Posts by tom dial

Re: @tom dial

The US (and Canada) have police and military agencies with missions that include protecting residents against various internal and external threats. Their activities inevitably interfere with or limit the actions of those residents and others and cost a lot of money. Contrary to your assertion, it is perfectly reasonable to discuss the extent of those limits, the cost of operating those agencies, and whether they are effective in carrying out their assigned mission.

It is not clear how failure to have universal background checks on private citizen gun purchases or to restrict ownership of semiautomatic weapons is evidence of a tyrannical regime; the natural interpretation would seem to be quite the opposite. Ownership of automatic weapons has, in fact, been tightly controlled for a very long time in the US.

Targeted killing of civilians, citizens or not, is to be condemned, as is perpetual imprisonment without due process. It is not, however very common and to describe it as the norm for the US is a rather extreme overstatement.

"The people with sand and more sand" killed quite a few, almost all civilians, in New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, London, and Madrid between late 2001 and mid 2005. I don't offer that to justify anything but the proposition that they may be worth worrying about, just a bit.

Re: "the ability and extent to which software can be patented"

So while you could not patent an improved mathematical algorithm for, say, solving the general transportation problem in linear time, you should be able to patent a device containing a logic interpreter controlled by a list of instructions to do so?

Of course the NSA won't either. Most targets are not subject to US jurisdiction at all and essentially all of what NSA collects would be clearly inadmissible in a US court.

I'm not endorsing what NSA does, and agree fully that the information it collects could be misused, but it is worthwhile to keep a sense of proportion and context. I suspect most people are more threatened, in fact, by the policeman in the patrol car just behind them who just ran their plate for warrants and violations.

Re: Oracle?

Am I wrong or did Microsoft not "contribute" to Samba by making the technical documentation available, for a fee, under compulsion of a court order? If so, that sound much like the best we may expect of Oracle.

Re: Exclusive rights

Well, and enabling a user to bypass technical contraints on copyright infringement probably does not result in many instances in which the theft, so called, of intellectual property, so called, results in actual loss of a sale. So the "theft" is in the same hypothetical class as the injury that might result from overspeed.

Re: Another 5-4 decision

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise fhereof; or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

A corporation is a usually peaceable organization and most of "the press" is corporations. Crossroads GPS is not materially different from much of what we think of as the press, and probably presents a view slanted to more or less the same degree, although in a quite different direction, as Mother Jones or Glenn Greenwald. A plain reading of the First Amendment suggests that any legal restriction whatever on political reporting or advocacy, including campaign expenditures and lobbying, is at best highly suspect, and quite possibly a violation of someone's constitutional rights.

Re: Interesting

Whether you're at a Customs checkpoint or stopped for a traffic offense it is unwise to sass the officials. You might win in the end at considerable inconvenience and expense; or you might not, probably at greater inconvenience and expense.

Re: Keys

"... NSA an most agencies have the SSL master keys."

Proof?

Re: Not that easy to stop

I wonder if a small strip of duct tape over the microphone opening would do the trick.

According to my understanding it has quite a bit to do with interoperability, at least at the development level. Developers can use the Java language and related tools to develop for Android devices so long as they limit themselves to the Java APIs that Dalvik implements. That is a huge gain for them and for all users of Android devices. It hurt Oracle to the extent that they were planning to recover part of their Sun purchase price by licensing the mobile version of Java.

My recollection is that Google did not consider the mobile JVM fit for their purpose, and Oracle declined to license the full JVM for mobile use, at least at rates agreeable to Google. So Google did a reimplementation of the part of the API they felt they needed, similar to what Compaq did with the PC BIOS. To the great benefit of a great many

So the Germans are doing it too. So much for privacy laws.

Re: Who the hell cares what any Iranian News Agency has to say?

$1M ~8-10 people working for one year. The ARPANET packet switching IMP program was developed by three people in about a year. Since it was under a US Government contrac, I expect the billed amount was about an order of magnitude more than the implied $300 - 400Kt, though.

The way I red it, he's assigning the work to himself, in his other role as a consultant, for an additional 15% fee, something that would be a clear conflict of interest if not for the fact that attorneys, as officers of the court are defined to be incapable of having a conflict of interest, or so I understood in a slightly different context a number of years ago.

Hard to feel sorry for Apple, though.

I've been running Debian on an Asus netbook for a few years now and it seems generally as adequate as the XP it came with. The install then was a bit hands on due to wifi driver needs, but I think that's been remedied. Not sure why this is such an absurd idea. The minecraft installation instructions are simple enough and appear to work (same for Ubuntu and Debian), and the applications ought to be fit for a 12yo in middle school.

Not as cool as an iPad, though a few orders of magnitude more useful

Re: Re:But hey, you don't care when having a good rant?

Made up statistic for today, Thursday, November 28, 2013:

83 % of Register posters can rant successfully in three or fewer lines.

Re: I thought the usual method was

But here you are just making things up. The Register article and the Greenwald article on which it is based described a program to find actual information.

There is enough reason for concern about the potential for national security agencies to misbehave without adding unsubstantiated fantasies to the list of "offenses".

Re: +1

Both the Motorola and National Semiconductor devices were far better than the rubbishy x86, hobbled as it was by register scarcity and backward compatibility to calculator chips. What a loss that they were too late for IBM to pick one of them for the PC.

Re: can Windows fork() processes yet?

Yep, a thread or two inside the same process so they can gleefully trample each other to death, neatly sidestepping the advantages delivered by multiple address spaces.

Multiple threads have a place; IBM had them in their mainframe OS at least as far back as MVS (1974 or earlier) and used them extensively in products like CICS and DB2. Separate address spaces provide protection from other processes and, for many applicatons, a far simpler, if less flexible, programming environment. Both techniques are useful, each in its place.

Re: Speaking as a recent apple convert....

@ukgnome: I do not own Apple equipment, so can't comment on the user experience. If it is as superior as you say, Apple will be taking market share from Samsung and the other Android based devices, and have no need to seek monopoly rents based on a broken patent environment.

On the other hand, the dominance of the Androids is powerful evidence that the overwhelming majority of purchasers value the lower-priced "poop" more than the golden "user experience" - at the time they sign a contract. Two years on we will know from the sales figures whether they changed their minds. For whatever it's worth, my (Verizon) Android serves me satisfactorily, and having recently moved to a new city I find the map and navigation applications especially useful.

Re: "scrolling and bouncing" is patentable?

"... on a touch screen"

or

" ... on a portable electronic device"

Such is the BS that is patentable.

Re: Sigh

Enough paranoid fantasy.

First, there is not the slightest reason to think the Federal government, let alone the NSA, had any reason in the past to be interested in the identity of anyone associated with Groklaw, quite a number of whom were openly identified anyhow. SCO (RIP), Oracle, and Apple are not the government, nor is there any evidence that any of them is in position to make claims on government police or military powers. And the proposition that potential Groklaw coverage of national security law would be harmful to the government's case is preposterous in view of Groklaw's fairness throughout its history.

Second, Groklaw is hosted on ibiblio, at the University of North Carolina, in the US. IF the NSA cared in the least about tracking those associated with Groklaw, they probably would have done it in a day or two, and by now it would be far too late for remedial action..

Re: I dont get it...

The last time I looked at Oracle DBMS licensing, it was by the CPU, with a fudge variable that depended on the CPU archictecture. They didn't care how many instances you ran from the installed software, and where I was we commonly ran as many as the memory and CPU capacity of the machine would support.

(There also were named user licenses, but those only made sense for special cases).

Re: I expect to get a zillion downvotes but...

Maybe the framers of the Constitution distrusted the popular vote less than they distrusted each other, but they didn't trust the popular vote very much. As the Constitution was written, neither the President nor the Senator were elected by popular vote, only the Representatives.

The Senate election procedure was changed in a snit over purchased state legislators or something similar, and the "progressives", so called, full of knowledge about how well the Senate works, are agitating for elimination of the Electoral College so that those of us North of Texas, East of California, Oregon, and Washington (state), and Southeast of New England may be relieved of participation in the matter of choosing the President.

Re: This Annoyed the Hell out of Me

The law will not be changed to eliminate issue of sealed warrants and subpoenas that forbid disclosure. We are not talking here about a National Security Letter. (Actually, I'm not sure the highly indignant Senators or Representatives are, either).

TLS combined with DNSSEC would seem useful, but a government agency armed with a copy of the server certificate and warrant may be able to monkey with DNSSEC.

PGP is a bit messy, and not nice with web mail, but really not that awful. And the more you control directly, and the fewer entities you have to trust, the less open your message is to compromise.

Re: Let's look at this...

Which works if you surround the antenna(s) with energy collectors and capture the entire signal, making it fairly useless for its intended purpose.

Re: Retrospective Reuters arse-covering ..

"[A] competent tech admin don't (sic) need passwords."

He needs passwords if he plans to access data which he is not permitted and knows that there is auditing in place that he cannot disable without being noticed. For example. What he needs is login details of people who plausibly could be accessing the data.

He could need login credentials to access systems to which he was not authorized. In that case, he might need credentials for administrative accounts. I seem to recall that shortly after Snowden's resignation, NSA announced a radical reduction in the number of administrators. These may be related.

It may *just* be possible that the employees whose trust Mr. Snowden abused had the honesty to come forward and own up to their error. In the end, though, they probably would have been questioned and with reasonable probability found out.