* Posts by John Lilburne

1026 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2009

Bundestag holds 'unusual' hearing on German Copyright Act

John Lilburne

Just sat NO to freeloading

I for one welcome any democratic government's attempts to curtail the thieving, tax avoiding, and criminal activitoes of Google. The web is NOT Google's private property, adding information to the web does not give Google an automatic right to steal it.

The days of freeloading by aggregators who provide very little content of their own should come to an end.

Ad-titan Google blocks Adblock Plus in Android security tweak

John Lilburne

Re: Do no Evil

I disabled the bypass filters in Adblocker which allowed Google ads through, and I redirect all Android devices to a "SCREW GOOGLE" image. Lets turn the web dark to Google and its customers. Fuck all tax avoiding criminals.

Clarkson: 'I WILL find and KILL the spammers who hacked me'

John Lilburne

Do try to keep up. Mr Airport was given the all clear, and plod has been told to lighten the fuck up.

Python-lovers sling 'death threats' at UK ISP in trademark row

John Lilburne

Which just goes to show that the denizens of hobby computer forums are dumber than the average SUN reader. May Inspector Knacker arrest them all.

Satanic Renault takes hapless French bloke on 200km/h joyride

John Lilburne

Re: No brakes?

The electronic parking brake on my car won't work whilst the vehicle is moving. It only works when the car is stopped.

Google whips out pocket cannon, fires VoIP patent sueball at BT

John Lilburne

BT should do a Frenchie and block access to google search.

Rivals to Brussels: Google labelling its own stuff won't help us

John Lilburne

Re: Awww Poor Old Micwosawft

Lets see the Google tax-avoiding thieves pay Mozilla $300 million a year to keep Google as the default search engine. Its not such that Google are particularly good at search in fact they happen to be as useless as all the rest. The issue is that it is the default and most people change the default browser search engine as often as they change Utility suppliers.

John Lilburne

Did it?

I thought that back in 1998 or so too. It was only an impression, I never actually tested it out. It was cool back then to point people at this new search engine. And we all said it provided better results, but maybe that was because we'd read it somewhere, and as we now know Google pay a lot of people a lot of money to talk them up. I still recall having to wade into page 50 or so to find relevant stuff, and maybe it would have been on page 55 on Yahoo, or page 45 on Jeeves. I don't know, because I never tried, because Google provided better search results.

Then around 2005 or so I found that it was just another search engine, it didn't provide anything greatly more relevant than any of the other search engines. Except that it was now more likely to have searched through your gmail archives and browser history to select stuff you liked. Which if you think about it for a minute is pretty crap, unless you want your internet to be an echo chamber. Turn all that targeted stuff off and its no better than anything else.

Review finds Wikipedia UK board needs major leadership overhaul

John Lilburne

This WMUK gravy train

does it start out from Constantinople perchance? Cos it seems like Poirot would discover that they are all guilty.

Dish boss on ad-skipping service: 'I don’t want to kill ads'

John Lilburne

How does it go we skip the ads, we torrent down the shows, there is nothing new on TV its all repeats.

Microsoft techies bust data centres, pull plug on Bamital botnet

John Lilburne

Anhd where were ...

... the ad agencies like Google that were still profiting from all this click fraud? Setting up new tax avoidance schemes no doubt.

Samsung: Never mind Steve Jobs, let's snap off a piece of stylus biz

John Lilburne

All I can say is that bought a wacom bamboo tablet for general computer use about 2 years ago and it has become my preferred pointing input device, and the joints on my index finger are no longer throbbing.

Feds slurping your private data? But that's OUR job, says Google

John Lilburne

""We’re a law-abiding company, and we don’t want our services to be used in harmful ways."

Rubbish.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/google-to-pay-500-million-fine-for-rogue-pharma-ads/

Worst broadband notspots in the UK named and shamed

John Lilburne

Had some fool cold call me from TalkTalk last year saying they could give me a better BB speed. Neat trick I said, how are you going to speed that up given that the nearest BY exchange is clapped out and 2 miles away? On the plus side I no longer get BT sales people phoning asking me to switch providers, not since I had one of them trying to explain to me for 30 minutes how switching to BT would give me a better service given that it was their clapped out equipment that was responsible for the slow connection anyway.

Swartz suicide won't change computer crime policy, says prosecutor

John Lilburne

Re: It was of his own choosing

*blink* Dead is dead. and you don't get to fight another day. As for 'national news' well in a months time it will be "Aaron who? Oh yeah him. Yeah sad, pour another beer will you."

John Lilburne

Re: Expect more of this...

Are you completely bonkers?

Swartz was into collectivising works, he has a manifesto out that calls for the collectivisation of all culture, which was pretty much a Soviet ideology.

http://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt

Perhaps he could have got off due to lack of maturity.

John Lilburne

Re: WTF

The issue is interference with a property right. If I come around and dig up your garden I've not deprived you of anything as you still have your garden all be it strewn about the place.

And besides everyone knows that IP is property.

John Lilburne

If you can't do the time don't do the crime.

Tech firms face massive tax bill if Dutch vote to end loopholes

John Lilburne

Jail the bastards next time they get off a plane anywhere in the world. If they want to be in the cloud let the fuckers live there.

Hackers on anti-Egypt spree bury Egyptology journal in the sand

John Lilburne

Dontcha lovem

Hackers and "News of the World" readers not much sense between any of them paediatrician->paedophile Egyptology->Egyptian state.

China turns to no-name handsets: Android - without the Google-iness

John Lilburne

Re: 2 Questions

Who cares if it phones the communist party intelligence headquarters? The last I heard they aren't some criminal company, and besides them communist party intelligenciers need to learn the real radical stuff from somewhere.

John Lilburne

Re: "Google receives no signalling information from these devices"

Google is the frying pan and the fire. As I just want a phone to ... well ... phone from time to time, I'd buy one as well to replace by 8 year old nokia whatsit.

Wikimedia gets the travel bug with Wikivoyage

John Lilburne

Adverts come to Wikipedia.

This is what Gibraltarpedia was was the forerunner for

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/26/gibraltar_pwns_wikipedia/

Swartz prosecutor: We only pushed for 'six months' in the cooler

John Lilburne

Re: 'We were big softies all the way' - Yeah, right

Some years ago the maximum penalty for burglary is 14 years, which was also the maximum sentence for possession of pot. But we know that hardly anyone got hit that hard. £25 fine plus costs, or probation. Maybe if the rozzers caught someone burgling multiple times they'd get a short custody sentence. The maximum is never what a first timer gets.

My impression is that this is mostly the middle classes not thinking that the law applies to them.

The forkers saving open source from a corporate bear hug

John Lilburne

Re: Corporate And Open source, What's The Problem ?

@Bronek Kozicki

Depends. We release maintenance builds every month, and we have two major release a year. Some years ago we had 4 major releases a year. Often our customers report that the updates are too frequent, and most are several major release behind.

John Lilburne

Re: Corporate And Open source, What's The Problem ?

End users don't care about how crap the source is, if it does the job and they get the results they need. It could be written in ZX Spectrum basic for all they care.

Media barons threaten to spike UK.gov's audacious copyright grab

John Lilburne

Re: "What happens when someone deletes your metadata?"

Google, Yahoo, Photobucket, Facebook, have always stripped metadata from anything that is uploaded to their sites. Google is one of the worst offenders in creating orphans, if you download an image from image search it will have had metadata stripped.

CIOs: Don't listen to tech vendors on ICT skills, listen to US

John Lilburne

Re: Pay

Sounds about 2/3rds going rate. But at least there will be sun and sand (well sand anyway) and plenty of gandmas/gandpas on the look out for a young un.

Google's Schmidt: I squeezed Norks to lift web blockade

John Lilburne

Re: And North Korea will look to China, and say...

They can also look at Google and say the same thing. Google only wants a free and open internet so long as Google doesn't have to comply.

Sir James Dyson slams gov's 'obsession' with Silicon Roundabout

John Lilburne

Re: Web fads and video games

Dyson, like many in the engineering field, straddle both the manufacturing and IP sectors. The fact remains that physical products are not only manufactured, but they are also designed, and the tooling to manufacture the parts is also designed. People may decry the loss of UK manufacturing, but last year we had record sales of design and manufacturing software into UK engineering.

John Lilburne

Re: Hypocrite

We don't fabricate stuff here that much any more. Mostly what we do is design stuff, and design the tooling (dies, moulds, patterns) to make the stuff. Our economy has moved more into IP in its wider contexts and those so employed earn 60% more on average than those outside of the IP sectors. However that won't last forever and the emerging economies will soon become self sufficient in designers and engineers. India produces over 20 million graduates a year and they aren't going to be settling for call centre jobs for long. In fact from our sales of design and manufacture software into places like India and China it won't be long before a lot of that work is done there as well.

John Lilburne

Re: Web fads and video games

Stuff and nonsense, well at least as far as the 'web fads' is concerned. These do not generate any socially useful earnings, if anything they displace earnings from elsewhere. They operate in some ax avoidance crevice between jurisdictions, and are mostly profiting from the creative endeavours of others.

The companies behind them are more akin to flesh eating bacteria. Which come to think about it should be quite attractive to Tories.

Wikipedia doesn't need your money - so why does it keep pestering you?

John Lilburne

Re: A finely crafted smear piece

Wikipedia articles are supposed to be NPOV yet your SOPA article (Kaldari is a paid employee) is anothing but NPOV. It contains a bunch of statements from SOPA detractors which are untrue, and no statements from SOPA advocates refuting the lies. Additionally the SOPA article quotes extensively from Google shill organisations, and links extensively to blogs and articles that are at best speculative. An example wouldf be this from EFF:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/whats-blacklist-three-sites-sopa-could-put-risk

where non of the sites mentioned are foreign and non of the sites refuse to take action under a proper DMCA request.

John Lilburne

Re: Love it or hate it

They need to fix the Richard II was king of England, when Clemens VI was pope, and Philip VI was king of France.

John Lilburne

Re: Deletion obsession

All content has a cost, the number of editors is declining, the number of pages is increasing, they can't maintain that which they already have. More, and more of their articles are rotting away.

Yes, hundreds upon hundreds of websites CAN all be wrong

John Lilburne

Re: Oh

No he's saying that more than 90% of it is bollocks and only 70% of that is gay pr0n.

Musos blast US copyright bods: 'ARTISTS MAKE LOUSY SLAVES!'

John Lilburne

Re: The way to do it...

What percentage of musicians make money from touring, and what percentage of their income is made up from touring receipts? I think you've been told porkies if you think that touring is the answer.

John Lilburne

Re: Angered down in Anchorage

And not paying taxes.

John Lilburne

Re: Artists have a choice

Yeah I bought 100 old Blues tracks for £2.50 yesterday. We don't need no more stinking music. Pull down the shutters.

Google's ethics, cosy UK.gov chats under Westminster scrutiny

John Lilburne

Article 27 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml

You also seem to be behind the times no one is concerned about someone making copies as personal backups, and they don't much care about you copying the shit you bought to multiple devices either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSUsiVnvS2w&t=1324s

John Lilburne

Re: Big tech companies promote "copyleft"? That's new to me.

Really. Content scrappers like Google hate copyright, they have an army of paid shills that attempt to undermine copyright at every turn. Whether its bloggers, or the Berkman Center, Public Knowledge, or the EFF.

Currently they are getting 1.5 million DMCA takedowns a week, a year or so ago they were complaining that the cost of 5 million takedowns a year on youtube was costing them $500 million. Google has a major cost benefit in undermining copyright.

John Lilburne

Re: The internet does not do competition

Bing, linkedin beebo, Google+ are also rans. heck I still use LJ but almost everyone has gone elsewhere. In each category there is one site that eventually gets 80-90% of the traffic. We change search engines less often than we change utility provider. Today some software update was taking place and I only just caught in time the fact that it was about to install google chrome and hijack my current browser with google toolbar. A couple of days ago it was some 'ask toolbar' that was about to be installed. If I look at the wife's machine its full of hijack software from Google, Apple or somewhere else that is redirecting to their sites. None of it is based on innovation, its just due to people not being arsed to change to something else, so they're all trying to hijack your computer activity.

John Lilburne

Re: The internet does not do competition

You think that Google has created the map data and not bought it in from other companies? That its dominance is not based on the overlaying of user created content? That its street view section does not contain still images ripped off from 3rd parties. That it does not overlay ARR images from geodata ripped from flickr? That its satellite view is not ripped from NASA? Which part of Google maps is actually created by Google?

John Lilburne

The internet does not do competition

This is something that politicians need to recognise. The internet only does one of anything, and innovation is not part of it. One tat bazzar (ebay), one search engine (Google), one advertising network (Google), one online retailer (Amazon), one music seller (Apple), one social network (Facebook), one supplier of crap information (wikipedia), one site for maps (Google).

Also note that none of the above are actually creating anything they are all profiting of the work of others which they take for free.

A tweet too far: UK contempt law reform push begins

John Lilburne
Thumb Up

Quite so.

If you are broadcasting your micro thoughts to 60,000 people you aren't just gossiping in Arkwright's Corner Emporium, nor if you #tag them.

Google to UN: Internet FREEDOM IS FREE, and must remain so

John Lilburne

What have they got ...

... their beady eyes on to steal this time?

Boss wrong to demote man over anti-gay-marriage Facebook post

John Lilburne

The conclusion being ....

... that whilst the employee is a twerp, Trafford Housing Trust is managed by wankers.

Hacker sentenced to six years – WITH NO INTERNET

John Lilburne

Alternatively ...

... they could allow access but insist that all accounts, are branded with 'Credit card fraudster' or something similar.

John Lilburne

Re: Asking the Impossible

Did you miss the "without permission" bit of the sentence?

UK's Intellectual Property Obliteration office attacked by Parliament

John Lilburne

Police investigation needed ...

... into the possible corruption by Google of Civil Servants in and around the copyright office. In the meanwhile, Ed Vaizey MP can be arrested and locked just for being a tory twerp.