Posts by Steven Roper

Oh yeah

Translation: "We want all of Rudd's mates gone so we can give the cushy sinecure positions to our mates."

Sometimes these politicians' motives are so transparent you could use them to measure Doppler shifts in distant galaxies.

I don't have a problem

with the concept of the cloud per se. It has its uses and provides a lot of convenience; you can access your data from anywhere there's a computer and internet connection, you can share that data with colleagues in distant locations without the limitations imposed by email; you can offload much of your maintenance problems to a third party. The cloud certainly has its advantages.

What I object to, in the strongest terms, is this constant push, push push to force everybody to use cloud technologies exclusively. Increasingly, new versions of software are coming out as SaaS - pay every month, instead of pay once and keep forever. And if your cash flow is down one month, and you can't afford all the stacked monthly payments, you lose everything. Much of the software we use is now in two flavours - packaged and SaaS - but it's evident that "packaged" is being retained only as a transitional measure and the intent is to "wean" us all into the cloud as soon as possible.

Whenever something like this is pushed with such fervour and zeal, it inevitably means one thing: the big boys make more money which means you get less while paying more. Microsoft have found to their cost that selling a successful product can be a disaster once market saturation is reached, as the numbers of companies unwilling to migrate from the tried-and-true Windows XP shows. "Buy once and keep forever" is not as profitable as the "leech money off the poor bastards forever and a day" model. And this is one real reason why cloud is being pushed so hard.

The other reason is about power and control. Cloud storage means your data can be taken away if you don't toe the official line; it means your data can be monitored and analysed at will without your knowledge; it means your computer and your data are no longer your own, they now belong to the companies that own the OS and your data storage.

So in the end, my problem is not that cloud technology exists; it's that we are being forced into it to the exclusion of all other options. And until this hegemony is confronted and we are let to make our own choices about how and where we use what technologies, I and others like myself will continue to oppose this encroachment of our informational freedom to our last ounce of strength.

Interesting that Safari and Opera have such high error rates while Chrome is so low, considering that all three use the Webkit engine as their foundation (ISTR Opera switched to Webkit a while back didn't they?)

Like others here, I have no problem with the modern incarnations of IE. Since Microsoft have been dragged screaming to the W3C table the job of web development has become a lot less hair-greying than in the days of IE6, when as I recall I became quite the Firefox evangelist on these very forums (and elsewhere) to try and drive standardisation. I'm very thankful that that battle, at least, is finally over!

History has lessons for us here

This kind of greed and exploitation by the aristocracy is what eventually leads to revolutions and sends parasites like this bitch to the gallows and the guillotine.

Some toy throwing going on here.

I'm no Google fan any more than I am a Microsoft one, but it seems to me that Microsoft are throwing their toys out of the pram on this one.

As a web developer for many years, I still remember the horror days of IE6 and ActiveX, where I had to create two versions of the same website for every project - one for IE6, and one to the W3C specs. This blew out costs and dev times on every project and I came to loathe Microsoft for this.

But these days Microsoft aren't the big boys on the block any more, and so it seems to me they're now spitting their chips because they're not the ones shoving their bloated inconsistent standards down everyone's throats. Instead they're being forced to abide by the W3C specs as they should have been from day dot. And they're bitching about it because they're no longer the ones calling the shots.

So tough shit MS, your day is past and you have to suck it up and comply with the W3C standards like everyone else.

Mind you, I don't like Google's "We don't have to use HTML 5 but you do" approach either. Anyone who operates under "do as I say not as I do" is someone I never want to deal with, as I despise nothing more than a hypocrite.

Encryption alone is not enough

No matter how effectively a message is encrypted, it can be intercepted and saved indefinitely in its encrypted form and then decoded at leisure. And with the computing power available to the three-letter agencies "at leisure" isn't very long at all in the scheme of things.

Better security would be achieved by breaking the encrypted file into pieces and routing each piece separately through a different random path each time, interspersed with rubbish pieces to further obfuscate the real ones. This way, no one system can capture the entire message and piece it back together. The internet is already set up to operate on this basic principle; all that's needed is software to ensure that no two packets go by the same route.

The weak point in this system would of course be the sender's and receiver's ISPs; of necessity, both ISPs would have every piece pass through them. A possible workaround would be an open network of interconnected wireless routers, linked between neighbouring homes and offices. This way, part of my message could go through my ISP, part through my neighbour's ISP, part through the guy down the road's ISP. The recipient could receive the message the same way. This way, even if all of us were on the same ISP (as in some areas where one big company has a monopoly), the ISP sees packets from multiple customers and has no way to tie any group of packets back together into a single file.

At present, this is conjecture, as in my area people aren't yet amenable to interconnecting their wireless routers, but I've heard of districts where this is being done already, and as governments and companies continue to encroach on our freedoms, I'm sure people will in time come to see the necessity of doing this.

I have a complex up/down voting system for this site!

On consideration, I find I have quite a complex algorithm for upvoting and downvoting on El Reg, more so than other sites, due to El Reg's voting system requiring a wait for two page reloads to vote. As a result, I only go to the trouble if I feel the post is worth voting on.

I'll upvote a post if:

1) The post makes me laugh or spit coffee/lunch over my keyboard or monitor.

2) The post expresses a political opinion I strongly agree with (regardless of its factual content or literary coherency - the political alignment with my own is sufficient cause for an upvote.)

3) The post has good literary merit or posits its owner's case with aplomb.

4) amanfromMars posted it and I cannot decipher or understand what he posted, or if I simply give up trying part way through.

I'll downvote a post if:

1) The post has even the slightest whiff of political correctness about it.*

2) The spelling, grammar and/or syntax is so bad as to make the post indecipherable (amanfromMars is treated oppositely here: he gets a downvote if his post is actually decipherable!)

3) The argument of the post is so ill-researched, fallacious or delusional as to expose the poster as a retarded fuckwit.

Fanboi/fandroid arguments get nothing. I hate Apple myself, because of their control-freakery and egregious litigiousness, but I won't upvote a post simply because it's an Apple hater and I won't downvote one simply because it supports them. My fanboy loyalty to IT companies died with the Commodore Amiga.

*Political correctness: I won't downvote a post simply because it expresses a political opinion I disagree with. For example, you could call for abolition of minimum wage or billion-year copyright extensions and I wouldn't downvote you for that even though I disagree with it. But any hint of the poster supporting feminism (note: by this I mean focus on women's rights alone), affirmative action, advocacy of censorship of dissenting views, or anti-white/anti-male dogma WILL get a downvote, guaranteed, regardless of the validity of the argument or how well the post might be written.

If I feel the politically-correct post is aggravating enough and it pisses me off sufficiently, I'll actually go to the trouble of going to the poster's public post history page and sequentially downvoting their other posts until my temper calms down (David W, Vladimir Plouzhnikov, Oolons and NomNomNom have all been victims of this at various times!) I know that's juvenile, and one should expect more from a 46 year old adult, but I find it therapeutic and it makes me feel better... So to the guys listed above: If you suddenly find your last 50-odd posts all have at least one downvote regardless of topic, you can feel gratified that you've pissed me off enough to waste half an hour attacking your post history!

Duck test = fish test!

"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck."

This line of reasoning could also be used to define a whale as a fish, since a whale looks and swims in similar fashion - as famously (and erroneously) argued by Herman Melville via his protagonist Ishmael in Moby Dick:

"Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost anyone must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal position." - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter XXXII Cetology.

Obviously this reasoning is flawed, as any primary school kid knows that a whale is a mammal, not a fish. So in similar vein, just because something looks, swims and quacks like a duck, doesn't necessarily mean that it is. It may well be that it usually is, and one could be justified for saying so, but using this argument as the basis for a legal decision doesn't bode well for rule of logic and reason. There needs to be a more solid factual basis for arguing that Bitcoin is indeed the same thing as money.

At present, Bitcoin strikes me as having more in common with a commodity than a currency. Consider trade commodities, for example sugar or copper. Like sugar and copper, Bitcoins have a variable market price which rises and falls according to supply and demand. Like sugar and copper, Bitcoins are manufactured by a value-adding process of labour and production. Like sugar and copper, Bitcoins are bought and sold on commodity exchanges, not banks.

So under this court's ruling, sugar and copper are the same thing as money, just as Bitcoins are. They can be used to store and retrieve value, bought and sold for profit, just as Bitcoins are. But if we start treating commodities as though they were money, we're opening a Pandora's box of trade nightmares that are going to have repercussions around the world. I'll leave it to the more imaginative commodities traders to consider the ramifications of that decision!

It's a great idea, and it could work

if the content providers embraced the globalism of the internet. It'll likely work in the US, but if this were implemented in Australia:

My ISP: "Hi! We've noticed you just downloaded Game of Thrones. Did you know you can view it legally on Hulu.com? Click here to see for yourself now!"

Hulu.com: "We're sorry, but the content you have requested is not available in your country."

Me: "Fine, I'll just activate my VPN and grab it off TV Torrents, even though I'd rather buy it if I could. (And no, I'm not giving Murdoch $120 a month to watch one fucking 3-month show on Foxtel!)"

When these idiots wake up and realise that geo-restriction is the idiocy of an antiquated mindset, they'll solve the piracy problem overnight.

Obligatory Oatmeal Game of Thrones cartoon

So what difference does https make?

Facebook are still going to hand over your details to governments and LEAs alike. If some feminazi on Facebook decides to step up the War on Men another notch, and I organise some opposition or argue back at her, I'd still be arrested for political incorrectness hate speech regardless. So Facebook doing this proves what exactly?

Hmmm

Sounds to me like there's another civil liberty that needs to be removed or another tax imposed, one whose removal/imposition can't be justified by protecting children or preventing terrorism, so the old 'anthropogenic climate change' excuse is as good as any I suppose.

"Superfast" brings back a memory

As I recall from my dim and heady childhood way back in the 70s, "Superfast" was a line of Matchbox cars (the real solid metal ones - remember those?) of which I had several examples in my toybox. I also had the associated plastic track with the loop-the-loops and the "Superbooster" car-flinger that propelled the Matchbox cars around it. I'm still annoyed to this day that my mother ended up giving it all to the church when I grew up and stopped playing with it. The collection would probably be worth thousands today.

Make VPNs legal?

Insofar as this is not quite yet the People's Democratic Republic of Australia (although admittedly it's well along the way), there is no law as yet forbidding the use of a VPN in this country. Although the way things are going there may soon be, albeit more likely as I've predicted elsewhere, some kind of business-use-only licencing system will probably appear requiring you to register and prove a requirement to use one in the normal course of business. Not just for copyright enforcement, but also in response to the reaction against PRISM and its ilk. After all, if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear, right?