Posts by Joe Harrison

Advanced state-level adversary technique

"His session is in his browser cookies. You get his Facebook.com cookies, you get his session."

Wow! Leaving your session open allows people to do bad things and impersonate you. Who knew.

Microsoft backing Linux

Deeply impossible things are happening.I knew I shouldn't have eaten those mushrooms I found in the woods :(

how does it work in reverse

For example alcohol is illegal in some countries. When someone located in one of those countries finds your ilovebooz-hic.eu site and complains, then what, do you have to take it offline or censor it somehow?

ominous

I have never exactly been a junk-food junkie but I have certainly eaten my share of pizzas and "things in packets". What has finally prodded me into serious care about my diet has been that I keep hearing "oh noes the doc told me I had diabetes" from my mates and contemporaries. It's one thing reading that in the news but quite something else from people you know and who are maybe younger than you.

After a lot of reading and crap-filtering I came to the conclusion that actually caring about what you eat is the key rather than trying to make sense of conflicting research studies. Incidentally I have come to distrust any food statements from "nutritionists" (anyone can award themselves that title) unlike "dietician" who have serious clinical qualifications.

No matter how much you might identify yourself as a permanent jaffa cake snacker you know in your heart what it is doing to you. Just switch your common sense on and if this is difficult picture yourself having treatment somewhere for your overloaded pancreas.

Finally, do some exercise and if you're not hungry don't eat (sounds obvious but isn't).

Certs not so bad

There's nothing wrong with certificates as such. If you need your botnet herd looked after properly then wouldn't you rather have someone who's studied his socks off and is now a Certified Botnet Shepherd?

Unfortunately where the model falls down is that nothing in the IT biz stays the same for long. The "getting the right certificate" cycle is longer than the "what's hot this week" cycle and people can't be expected to run looking over their shoulder on a permanent certification treadmill.

Finland is different

I used to work for a Finnish tech company and to my mind their single most difficult characteristic was inability to admit when something was not working.

Pointing out a deficiency in your own company's product or strategy was tantamount to high treason so of course nobody did. There were probably plenty of people in Nokia who knew what was wrong they just didn't dare stand up and say so.

?

What is the point of encrypting your stuff if people can still search to see what is in it. (Is it just me?)

Nobody reads those things

I never do, and even if people can be bothered the agreement is often not formatted to be read easily on a tiny phone screen. I just tick "yes" to everything. Does it really matter when everything I care about is via SSL or some other encryption.

Good luck trying to enforce the favourite pet thing as well.

bing ka-shing!

Never used Bing but if it can accurately answer any natural language query about Scotland then I'm heading over there right now with mine.

"OK Bing what will be tonight's winning lottery numbers Scotland?"

Been there done that

Just around Y2K I was working for an organisation that wanted to sell what would today be called "private facebooks" to professional membership organisations. It was not a bad idea from the perspective of that time but ultimately failed.

The only point of being on a facebook or a linked-in or a <next big thing here> is that everyone else is on it. Who wants a phone that can only dial a closed group. Sorry but this is doomed.

cashback disaster

Not pointing at any particular phone retailer but many of them had a terrible reputation for using technicalities to avoid paying the "cashback when you send us your fourth monthly bill" style of rebates which were popular a few years back. Alleged victims spread the news and I believe that permanently and severely depressed a lot of their repeat business.

Sleeping

I'm a huge fan of the "sleep analyser" apps such as Sleep As Android. They rely on motion sensors which means you rather inconveniently have to keep your phone in bed with you. It would be quite a win to avoid that by having the app use the watch sensors instead. See? I found an actual use for it.

Not as big a problem as it looks

You could always reflash your phone with Cyanogenmod, whose built-in "Privacy Guard" allows you to set a default "no access" for apps. It's not a perfect solution but takes care of the major risks.

The message in the article is right though in that most of the apps which over-enthusiastically grab permissions never actually attempt to use those permissions. On a few occasions privacy guard does pop up "this app is trying to access your contacts" or some such with no valid reason. Answering "no" mostly seems to crash the app unfortunately.

Paranoid, moi?

You would be entering a large number of voice samples... would there be a back door uploading them to train someone's vocal recognition system? Your burner phone would no longer fool them would it.

He wha?

"If I want to do or say something which I am only prepared to do or say privately, then it is an interference with my freedom of expression if I cannot do it or say it because it will be reported in a newspaper," he said.

How does he work that one out? It's not true just because he says it is.

Of course it is real, there can be no doubt

It's real alright. It is obvious and happening right in front of your eyes how could it not be real.

The problem comes when you discover how hard it is to come up with an adequate definition of "real" (hint: there isn't one).

the real reason

I work a lot with public-facing entertainers outside of the music industry and they too went through a phase of "please don't put it on youtube". They didn't want everyone to be completely familiar with their act when they do it again next time somewhere else.

As I say it was a phase and has now largely gone away - firstly they know it is a lost cause and secondly they found the exposure was beneficial and didn't impact future audiences.

Not disagreeing that people with cameras during the actual performance are very annoying.

Why did the chicken only cross half-way?

It was a Rhode Island red

The internet

Have we so soon forgotten the central planning to create the internet? No... because there wasn't any... I am always astounded that such a big complex system that "just works" (for the most part) in over 9000 countries had no real plan.

Think about it though the internet was not Soviet-style centrally-planned, but neither was it really built by capitalism. A true co-operative effort is the best way I can think of it and that's the model I personally would like to see for the economy generally.

I don't get it

If you look inside one of these here "e-books" do you know what it is filled with? Words, that's what.So many words in fact that it reminds you strongly of that "interweb" thingy which is also ankle deep in words. What is the difference between e-book internet words and normal internet words? Apart from one being 20% vattable.

In any case wasn't The Internet supposed to link us all together and eliminate the need for middle men such as Hachazon?

Kevin Holley = top bloke

I used his SMS daemon in the 1990s to provide web->SMS for our entire company.

Why do they never tell you why?

A massive amount of effort and planning so they can land on a space rock and take samples. Surely the samples will turn out to be the sort of materials you do normally expect to find in rocks? "Yep! It's a rock alright!" Or are they hoping to find something different and exciting?

For the benefit of us non-rock(et)-scientists... why exactly are they doing this?

The way I limit this

1. Cyanogenmod "privacy guard" natively allows you to prevent apps looking at your private stuff, contacts etc. regardless of what permissions the app thinks it has.

2. Use a PAYG SIM and not put much credit on it. That way a rogue premium dialler can at worst cost me ten quid or so.

Not saying this is a complete fix but it prevents the two most heinous problems.

Broadcom 7225

Really?

not illegal

How can it be illegal for Google to remove one of its own links? The EU ruling just says that Google must remove a link if an individual requests it, unless there is a public interest angle. The ruling does not say the opposite (that if there is public interest then the link must remain.)

50Hz hum randomiser

A box that outputs hum patterns of your choice. These could be fake ones randomly generated, or maybe real ones streamed over the internet from the Taiwanese national grid. Remember folks you heard it here first.

can we stop saying glasshole yet

Every time there is a new personal technology we feel this deep urge to take the p out of early adopters. Like analog mobile phones, bluetooth headsets, and now smart specs. Then once we get to a critical mass of users suddenly it's all perfectly acceptable. Can you imagine in 2014 laughing hysterically about"some moron" pulling out a mobile phone well that's what used to happen in the 1990s.

Ten quid will get you an unobtrusive clip-on camcorder about the size of the typical USB flash memory stick. How is that any worse than special glasses.

too late

It's already possible to make a virtual environment which is so immersive and realistic that you actually forget you are inside it. Look around you.