* Posts by John Lilburne

1026 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2009

Middle-aged US bloke pleads guilty to iCloud celeb nude photo hack

John Lilburne

Re: They gave him their password

Insurance companies mostly have senior Tory party members on the board and have wealthy investors. Different standards apply when these sort of people are asked to cash out.

Swedish publishers plan summer ‘Block Party’ to thwart ad blockers

John Lilburne

Re: They don't understand

"If publishers want people to turn off adblockers, return the advertising model to the days when the internet first became a necessity of life, the days when the above rules were the de-facto standard."

Well back in the early 2000s I was running this

http://proxomitron.info/45/help/Contents.html

because ads have always been a problem on the web.

Why I'm regulating the 'sharing economy': An Italian MP explains

John Lilburne

Re: Uber/Lyft to become Monopolies? Oligopolies? Puh-leeze

Firstly the only country that has ever followed Randian rules is Somalia.

Secondly YT benefits from government regulations regarding net neutrality, the amount of of subsidy that tax payers give to Google is staggering.

Thirdly YT needs a strong central government. When a French ISP filtered out Google Ads where did Google go crying to - yep that's right the French gubmint - make them unfilter our ads.

Fourthly neither gasoline tax nor tolls pay for the road infrastructure. There are far more miles of roads than there are toll roads.

fifthly Mogadishu has a thriving mobile telecoms access. Internet access too. Well until Al-Shabaab forced the largest provider to shut down.

John Lilburne

Re: Uber/Lyft to become Monopolies? Oligopolies? Puh-leeze

*Gack* so much Randroid bollocks in so little space. If we were to squeeze you would we get pimple puss or gun oil?

Companies like Uber couldn't exist without a strong central government. What they want is all the benefits of road infrastructure and centralized zones which people want to travel into and out of. Zones that are mostly regulated against lawlessness, and where there drivers can operate without fear of being hijacked and robbed. They can operate without a centralized banking system, or without a regulated communications system. Uber don't work out of Mogadishu for a reason.

A typo stopped hackers siphoning nearly $1bn out of Bangladesh

John Lilburne

The Fed ought to be well versed with fraudulent activity ...

... sub-prime mortgages, lehmann brothers, libor, ...

Ad-slinger Opera adds ad-blocking tech to its browser

John Lilburne

TEH INNERNETZ companies ...

... need a new business model. It may be as simple as giving us more control over the type of ad content that gets slung at us. A couple of years back Last.fm were stuffing "Asian women want to talk" banners from Ad-Choices that site went from whitelisted to blacklisted. FB wants to shove political ads at me. Not wanted, not needed, my political views are fully formed they aren't going to change. If these companies had any real profiling experience they'd know that.

Google-backed British startup ‘stole our code’, says US marketing firm

John Lilburne

Google and its partners in copyright theft ...

... NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO say it isn't so.

Hacker 'Guccifer' extradited to US

John Lilburne

Re: Dubya paints ?

Not so surprising so did Bonzo the chimp too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedtime_for_Bonzo

Apple: FBI request threatens kids, electricity grid, liberty

John Lilburne

This pudding needs more eggs ...

... yes lots more.

Mechanical black hole: Microsoft settles music royalties sueball

John Lilburne

Step up EFF and defend Google!

Isn't it the God given right for tech companies to just take people's shit sell it on for a penny in the pound, and then use $millions to get a judge to approve the theft?

Ad-blockers are a Mafia-style 'protection racket' – UK's Minister of Fun

John Lilburne

Re: imho

Don't forget that the Tories have a love for advertisers (Saatchi). As for content I don't see adverts on the Natural History Museum website, nor on Encyclopedia of Life, nor on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, nor on a whole range of other sites that offer quality contents.

Its not my fault the publishers followed down the route of giving away their content online in return for 100th of the advertising cost that the print versions received. That they were scammed by the digiterati is no one's fault but their own.

More and more Brits are using ad-blockers, says survey

John Lilburne

Re: Like it or not...

We only have ads because 20 years ago there weren't any trustworthy ways to pay for content. No payment processors etc. Ads were a way of doing it back then. The internet should grow up and find a more modern way to finance itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/technology/personaltech/banner-ads-the-monsters-that-swallowed-the-web.html?_r=2

The banner ads got taken up by one trick ponies like DoubleClick and Google.

John Lilburne

Re: Whitelist

Problem with ABP whitelist is that it allows Google through. The advantage of the list is that you can add it to the list of things to block. Google get to pay ABP to give us a useful list of Google sites to block. I'm fine with that.

John Lilburne

Re: Why the fuss just about Ad blocking?

Of course and some sites are getting antsy when you run ghostery to block the web trackers, beacons, and other shite they want to shove at you. Fuckem. Doubleclick and Adsense will never be enabled on my machines.

Safe Harbour v2.0 greenlights six bulk data collection excuses

John Lilburne

Perhaps they should ...

"Data protection authorities in EU member states will have to work with the FTC to ensure these are resolved."

... outsource it to Google?

... (0-0) ... (`-0) ... Oh?

Wikimedia’s executive director quits after less than 2 years in post

John Lilburne

Geeks with too much time on their hands ...

... and not enough ability. Lets be honest the WP engineering staff are mostly converted WP wonks. They have little in the way of experience in writing commercial grade software, and the WMF has had little in the way of experience in managing a major open source software project. The result has been that hacks and screw up have dominated in creating the ramshackle product that is wikimedia. The software is unmaintainable and mostly untested. Witness the bugs that kept coming back as they tried to implement a visual editor.

So the current batch of incompetents are in disarray when faced with someone in charge that knows how software engineering should be done, and in true wiki style back stab and screech in message boards. Meanwhile the WMF board are as incompetent as their employees.

Should be fun watchingt this years donation disappear down the drain. Last year they squandered $3 million in travel expenses.

Lose the onion tears, Tor fanboys: CloudFlare may consider binning CAPTCHAs, says CEO

John Lilburne

Re: walk the walk....

I've been flooded by spam and crap from some locations. Don't really care whether they are Tor exit nodes, proxy servers, or just IP locations where the owners don't give a shit what their users are doing. I block them. If the same IP range appears multiple times then I block the entire range. If multiple blocked ranges are owned ISP by the same ISP then I'll block every IP address allocated to that ISP.

I don't give a shit whether they have legitimate users their fuckwit abusing users get the place blacklisted.

UK.gov could reopen Google's £130m HMRC tax deal, says Parliament

John Lilburne

Pour encourager les autres

When Henry I discovered that coiners had been cheating by manufacturing sub standard sliver pennies, he invited them all round for Christmas get together at Salisbury cathedral where he ordered that their right hand and gentiles be cut off.

Most people approved of his actions.

'Kalamazoo killer' gave Uber rides in between shooting six dead

John Lilburne

Well I'm reassured

"Uber has reportedly confirmed that Dalton was one of their drivers and had passed a background check."

Remember WordPress' Pingbacks? The W3C wants us to use them across the whole web

John Lilburne

Re: "all in one place ..."

"but there's archive.org as a last resort."

A few years back I discovered that a web page that my wife had created had her full name on it. That name is pretty unique and pasting it into a search engine hacked up her full address etc. The page was on archive.org but a quick edition to robots.txt and an email fixed that and 12hrs later all was gone.

John Lilburne

"all in one place ..."

"If I have a conversation on Facebook it's all in one place."

I had one of those the other month. At the end the user whose feed it was deleted the entire thing. Most links on wikipedia are dead, most of the flickr accounts that they took images from are deleted. My drupal powered site has 8000 indexed pages on Google and several 1000 images. Linked to by a number of academic institutions but it could go tomorrow, or in a couple of months time if I decide not to renew the hosting.

The web in whatever guise is completely ephemeral.

John Lilburne

Interesting. The more ways in which we can breach these corporate silos, and claim back the internet for individuals, the better.

UK to stop children looking at online porn. How?

John Lilburne

"It is the parents' responsibility to ensure their children are safe,"

Adults tend to get their lawmakers to make sure that unsavoury material is not readily available to kids. Which is why porn tends to be on shelves out of reach of small kids, and fags and alcohol is age restricted. I seem to recall that Germany already has a age-verification law regarding online porn and kids.

John Lilburne

Re: Naff all use

You haven't done much multimedia searching on wikipedia then.

John Lilburne

Re: Naff all use

Not the point. They know they can't stop someone that is determined to access something. What they are looking to do is limit the cases where someone just happens into a porn site. Similarly they know they can't stop some kid from buying drugs, but they put in place laws to discourage dealers from selling skunk outside schools.

Move over, Google. Here’s Wikipedia's search engine – full of on-demand smut

John Lilburne

Bad a s Google is it doesn't toss up porn when you image search for furniture or pearl. And WP is innoculated against ever stopping that from happening.

Google after six-year tax foot-drag: No they're fine about the fine. We're fine. No fine

John Lilburne

FFS even your local ...

"Tom Hutchinson, veep at Google, blamed the overly complicated tax system as to why it took so long."

... window cleaner knows how to fill in, or not fill in, his tax return.

Google wins High Court fight with StreetMap over search results self-pluggery

John Lilburne

Google maps infringed on 1000s of photographers work

They took RSS geodata feeds from flickr and put them into their web search. So if someone had put holiday pics from X on flickr maps a search for X would provide an KLM wrapper of the RSS feed which pointed directly to Google maps with thumbs of the images plastered over it. So photos of someone's kid playing on the sand got used to promote a commercial website.

That wasn't the whole problem though. Because the relevance of the images was dependent on how often some one was updating flickr and how often Google trawled the RSS feeds. So yesterday someone might have uploaded beach photos from X which Google trawled and the following day conference photos from Y. The RSS feed would now be pointing to Y so a search for X got the KLM wrapper which plastered photos from Y. The whole exercise (which lasted for several years) was useless as a search option as it was hardly ever relevant, it was simply a sparkle for GM.

Andreessen stokes the Facebook Free Basics ‘colonialism’ row

John Lilburne

Re: Are these apples or oranges?

If you are accessing facebook then you have something other than a basic mobile phone. How much in terms of the yearly income of a villager is a basic internet enabled phone? The data consumption is due to large amounts of unwanted adverts, and other irrelevant shite, being dumped onto the device. We all pay a large premium in terms of data charges to allow these corporation to bombard us with their crapola. As a charitable act facebook should be providing people with a FB sans adverts.

Gmail growls with more bad message flags to phoil phishers

John Lilburne

You can go along avoid phishing scams ...

... by bozo binning all incoming gmail.

France joins India in telling Facebook to just Zuck off

John Lilburne

Generate a random list of email address. Plug it into facebook and it will tell you which are valid, and with a little bit of researching you'll get to know quite a bit about the person, before you social engineer a phishing attack.

Labels to artists: You'll get a penny, so go away

John Lilburne

Re: Payment?

Consolidation happens because the small players cannot weather a downturn in sales, they go bust or sell to a major. Freetardary is part of that cause. It happened in the software industry. For each software application there are now at most 2 alternatives. None of them are the best that could be, they are simply the ones that survived the piracy of the 90s and 20s.

AdBlock Plus, websites draft peace deal so ads can bypass blockade

John Lilburne

If they want any change getting past my blockers then don't use any google ad networks.

Sorry slacktivists: The Man is shredding your robo responses

John Lilburne

Re: Nice censoring your doing andrew

You have articles about it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/10/eu_copyright_fears_nixed_wikipedia/

John Lilburne

Re: I'm with Morozov

Back in the day people stood in corners and collected 100,000s of signatures which were delivered to Downing Street or wherever and promptly ignored. Did anyone think that clicking a box on a website or sending a form email would result in anything different? Email is extremely easy to ignore it can be filtered on keywords subject lines whatever. If you want to disrupt them don't use email, use normal mail. They at least have to sort that manually. Send your complaints about the BBC to the Inland Revenue, send complaints about copyright infringement to the Ministry of Defence or the DVLA. They need to sort it from their normal mail. Execute an analogue DDoS there is nothing illegal in that.

John Lilburne

Re: Nice censoring your doing andrew

OTOH I've had 4 posts rejected in the last year, and it can take up to 12hr to get one approved. None of which were being rude to another commentator, and though they may have been less than complimentary to Google and wikipedia, none were libellous either.

Europe: Go on. Ask us to probe the £130m 'sweetheart' deal HMRC made with Google

John Lilburne

This just supports ...

... the claim that 80% of Evil contains traces of Google.

Wikipedia board stands by new ex-Googler appointee

John Lilburne

Cromwell's words can be applied to the WMF board

"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

"You are no longer a Parliament, I say you are no Parliament"

US rapper slams Earth is Round conspiracy in Twitter marathon

John Lilburne

Issac Asimov delt with this ...

In the relativity of wrong.

[

The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile, as you can see, and one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients. The tiny difference between 0 and 0.000126 accounts for the fact that it took so long to pass from the flat earth to the spherical earth.

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

]

Google and HMRC face Parliamentary grilling over £130m tax deal

John Lilburne

When the officials turn up ...

... a quick tour upstream to "traitors gate" wouldn't be amiss.

It's Wikipedia mythbuster time: 8 of the best on your 15th birthday

John Lilburne

Re: Thanks for this article.

Wikipedia has a million and one excuses as to why it is shite, and about 1001 people to deliver them.

John Lilburne

Re: >"reader's digest"

a subject I feel knowledgeable about and catch them out in some unambiguous factual error or omission.

Oh I've seen photographs or organisms which are of the wrong species. Links from articles on 15th century subjects go to people living in the 18th century. Dates of European monarchs wrong. A described as a contemporary of B when A had died 100 years before B was born. Etc, etc. There is hardly any article that I care about there where I could be confident that the information was correct.

John Lilburne

Re: There was always a near monopoly on encyclopedic knowledge

Example:

Quantum Gravity

You would never see that much detail, or that many links to related topics, in Britannica.

This article may contain improper references to self-published sources. Please help improve it by removing references to unreliable sources, where they are used inappropriately.

The issue is that WP gets pushed about by every crank with a internet connection and a keyboard. Gets swamped over by under-grads posting up their lecture notes, post-grads adding in their research, and the result is that the article is a hodge-podge of kookery, undergrad wankery, and the esoteric.

John Lilburne

Re: There was always a near monopoly on encyclopedic knowledge

So, "30% more errors" is the same thing as "as accurate".

Even better, many of the articles were those that WP had originally cribbed from the 1911 version of EB. In effect the report said that the modern version of EB had less errors than it had 100 years previously, and WP hadn't been arsed to fix them.

John Lilburne

Re: There was always a near monopoly on encyclopedic knowledge

"And it was bl**dy expensive, quickly out of date if you wanted any scientific information"

Probably not as it had a yearly update. Very little changes in science year on year, and wikipedia is in no position to make any significant update if things do change. For example each wikipedia 'fact' has to be referenced and new 'facts' that contradict old facts are almost invariable reverted. There are very few scientist editing the articles capable of appraising new facts. OTOH Britannica having practicing science editors can make the appropriate changes far quicker once the new is established.

John Lilburne

Re: 4.

It makes money by not having to invest in search. Actually it seems to have abandoned indexing the web about 10 year ago. Now it just scrapes wikipedia, which won't be the worst pile of shite out there, and will satisfy the vaguely curious.

OW if Google and the other search engines throw a few wikipedia pages up for any given search, plus links to sites they know you like, you won't notice that the information being provided is pretty low quality.

Google UK coughs up £130m back taxes. Is it enough?

John Lilburne

If I didn't pay my taxes for 10 years ...

... I'd be spending the next few in one of the HMPs.

It's 2016 and idiots still use '123456' as their password

John Lilburne

The ubiquitous ”123456" remains the most popular password among web users, followed by "password" in a list of user credentials leaked online last year.

Yeah but we only do that in the 100+ throwaway accounts we create.

UK can finally 'legalise home taping' without bringing in daft new tax

John Lilburne

FFS in the number of people that only copy Linux and don't copy music files is about 1 in a population of 6 billion.

Library web filtering removes info access for vulnerable, says shushing collective

John Lilburne

"Library users should not be denied access to sites that contain information about, for example, abortion, sex education and LGBT issues, but many people will be reluctant to make libraries aware of this when it happens,"

What is wrong with the modern day equivalent of the playground, and behind the bike shed, for learning such things (wikipedia)?