Posts by Trevor_Pott

@PC Tech

http://search.theregister.co.uk/?author=Trevor%20Pott

It was brought up in a recent article of mine. You should read the past four, as they are all about the various layers of protection against web-based threats

"Within reason?"

Since when has the Canadian government needed a reason? The conservatives are in power, which means that when the US says jump, Canada says "on what vector?"

Disgusting, really...

It's not just a matter of making available the raw data files.

It is also a matter of making available the APIs required to properly use them. Here's a thought: who owns the intellectual property to that? Were the programs in use created by a proprietary company? Perhaps a good chunk of the money involved is actually going to purchasing the intellectual property rights to the API involved so it can be redistributed.

There simply isn't enough information available about where the money is going to make any judgements about whether or not it is being improperly spent.

ASSumptions

At what point have I ever, EVER, in my very long history of commenting on El Reg been an "open source advocate?" I am a cynic: everything has flaws.

I am sorry you feel "my attitude is childish," but the reality is that i simply don't like the damned ribbon bar. I don't see where there is FUD in that. I stated a personal preference, and you got your hackles up. I have been forced to use Office 2007 since the earliest beta we could get hold of, and then office 2010 since the earliest beta we could get hold of for it. As a sysadmin it's part of my job to learn how to use the newest technology. It doesn't mean i have to (or do) like the crap I have to use. I simply learn to use and (and do use it for hours every day as part of my job) because it is my job.

As to what a stupid debate like Android versus iPhone has to do with the ridiculously pointless thread: it’s an example of how people who get so entrenched in their defensive little camp are completely incapable of see anything as not an attack on their way of living/believing/doing things/etc.

Whip out an Android phone in front of an iPhone user and (in my experience) the iPhone user becomes instantly defensive. Some of them are for some reason so threatened by its very existence the immediately go on the offensive: attacking and insulting the phone, the person and everything related to it. Rather a shock when you are just checking your mail. (I have never had anyone go after my Blackberry like they do my Android phone, which is odd since I have had blackberries for about 6 years, and my Android phone for about four days…)

In this case, I made the statement that I don’t like Office 2007 or 2010. In fact, I deeply abhor both products. Part of this is the UI, but a large part of it the arrogance associated with the UI. In my opinion, radical changes to the UI in a product such as Office (or Windows) should have the option of either reverting to the old UI, or having an overly (such as UBit menu) to ease the transition. In the case of Office 2007, the Ribbon bar was thrown at us with a great big “fuck you” and a format change to try to force everyone into uptake.

When you combine that with the fact that I have found nothing about the ribbon bar to love then yes, I deeply, DEEPLY dislike the product. I will stick with Office 2003, and when the time comes to migrate away from it for whatever reason it won’t be to further versions of Office when and where it can be avoided. I will put my time and effort into converting to Open Office, a product I can make look like whatever I should want.

It isn’t about the money. I personally intent to donate the cost of a Microsoft Office license to the Open Office project for every single copy of Open Office I deploy. It’s about choice, and it’s about not having someone else’s idea of a good UI or their personal preferences rammed down my throat without having any say in the matter.

If you don’t like to hear about my personal preferences you are perfectly capable of not reading comments by me. I on the other hand don’t have the luxury of (at least at work) not using Office, and what I consider to be its terrible, TERRIBLE UI. When and where I can exercise my own rights to enforce my personal preferences, (such as my home computers, or recommendations to friends and colleagues,) I will push remaining on Office 2003 or supporting Open Office with every bit of effort I can muster.

If you wish, you can take my opinion and feelings as whatever verb you want, but it simply doesn’t change that I think the ribbon bar is an unholy piece of ever-loving shit and I will do everything in my power to avoid the bloody thing for as long as I live.

Including giving the money I would have spent on Microsoft to their competitors.

With a big huge smile on my face.

Please understand that I say this as a systems administrator whose job largely relies on Microsoft. I believe Microsoft have some of the best server offerings out there. I could talk all day about the good products Microsoft have, just as I can about the bad. In this case, I honestly believe that those responsible for the direction of Microsoft Office have failed. It is my personal opinion, and of course you are free to disagree, but what I see as a failure to be responsive to the requests and requirements of their customers has led me to abandon Microsoft’s Office offerings.

To such a point that I am in the process of migrating 7 out of 12 networks I am responsible almost entirely away from Microsoft’s interconnected Office offerings to alternatives. Open Office as a productivity package, Jabber instead of Office Communications Server, Evolution + MAPI to talk to Exchange, (Exchange is still the best IMHO,) and more. Call me names if you want, but you will not change what I believe.

@AC

"The Authors attitude is exactly the "IT Crowd" mentality that will ensure that IT staff will never be looked upon as a professionals by their business colleagues."

I'd love you to qualify that statement. I don't remember once saying that I was calling for NoScript in the bulk of a business environment. The solution for corporates is DNS Blacklisting. (Which is what my next few articles are about.) I in no way expect the users to be computer experts; in fact I have come to terms with the concept that the vast majority of them probably couldn't understand the difference between Firefox and IE if you gave them a ten week seminar.

It's not their job to know that. It is their job to know some basics of how to use computers. For certain individuals in my company, I do encourage the use of NoScript on their corporate machines, but only because these individuals are "advanced users" who are both capable of understanding its use and far more likely to poke around where they shouldn't be online.

When a staff member brings me a personal computer and asks me to set it up for them, you are damned right I try to teach them NoScript. If I am taking my personal (not company paid for) time to help them set up their home computer, then I am going to at least /try/ to teach them good digital hygiene. The vast majority of them rather like the concept, once they understand it.

Seriously though, if you honestly believe I storm around work all day pretending that “root” means “god” then I wholeheartedly encourage you to come down and pay me a visit. You can watch a sysadmin in their native environment, and realise that there are quite a few of us would actually enjoy helping our co-workers.

In fact, the biggest problem I encounter at work is people simply not telling me when something has gone pear-shaped. I can’t help you if I don’t know what the issue is. Sadly, there are always people who get hostile and unreasonable because I am not a god and thus don’t know everything there is to know.

If my “business colleagues” are incapable of looking upon my efforts to assist them in doing their jobs as professional, then I would have to say the fault lies with them. Their prejudice and need to fear and segregate what they don’t understand is the barrier, not a genuine desire to help and enable on my part. Sadly, there are people who cling to archaic stereotypes in any situation. In my opinion those people are a detriment to any business, as business must be capable of adapting to reality. In fact my experience has taught me that businesses that adapt the quickest are the only ones that survive.

@Tom Maddox

Agreed. There are a very, very few people I would truly cheer the death of, and he is not one of them. I disagreed with the man in every way imaginable, but there is something deeply wrong about actually cheering someone's demise.

That said, I will cheer the fact that he no longer has influence, even while I am greatly saddened it took his death to achieve said result.

Hmm

I should have phrased that differently. "For the record, “The Independent” has proven itself to no longer be high on my list of reputable resources…" is incorrect. It implied The Independent was at one point high on my list of reputable resources. I really hadn't heard of it until now, so that would be impossible. It's gone from "unknown resource" to "shite" in a short timeframe however.

@Andrew O

Again, it is a matter of proactive versus reactive. The net has always been neutral in that access to information has not (with very rare exceptions) been prevented. Companies can and do discriminate traffic based on protocol, but the traffic will eventually get from point A to point B.

The exception to this has always tended to be filtering illegal traffic: cutting off spammers, or prevention of individuals within a country from access information their government deems wrong.

The issue at hand is whether or not to allow the corporations that own the pipes and own the content to block you from accessing parts of the internet. I don’t give a rat’s if they want to discriminate based on protocol. So long as there are least two ISPs in a given area to chose from, there should be enough competition that they will eventually get into a war based on who will filter your traffic less.

If we allow ISPs to own content, or to form deep alliances with content owners then we enter entirely other territory. There is now suddenly a business case for preventing (or at the very least deprioritising) access to services offered by rival cabals. There may even be reason to prevent access to blogs, media outlets or what-have-you that deliver a message contrary to that which the cabal in questions wishes it’s customers to have access to.

You say that we should not legislate against this until after it has happened. I call that bizarre and dangerous. It seems we are at a complete impasse here; our opinions will likely never be reconciled. The ability to charge different rates based on the ORIGIN, DESTINATION or ACTUAL CONTENT (not PROTOCOL TYPE) of traffic is my beef. That is net neutrality to me; keeping the access to information 100% open, and preferably enshrined in law.

Enshrined as a human right, if at all possible. I do not believe that it should be a human right to have X Mbit internet access or free access to the latest episode of Survivor. But it damned well should be a human right to consume any freely available information without prejudice, and to have the opportunity to pay for and receive any information behind a paywall without prejudice.

If I pay for HTTP traffic, I should receive all HTTP traffic from all sources without prejudice or prioritisation. If my ISP is partnered with NBC they should not be preventing or deprioritising traffic to/from the BBC. Similarly, if my ISP is partnered with FOX, they shouldn’t be preventing or deprioritising my access to left-wing websites or anything that actually provides access to provable facts or scientific research.

Has anyone done this yet? No. It is however only a matter of time. If any corporation in the position to do thinks for a fraction of a second it can “generate revenue” but doing so then it will be done. Corporations don’t have morals; they have only the pursuit of the almighty dollar. The possibility that corporations will prevent or deprioritise access to information in order to either gain competitive advantage or shape public discourse is a threat. It should be dealt with accordingly.

Nice redirection with the malaria thing though. It’s nice to know what our societies must obviously solve problems in an arbitrarily defined hierarchy. “Don’t worry about this problem, that problem is far worse!” Personally I believe that preventing any entity, from governments to corporate cabals from controlling information in such a way as to effectively control the public at large is THE most important issue in the entire world. You will never convince me otherwise.

If the rich and powerful have total information control then nothing will ever be solved. Why? They became rich and powerful because of how things are; any change at all is a direct threat to them.

This then is why I revered good investigative journalists growing up. The ones who didn’t let their stories get killed, and who stood up for telling the truth regardless of who wanted what parts cut. I was lucky enough to know a few growing up, and frankly it’s why I like reading The Register. There are the rare folks around here who “speak truth to power” even when it’s inconvenient.

Personally, I will not stand idly by while there is any potential threat to the free flow of information. Access to information needs to become more open, not less. We certainly don’t have completely free access to information now, but that should never be used as an excuse to allow further restriction.

It needs to be used as a reason to identify areas where access to information is restricted and fight those barriers with everything we as citizens can bring to bear. (With acceptable barriers for individual privacy. I don’t believe corporations or governments should have the rights of individuals, and so in all honesty I don’t believe in corporate or governmental rights to privacy.)

I’m sorry if you feel I’m a whackjob for believing that, but that belief is part of the very core of who I am, and has been for as long as I can remember. I also believe in being proactive about threats, from computer maintenance to corporate malfeasance. Placing an outer marker on information control and manipulation isn’t the equivalent of corporate pre-crime. It’s letting everyone; from corporations and governments to individuals know where the line is, and establishing penalties for crossing it before someone tries.

If you were starting up a new country, would you wait until the first murder before outlawing it? Or less alarmist; would you wait until the first town/university/church group tried to censor access to information they didn't like before you declared such activates illegal? If you wouldn’t, they why wait until after access to information on the internet has been curtailed before declaring such activities verboten? At what point do we start learning from the past and proactively working to better our collective future?

@ITWillSaveTheWorld

Or, Anonymous could download WOT and poison the DB for a given site if they want. Yes, it has its flaws...but overall it's a lot more effort for the bad guys to game the system then they gain from it.

@frank ly

You felt the shiver of fear because you didn't think it through. A great big ball of ice, say at most a dozen kilometres in circumference is a whacking amount of fuel. It’s also an enormous pain in the rear to de orbit from wherever it is and park it anywhere near earth. Go up much bigger than a dozen or so kilometres and you are getting hundreds of years past our current technology. (As it is, even at a dozen kilometres, there would be about 30 years of R&D required before the first attempt.)

The thing is, a dozen kilometres of ice doesn’t mean anything to earth. If you miss with a ball that size, it will completely vaporise before hitting the surface. We’re not even talking about Tunguska here. We’re talking nice fireball in the sky followed by an interesting cloud of vapour. Now without an atmosphere, the moon would be at risk. Drop a dozen-kilometre ice ball into the surface and watch the kinetic energy both vaporise all of the ice and turn a sizable chunk of the surface into a shiny new (molten) crater. I don’t know how long it would take that crater to solidify, but given there’s no atmosphere to absorb the heat; I suspect it would be quite some time. (Radiative transmission and absorption of heat by the surrounding rock being the only methods of shedding the heat.)

So in short: you could do that in such a way as it would pose almost no risk to Earth, but I wouldn’t want to be living on a moon base when that sucker came by. (Not to mention the damage it could do to the cloud of Earth-orbiting debris we keep launching up there.)

The best solution is not to drop it onto the moon or even to attempt to park it in Earth orbit. The best solution is to drop fuel asteroids like this into the Lagrange points. They are stable places to leave things lying around, and currently largely unoccupied. This is not a difficult thing to do. Send a big-ish robot to some random iceball. Try to smack into it with as much force as you can muster, and have what amounts to an MCV pop out of the crater. (The impact hopefully being in the direction you want the asteroid to go. No sense wasting the kinetic energy you build up getting there.) The MCV deploys, uses some of the water for reaction mass on hall thrusters and deploys as big a solar sail as we can pack into the thing. It might take 50 years to move that asteroid, but at least we could do it safely.

Interesting hypothesis

I was under the impression that neither Firefox nor Safari had ActiveX capabilities. yet I still see quite a few machines coming in with infections that have crawled in through Flash or PDFs. These folks are not using IE, it having been carefully hidden and disabled from being the default anything.

I suspect there are for more things to be worried about than ActiveX….