet they're still incredibly common in code. They're common because they're really easy mistakes to make.

Every single bit of non trivial code uses the kind of data structures that are vulnerable to exploits like this over and over again, because they're just that common. All it takes is missing a bounds check on one very specific way of accessing your code that you may never have thought of or saying "no one is ever going to access this code that way" once in a project to get a vulnerability and things like that happen way, way, way more often than once in a project.

I'll guarantee that if you're actually a developer you've written at least a hundred of them, mostly in little things, only intended to be used internally or only in a specific space. Or you've counted on a library to do something and the library's author has screwed it up.

Flash is of course particularly vulnerable because Flash was first and never died. It was made when the world was a very different place and all sorts of horrors had to be coded in to make it even remotely plausible. Every attempt at a replacement has failed to date, including the idea that HTML 5 will kill it, as if YouTube videos were the only reason anyone ever used flash.

Re: unsigned int, anybody?

Because, and this is the answer to the question about the arbitrary precision comment below you, it's not actually the programmatic type that's causing the problem, it's the type in the database which is the issue.

For a number of reasons most db's don't have a unit type and an arbitrary precision integer is a binary blob which can't be indexed.

Re: banks and laundery

Two things.

The first is that they haven't actually seen whether they get jail sentences or not.

The second is a bit more complicated. Proving who knew or didn't know something is really difficult, and unless there's a legislated duty for the person to know, you're going to have to actually prove they did. HSBC probably knew that the money was drug money, but proving it was going to be difficult so the government took a cash settlement.

These two morons spent years not filing the necessary paperwork for transactions. The government had them stone cold on that, they merely had to prove that a transaction over the reporting limit occurred, and didn't need to prove if they knew it was dodgy. Because of this, the idiots in question had to cop a guilty plea to avoid significantly more jail time.

TL;DR; To toss anyone from HSBC in jail you'd have to prove that they knew that the money was from drugs and proving what someone knew is really damned difficult. These two could have spent the rest of their lives in jail for statutory infractions so they've had to admit they knew(whether they did or didn't) to get out in as little as five years.

Re: The first problem....

There's two problems.

The first is that the issue with MtGox wasn't so much that Bitcoin isn't traceable. The issue with MtGox is that the "Bitcoin Banks" hold your money in Bitcoin wallets which belong to them, they aren't regulated as banks and so unless you've got an explicit contract with them about what they will and won't do with the money you've given them, you're SOL. MtGox lost people's bitcoins and was under no obligation to do a damned thing about it and they didn't.

The second is that, once you start actually getting paid in Bitcoins your wallet stops being anonymous. Your employer knows who they sent the money to and that number can be retrieved with a warrant (if they even need that). Bitcoin wallets are anonymous in the same way that IP addresses are anonymous. If you know who either belongs to, they aren't anonymous at all. They know where you get your salary from, so they've got a starting point. A bitcoin starts off in your wallet and ends up at Silk Road a couple hops later, you might see an agent of the government on your doorstep asking you who you sent it do.

Re: smoke and mirrors

The problem with TrueCrypt is that we have no idea who actually develops it. It could be the NSA, it could be Microsoft, it could be anyone on earth. Even the auditors don't actually know who the TrueCrypt foundation actually are. The only thing that identifies them in anyway is the cryptographic signing key they use to sign the binaries.

Using TrueCrypt requires you to take a leap of faith that you can trust those anonymous individuals to be creating a quality product. That's simply no longer possible. Even if this was a hoax and the "real" developers came forward tomorrow to tell us everything was ok, we'd have no way of determining that they were actually the real developers, because the only proof of identity we have was used to sign the current binaries.

TrueCrypt is dead, its developers have told us so. You can speculate on why that's the case for ever and a day, you can decide to use the previous binaries if you like, but it's dead and it's never coming back. Maybe someone can fork it, but they couldn't do so anonymously and if they can't do it anonymously they're under as much pressure from the NSA as anyone else.

Re: Oh, the irony

That's about the size of it. Essentially, when California takes a policy to referendum, which they do a lot, they put the policy and the mechanism to pay for it on the ballot separately. The result should surprise absolutely no one.

Re: malcolm turnbull is an idiot.

We want a monopoly on the wholesale side, we should never have gotten rid of the monopoly on the wholesale side because having two companies lay down heinously expensive infrastructure is a gigantic waste of everyone's money.

Selling Telstra Wholesale along with Retail is why we're in this mess in the first place. If Howard had kept the wholesale branch of Telstra and spent some of that mining dosh he threw away in tax cuts and middle class welfare upgrading the network we could have had a nice orderly move from copper through to FTTN through to FTTP over the course of about 20 years comparatively cheaply, but that's not what happened, we sold all of Telstra then regulated the hell out of it which meant that Telstra retail was effectively crippled and Telstra wholesale was still a monopoly, but a private one this time. No one won when Telstra was sold this way, not the government, not the people, not even Telstra.

The coalition's plan wouldn't be a bad plan. IF the copper network hadn't been allowed to degrade so badly and IF it weren't going to need to be upgraded to FTTP almost immediately. The issue is that that's not true. The last mile of Telstra copper in large parts of Australia is horribly degraded and the speeds they're advertising while plenty for 2013 are going to be too little for 2019 when they finish it. Fundamentally the coalition are going to end up doing far more FTTP than they've budgeted for as part of the initial roll out and then almost immediately start a second roll out of FTTP.

TLDR; Competition on wholesale doesn't work, and the coalition are going to roll out exactly the same plan as Labor except they're going to pay for it twice, take 5-10 years longer and make you prove to them that your copper is crap and needs replacing. That's what makes their plan such an epic failure.

Re: wipe your glasses, Mr. iFanboy

Not that the patents Apple is suing Android over aren't ridiculous, but whether they are or not they also clearly don't apply to Windows Phone which is why Apple aren't insane enough to sue Microsoft.

You can show a jury pictures of iPhones and Samsung phones and say "they look identical give us money", the same doesn't work because the metro style interface is fundamentally different. Apple would get laughed out of court for trying to sue Microsoft.