Posts by PyLETS

IPV6 transition can happen now

It's already happened as far as I'm concerned - home network and hosted server and applications I maintain all upgraded to run dual stack. That's even though my best available ISP (Cable offers better speeds than ADSL) is IPV4 only, so I tunnel IPV6 over IPV4 using protocol 41. I had to do something similar to get Internet in the late eighties by tunneling IPV4 over X25. Well, now that FTTC makes better ISPs available in perhaps the next 18 months, my existing one (Virgin Media) is going to have to offer dual stack pretty soon, or I'll be ditching them for one of the ISPs which are offering IPV6 natively. At least Virgin Media don't block protocol 41, like some crummy ISPs do.

I suspect most consumer equipment could be firmware upgraded to run dual stack, and ISPs providing tunnel servers more locally could support consumers they can't firmware upgrade without requiring hardware replacement.

Yes my ISP know my name

It's not difficult to know who lives long term at any particular address given the local political parties have the unedited version of the electoral register. But my ISP doesn't know the names of everyone who uses my WiFi or the wired network on my side of the router. In practice I can imagine many Chinese users sharing login credentials in practice if such become required routinely to get through the web proxies. Next they'll be locking up users for doing that.

I'd also hazard a guess that the restrictions on IPV4 address availability and the inevitable breakage which comes from multiple NAT layers work pretty much but not entirely on the side of the Chinese great firewall management. IPV6 seems potentially like a breath of fresh air in comparison, as it appears to allow for all sorts of unofficial and potentially interesting ways of privatising address management and routing.

security by obscurity

invented public-private key encryption but due to the usual utterly short sighted british civil service mentality , decided not to reveal it"

Cryptography was considered by this culture something to be kept secret as it was thought your enemy would then find it harder to break. They were aware enough in the seventies of Kerckhoff's Law in relation to the requirement to be able to rekey a system in case an enemy learned a security system design, so by rekeying the hardware implementing this cipher could remain secure, but this came from a culture where non-disclosure of system design was genuinely believed to keep a system secure for longer than would otherwise be possible. The Bletchley Park WW2 Enigma crack was still kept secret until the late seventies and there was a cold war on, because the captured Enigma hardware had been sold on, to new customers who were assured it was still secure and upon whom the UK intended to spy.

Yes it's a very real shame in many ways that such important discoveries were sat on and languished unused - or used little as a consequence. But not publishing Clifford Cocks' public key system until 1997 didn't have such a negative effect on the development of British computing as keeping the Bletchley Park work under wraps did until the seventies. Even so, the more widely usable parts of the Bletchley Park work were reinvented in UK academic and commercial circles - at the cost of a significant few years of development, enabling IBM to capture most of the early computing market.

Raymond's Law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" adopted by the NSA when the SELinux Mandatory Access Control patch was contributed to the Linux community, and the understanding that cryptographic systems were best selected following public peer review e.g. as with the AES design competition, would take another 20 years or so to be widely adopted as the more sound engineering practice.

Useful to scrutinise charities

I think the RSPCA is also overdonated in relation to the service they provide and in relation to charities which help people not animals. Clearly both the RSPCA and Wikipedia do useful work, but givers do need to think about sustaining smaller and also worthwhile charities which need smaller funding over longer terms to be effective. One thing Wikipedia do which I support and which I suspect gets up Andrew's nose is their take on freedom of information in relation to copyright business models which intend restricting such.

trivial and obscurely written patents

It's in the interests of patent lawyers to obscure and dress up a trivial and obvious development when helping write an application with complex and obscure language and it's in the interests of patent officers to accept a sufficient percentage of such applications or the application fees dry up. Those sitting in judgement of patent cases are likely to have been patent lawyers themselves earlier in their careers.

Given a license to print money at the public expense, who wouldn't run this press at full speed ? If you have made the mistake in career choice to be a genuine innovator rather than a patent lawyer, you've now got the prospect of fraudulent EU wide patents which can be litigated against you despite being written in a language you won't understand unless you are technically and legally highly fluent in French, German and English.

Is there talent there that can be used by anyone ?

In the case of Robert Tappan Morris who was dealt with for a much greater hack (the Morris Worm) much more leniently and appropriately, he went on to become a computing science professor. In McKinnon's case, not being able to do anything useful for the last 10 years - during what should normally an extremely formative period of life - will have restricted his possible avenues of employment - and ability to contribute his talents to the good of society.

A hundred hours community service served locally to McKinnon's residence when the crime he admitted was commmitted would have been appropriate. Destroying someone's career prospects through his persecution by threatened extradition for a decade is a great loss to all of us.

Kafka's Trial and peonage

I've read it, and it's a depressing book, describing circumstances seen through the paranoid imagination of someone suffering a severe mental illness made worse by cruel parenting. What they are putting her through is similarly inhumane, but unlike Kafka's imagined trial, this one is really happening outside of her head.

Peonage is all too depressingly a real form of debt slavery which keeps being reapplied to vulnerable people in order to exploit them for profit. "I own my soul to the company store" is part of a song describing this bookkeeping trick being used to keep vulnerable workers in a lifetime of servitude to their exploiter. It's a systems used by loan sharks very openly today, and by those pimping off illegal immigrants and child prostitutes also.

Effectively the US courts are saying to her that the RIAA own her, and everything she ever earns in her lifetime belongs to them. It's a form of slavery brought back in arbitrary manner reinforced by the US feral courts, and entirely at odds with the intentions behind the US Constitutional Bill of Rights. I hope she wins a legal battle against the form of slavery described as peonage more generally.

Re: Think interests not bribery.

"As much as copyright reform may excite the geek, it is not a big winner politically."

That depends how much it excites the 2% who might vote on this basis, and how many of them live in marginal constituencies. 2% voting on a single issue in marginal constituencies can concentrate the minds of mainstream candidates on this issue wonderfully, if these 2% are well organised.

Re: Yet another reason...

"To rent a server in a hosting centre and tunnel your traffic to it."

Worth doing if server and its address is shared between a number of users who can each plausibly deny any connection to particular packets, or is located in a country with more sensible privacy laws than where clients are located. If used for purposes of a single user in a place with similar laws and enforcement, all it does is shift monitoring of traffic from network belonging to ISP A to network belonging to ISP B.

Plausible deniability of particular packets if the server has multiple users probably also doesn't extend to the situation where traffic analysis makes correlation of unencrypted external packets with encrypted VPN packets, presumably associate by shortness of time interval and traffic size, so pleny of chaff on VPNs needed to obsure this association. Deniability also doesn't work too well if the hosting provider can provide the investigating authorities with binary copies of the (typically virtual) server image at any time to relevant authorities who can work out from this the relationship between internal users and externally monitorable packets. Some of the advanced virtual machine tools advertised now which offer live migration of VMs between physical hosts for load balancing etc, suggesting this kind of forensics to be entirely feasible.

So I think this privacy technique is only valuable to the extent you trust the laws and enforcement of the server hosting nation, or the extra cost of the attacks described to cause attackers to go after lower hanging fruit.

Re: Shooting your own foot

If the jack boot is used too much, the whole notion of copyright is likely to be lost on the masses and then what?

What happens next is that Pirate Parties tell their supportes which candidates from other parties to vote for in a few marginal constituencies where Pirates are not standing directly. Useful for Pirates to stand in a few constituencies to help get the message across. Other parties learn rapidly how unpopular extreme copyright is, and learn that sucking up to big media interests wins them fewer votes than it loses them. Eventually we get copyright law reform to take non-commercial use outside of the system and to reduce copyright durations. Artists who have something genuine to contribute needn't worry - there's plenty of money to be made from live performances and commercial use of recordings. As to how popular the pirate message on this is, just count the numbers of up and downvotes here on this forum.

Re: State intervention may well result in de-civilizatory effects

End subsidies to carbon burning and I might agree with you - then there would be a genuine free market and those wanting to stay incandescent can pay the bills. We all pay these subsidies e.g. through insurance costs against more extreme weather, but that's only a small part of it. Problem with putting up electricity bills by ending these subsidies is too many grannies freezing in the dark unable to afford their leccy bills. So that isn't going to happen, and the state is forced by all our politics to intervene to encourage reduced wastage, give a fair break to nuclear and renewables and keep bills affordable. You can't change that so you may as well get used to it.

Re: Extra-Territorial Reach

There are an infinite number of bad things the ITU could hypothetically do, and are very unlikely to do based on their history, constitution and good reputation. If you don't want to be ignored by crying 'wolf' or claiming that the sky is falling down once too often about potential landgrabs the ITU has never seriously considered, then don't accuse the ITU of being likely to carry out behaviour entirely at odds with the history of what it has done in the past and does now.

One job the ITU has done well is manage allocation of international dialling codes to member states, and much more consensually and much less contentiously than what ICANN is currently up to concerning top level domain names.

no such thing as "free" storage

If it works on operating system A but not B then this file storage system isn't using standard filesystem protocols. Which means when it does work on Linux you have to install some proprietary device driver to use the so called 'free' storage. Best done using a virtual machine used for nothing else, if you must and if you care about knowing what the software on your main machine is doing.

You may also want to consider only storing remotely if encrypted sharing the key with a friend you wish to share the content with or using asymmetric crypto - and if you look at the small print in the T&Cs and to the extent you can, you'll find that you're generally signing away your first born - e.g. the ability of some corporate to mine your personal data so they can more effectively target advertising at you.

Re: Fake islands as copy protection

Another reason why the origins are likely to have been forgotten. This kind of deliberate error, e.g. as was used in published log tables for the same reason, had to be kept a closely guarded secret known to very few involved in the publication, because otherwise someone copying without mapping would more likely be able to discover the deliberate error making it worthless.

Something constructed as a deliberate trade secret is more likely to become forgotten forever when it dies with those who remembered it, and the original publication goes out of copyright.

Tobin was right

"Don't use the facilities e.g. roads."

A more useful facility provided by government for the purpose of taxing corporates is willingness to adjudicate contracts through the civil courts. Corporates and everyone else could be made to pay taxes based on money not legally transferring in respect of contracts becoming enforceable until a transaction tax is paid. A flat rate on each transaction could be taken by the financial service provider at point of payment, unless the recipient is a charity. This doesn't sit too well with continuation of use of cash, but the latter is getting as obsolete as the idea corporations shouldn't have to pay taxes because they can offshore if you ask them to. Corporations don't like handling cash anyway, so if the Tobin tax rate on transfer of payment is low enough (say 1% or less) this won't cause a large shift to using cash due to the security costs being greater than this for heavy cash users.

This would begin to rectify the injustice of the Forex dealer paying a tiny fraction of 1% on what he sells in taxes while the woman who cleans his floor paying 40-50% in taxes and loss of benefits for every pound she earns.

No fluke - it's down to who has access to the source code

Mobile phone users generally are likely buy the phone and not the OS. It's the developers who choose the OS. Windows users will have to stick with X86 or migrate painfully because they usually don't have the source code for their applications, and so can't recompile these to run on a more advantageous hardware architecture. Apple corp and Linux users are able to change hardware platforms, due to having access to the source code needed. The Windows ecosystem requires so many third-party binary drivers and other binary blobs, e.g. Adobe's media viewers, that they can only migrate to a different instruction set by paying a massive emulation cost or losing most applications, which is what Microsoft are belatedly trying with their ARM surface.

Carbon needed also

Storing hydrogen is much easier once turned into hydrocarbons, e.g. using Fischer Tropsch process. .

Using the hydrogen as hydrocarbon fuel, you'll need similar quantities of hydrogen and oxygen as you derive from water electrolysis.

Oxygen needed for breathing and growing hydroponics should all be kept within a closed system to avoid energy and material losses, and to recover C02 needed for the FT process. As to how much energy you need over how long a period, from that it's possible work out the size of a nuclear reactor or the number of square metres of solar panel. The development of flexible solar panels may eventually result in tens of thousands of square metres of solar collector being rolled up like carpets and not needing to weigh very much, so don't write this tech off as a competitor to nuclear based on how rapidly solar thin film technology is likely to develop compared to nuclear over the next 30 years.

There's no way we could send all of what's needed for this to Mars this decade, but I wouldn't entirely write off what may become possible given appropriate developments in materials technologies and minituarised manufacturing capabilities within 20 - 30 years.

wrong way around

If the sensible place to keep your data is where you process it and where your users can best access it, then keeping the main copy on a hosted server in a datacentre with professional operators, high speed multiple routed links close to the Internet backbone, secured power supplies and rigorous physical access controls makes more sense than locating it where I'm located. So in my situation the data is processed on the so-called "cloud" and backup occurs using the faster side of my ISP link, i.e. my download bandwidth. Also makes sense to automate it, encrypt it, and only download the differences. Rsync, SSH and Cron are my friends here.

I guess the exception described in the article is the seemingly legacy business model where most of the access and nearly all of the users are local to the site where you work. I guess that way around still applies in some internal data heavy environments, as opposed to where the bulk of your input and output relates to your external as opposed to internal relationships.

trust and betrayal are recursive

Technology is so complex that nobody starts a new software or hardware design entirely from scratch. Which means all the technology we develop has an element of trust in the layers from the past being built upon. A classic paper describing this trust issue from a software perspective is Ken Thompsons's Reflections on Trusting Trust . Hardware is just as complex, hidden and layered. Even if the chip design were open source, this wouldn't prevent the possibility of evil microcode features.

@koolholio: Re: Looking forward to see-ing this

As to reverse engineering, I supect you're not looking at the risk the developers are trying to defend against. The issue of anonymity isn't only to do with what plod breaking down your door and taking away your equipment can find. It's also to do with whether plod can identify the right door to break down, and my reading of this article suggests the latter risk is being defended by this development, and not the former. No doubt work could be done to combine techniques to defend against both risks, e.g. using encrypted hard disk partitions etc.

Re: Higher temperatures =

No it makes sense. Faster moving glaciers calving more icebergs will cool down the surrounding sea more, so more of it will freeze on the surface. That's a local effect though. Doesn't prevent the whole earth getting warmer on average. Local anomalies don't account for what's happining globally when taken in isolation, but that's the model journalists, as opposed to scientists tend to assume. We never hear about the greening of the Sahel, for example. We only hear about the Sahel when its drying out. So we can't rely on journalism which is interested only in local anomalies for useful information about what's happing globally.

@AussieCanuck46: Re Hops

Was that Northern Brewer, Fuggles or something more southern like Goldings or Hallertauer ? The regional variation in UK ale depends upon the suitability of these hops to the local climate. Anyway, if it gets really hot, you could always use a very close relative of the hop plant in your beer instead, the cultivation of which needs more sunshine ahem... A lot more musty, not quite as bitter, and gives a somewhat more dozy high. As it happens, you can use various bitter herbs to flavour ale and improve its keeping qualities, but few are as good for the purpose as hops.

@Kristian Walsh

Nobody is stopping you expressing yourself freely.

Try explaining that to

George Hotz in relation to his publications concerning Sony network and games console technology ?

Then there the reason Adobe got Dmitry Sklyarov locked up before he was bailed and forced to stay for months thousands of miles away from his family until the corrupt case against him was thrown out ?

Then there's the case attempting to extradite Richard O Dwyer not for hosting any infringing content but for publishing links.

And don't get me started on Kim Dotcom who was arrested and had his hosted servers seized due to alleged infringement by his customers.

The war taking these prisoners is against the free exchange of information certain influential business interests don't want you to have, who are able to buy laws restricting what you or I are allowed to publish and do, not because this infringes what they claim to own directly, but because it makes it more difficult for them to control access.

Getting off spreadsheets

Grid-based editor sounds great until you mention escape sequences. Why bother "getting off spreadsheets" when they that already?

Because spreadsheets tend to assume a data model based on the concept of the data represented being inherently 2 dimensional and belonging to the individual sitting at the PC on which the spreadsheet program runs, rather than being inherently relational (or some other non 2D model) and belonging to the organisation the individual works for. I've encountered a few use cases where the spreadsheet model is entirely appropriate, but many more where it isn't and creates problems throughout the organisation which owns this data as a consequence.

I'd suggest doing a bit of analysis on the purpose of the data, where it comes from and where it goes to in the next few spreadsheets you see, and figure out whether using a spreadsheet for this job is recasting the problem as a nail because this hammer is the only tool understood by whoever decided to do things this way when it started being done on a computer.

@Kristian Walsh

"If you don't accept the concept of copyright, there's no reason to obey the terms of any open-source licence, after all."

There are many variations on the theme of accepting or not accepting the concept of copyright, because there are various understandings of what this concept means or should mean. So it's not as black and white as you suggest. It also seems pointless to start out from the viewpoint that only one of these understandings is "right" because if copyright exists in law, this law and future versions of it are governed by politics. And it's not as if might (i.e. the ability to influence legislators into passing your preferred expression of copyright law) is always right.

To the extent any law is political and controversial, it becomes reasonable to accept the parts of it you don't want to be used against you, or the risk of the parts of it you don't intend keeping catching up with you.

Copyleft is also enforced, to the extent that developers of copyleft software intend extension of rights granted to software distributors to be transitive to their customers. I personally quite like the idea of being able to modify the software in my mobile phone, router or telly, and the copyleft licenses used by these systems and their active enforcement by some of the developers enables me to do this.