* Posts by Serif

28 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2009

Microsoft, Databricks double act tries to sew up the data platform market

Serif

Re: All your Data, Analytics, and AI

Beat me to it by 9 hours :)

Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

Serif

This on the day that it was revealed that they have 23,000 social housing homes with serious health and safety issues.

Find My Kids app is basically AirTags for your offspring

Serif

Find my kid's watch

At least you'll be able to track the watch after your child has been mugged for it.

Pakistan’s PM overturns Wikipedia ban, seeks end to whack-a-mole content blocks

Serif

So blasphemy is OK again in Pakistan...

as long as it provides economic benefit or avoids an economic downside. And there was I thinking that religious teachings somehow represented the unchanging word of god, or other such crap.

Scientists conclude cats only have three personalities after YouTube clip binge

Serif

Oh long Johnson

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Serif

Re: a massive 456MB of RAM

If it was indeed a 11/780 and not some later vaxen then something isn't quite right. Around 1983/84 I was playing with a 11/782 (effectively two 780 processors working in master slave mode) and the memory maxed out at I think 12MB supporting around 100 concurrent users.

Linus Torvalds 'starting to get worried' as Linux kernel 5.17 rc6 lands

Serif

New features, drivers for new hardware, optimizations, removal of unused / no longer maintained code, fixes for new vulnerabilties that have just appeared in lists like CVE. And probably other reasons that don't immediately come to mind.

When's a backdoor not a backdoor? When the Oz government says it isn't

Serif

Re: Who would pay?

Just what I was thinking. The way the proposals are written seems to assume that any company called on to cooperate in providing intercept have the capabilities to do that in house. In practice of course they will more than likely be using 3rd party services and kit which they do not have control over. So they'll need to request help from these 3rd parties who in turn may be in the same position.

So a couple of questions. Who's going to pay for this assistance and how are you going to even be able to request it given that you are not allowed to tell 3rd parties what you're up to?

Boffins offer to make speculative execution great again with Spectre-Meltdown CPU fix

Serif

I'm going to use up my stupid question of the day quota here...

Am I correct in thinking that if speculative execution obeyed memory access restrictions (no user process peeking at lower ring address spaces like the kernel) regardless of whether or not that memory is cached, then these problems would go away?

Google's Grumpy code makes Python Go

Serif

Re: Yes, its you.

It's nice to see that the youngsters have got around to inventing CSP again ;)

Trump's plan: Tariffs on electronics, ban on skilled tech migrants, turn off the internet

Serif

Re: And we thought BREXIT was bad

> I really wanted to learn how to swim...

Given his views on climate change, that could still be a strong possibility.

Botnet-powered ballot stuffing suspected in 2nd referendum petition

Serif

Re: The next question is whether the UK should add this min limit for next Scottish IndyRef?

Just what I was thinking. So how about we have a second referendum (to overturn the current result) with the 60%/75% rule in place so things are nice and fair? No? Thought not.

If the result of the referendum is ignored then can you imagine how many votes that's going to send in the direction of UKIP next election.

'To read this page, please turn off your ad blocker...'

Serif

Re: And so it begins.

"But one of the reasons for ad blockers is to conserve metered bandwidth. The only surefire way to fool the ad-blocker-blocker is to spend the bandwidth to download the ad, which is counterproductive."

True, it's nice not to have to waste bandwidth and time downloading the stuff, but personally I'd be happy to switch to a blocker that downloaded but didn't display ads if that was the only workable alternative. If the ad pushers were to escalate things to the point where that was needed though, I'd also start thinking along the lines of virtual click and discard in the background on ads, just to mess with their pay by click model.

A looksee into storage upstart Hedvig's garage

Serif

Nice idea, but what's new about it?

This looks very similar to Ceph and Parallels Cloud Storage. I guess I'm going to have to read the white paper to see what makes it count as patentable.

PHWOAR! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, Prime Minister

Serif

Re: If this is the start of net censorship 101...

Good idea. Then we'll have someone to sue when we get a virus.

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

Serif
Unhappy

Re: Level of ignorance

This is what worries me too. In this case we can point and laugh at how technically illiterate the government are, but what about all the decisions that require expertise in areas other than IT? I have a bad feeling that the powers that be are equally ignorant in anything that an Oxford PPE degree didn't cover.

Three's Irish network goes titsup

Serif
FAIL

So it's someone else's fault...

...when you've engineered a single point of failure into your systems. And then you shout about it so everyone notices?

Brits on benefits: 'Dole office site only works on PCs over 10 YEARS OLD'

Serif
Facepalm

IP Address Space

This is the same Department of Work and Pensions that have 51.0.0.0/8 (all 16777216 addresses in it) allocated for their use. Good to know that there are plenty of IPv4 addresses left for anyone who wants one and that organisations still living in the IT equivalent of the stone age aren't hoarding them.

India crowned global spam-spewing zombie king AGAIN

Serif

The more interesting figure is Italy coming in second. It just confirms what I've noticed on my own servers where mail from Italian addresses is treated as "special".

ISP CAN cut off pirates with 'three strike' rule, says Irish beak

Serif

Database of those banned?

Is there only one ISP in the Irish Republic or what's to prevent you going to the next one down the list? Rinse, repeat. Failing that, don't pay as you go 3G dongles exist over there? But I'm sure they've carefully thought all that stuff through beforehand...

Virgin Media flushes pipes clogged by piles of Spotify fans

Serif

As another data point, I have the Virgin top end cable service (XXL or whatever it's currently called) and I pay Spotify a tenner a month for their premium service. I'm now seeing drop outs on my Spotify streaming where the music stops, buffers and restarts. If it isn't sorted out soon I'll be cancelling Spotify and writing them a letter to tell them why.

Barclays online banking falls over in outage riddle

Serif
Black Helicopters

Now if only you'd set up a Continuous Payment Authority with who ever you were trying to pay. Those seem to work even if you've closed the account and cut up any cards years earlier, whether you want them to or not. Strange that.

MYSTERY programming language found in Duqu

Serif

Re: A layman writes

It might be quite sensible for them to develop a domain specific language to write their code in. It's a fairly standard technique. It would also hint at the people behind it being reasonably clueful. Maybe a warning about what happens when you have too many bright computer science graduates around without a job.

Pirate Bay AND its users violate labels' copyright - judge

Serif
Pirate

And when the Google links disappear I expect we'll see sites of links to those disappeared links.

So where does the liability stop? If I have a site that links to a torrent tracker for a copyright work then I'm in the same position as TPB. If you now link to my site, are you equally culpable or less? How about if someone links to your site? Then how about if someone has a Google search link on their site? As things stand I'm pretty sure the law at present could be used to prosecute anyone using an Internet connection.

Starbucks extends gratis Wi-Fi to UK

Serif
FAIL

Too little, too late

Stopped using Starbucks a long time ago because of the hoops you had to jump through for WiFi. Moved elsewhere and discovered the coffee was a lot better too.

GCHQ losing its 'internet whizzes' to Microsoft, Google

Serif

Simple solution

They could offshore the work to India. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Google: botnet takedowns fail to stem spam tide

Serif
Thumb Up

@Shannon Jacobs

I agree with you, and maybe it's time that the Blue Frog idea (as mentioned above by Gabor Laszio) was tried again. After all, if even the spammers admit that this is the one approach so far that they're really scared of, then maybe one of the big players like Google could earn themselves several million brownie points by hosting such a service.

Mandy declares 'three strikes' war on illegal file sharers

Serif
WTF?

And if you're daft enough to get caught?

What's to stop you simply going to the next ISP touting for business? Are they proposing yet another national database of people who can't have an Internet connection. What about if you simply get your partner / lodger / cat to join up with next ISP in list? What if it's the family Internet connection, do you plan to punish the children by not letting them do their homework / spouse by not being able to work from home? I suspect these are all things which will be ignored until it's someone else's problem.