* Posts by Ken Hagan

8135 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Ubuntu deploys cloud-ready Ocelot beta

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: UI principles

"made simpler by Gnome 2's general adherence to the same UI principles as Windows XP"

Bloody hell! I failed to convert even myself to Gnome 2 because it was so annoyingly and pointlessly different from Windows XP. (The rest of the family just laughed indulgently and waited for me to find a sane alternative.) If that's what you are calling "general adherence" then Gnome 3 might as well be in cuneiform.

What a pity that KDE is so shit, too.

Space junk at 'tipping point', now getting worse on its own

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Space elevators

The "column" of a space elevator isn't moving (relative to the Earth) fast enough to be in orbit. That's one of the reasons why they are hard to build. Therefore, if anyone ever does manage to erect one, they'll find that for most of its height it is sweeping up objects that *are* in orbit.

Just one more technical hurdle to throw at the space elevator designers then: must be able to withstand collisions with solid objects at several km/s.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Really

I agree. The GEO problem sounds like FUD.

GEO satellites are only useful to the extent that they sit in equatorial orbits, so they presumably do form an orderly queue around the Earth with small relative velocities. Also, with fewer spacemen dropping hammers and fewer chinese missiles there is a lot less junk being produced to fill that space. Lastly, at a radius of 23500 miles, there's several orders of magnitude more room to play with than in NEO.

NEO satellites move within a smaller volume and generally don't sit in equatorial orbits so they may have relative /transverse/ velocities of many thousands of miles per hour. That will make a real mess of anything (or anyone) it hits. This isn't FUD. This is "just a matter of time".

Probably another reason to "go slow" on that manned space program. Robots don't have wives and children watching on TV back home.

New UK 'leccy meters remotely run via Voda 2G

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@Steven Roper

It's still our decision whether we let the power company play with the controls and if they want to play with my freezer they'll have to bribe either me or my MP.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Err

The original remark was about someone coming home to discover that the power company had turned off their freezer. No law has been passed mandating that all freezers should be remotely controllable, nor that the power company has a right to enter your home to upgrade your freezer.

The meter has always been the property of the power company. It is therefore uncontroversial that they have a right to maintain or upgrade it. Everything downstream of the meter belongs to you and it remains your decision whether you buy remotely controllable devices and whether you enable that feature when you get it home.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Big brother

They can already do all of these things, just not remotely. The reason they don't is that if they get it wrong then the legal and PR penalities are considerable. Being able to do it remotely doesn't change that and any power company that thinks otherwise will be out of business faster than they can flip the switches.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Switch off my freezer?

If you come home to a big puddle on the floor, it is because you allowed it. The power company can't force you to give them control over it. They'll have to reward you financially and you might not reckon it is worth the risk.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: At what cost?

"We are all being told to unplug chargers when not in use, so at what cost are these devices to run."

Nothing. Chargers that aren't in use draw so little power that you need specialist gear to actually measure it. (But yes, we are always being told that.)

Google might shun Dutch gov certificates from DigiNotar

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Technical question

Is it possible (within current standards) for two or more root authorities to countersign a certificate, in effect saying "we both/all believe that the holder of this certificate is who it says on the tin". (It certainly is for some purposes, because Windows' kernel-mode code signing does exactly that.)

If so, and if this were the common practice, the failure of a single root would not inspire mass distrust of the valid certificates and we wouldn't have situations like this.

'New laws not needed' to block / censor Twitter et al

Ken Hagan Gold badge

My conclusion

"So when the Home Office says (as it has done) that no new powers are needed, then it follows that either no new powers are needed (ie, the government already has the power to block social networking communications) or the politicians have quietly gone off the idea (and have decided not to say so)."

Your article would suggest that the existing powers *aren't* adequate, so I have to conclude that the politicians have gone off the idea. That wouldn't be surprising. The riots are over. Parliament is back on holiday. The papers are back to reporting the "Arab Spring". The only possible incentive to bringing forward new powers would back that it would piss off the Lib Dems in the coalition and please the right wingers. Oh, hang on ... there's party conferences coming up.

IBM builds biggest-ever disk for secret customer

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Mushroom

Million years

If you are going to make claims like that, you need to factor in "rare" external risks such as Yellowstone blowing the west coast away, the Canaries washing the east coast away, or taking a direct hit from a 1km meteorite. (See icon for illustration.)

Call me cynical, but I'm guessing that these discs probably *can't* take a multi-gigaton direct hit.

UK-US corporate world slams 'dot-brand' domain plans

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"ICANN's supporters" are stupid

"It's inconceivable that the ANA and the other objectors didn't see it coming, and yet both organisations participated very little in its creation, ICANN's supporters say."

Well, duh! They just don't want it so how, exactly, are they supposed to participate? Are they supposed to spend 3 (or 13) years repeatedly saying "I don't want this."? Would that have counted as sufficient participation, or would it have been written off as "unhelpfully negative"?

Antitrust nemesis accuses Google of 'WMD program'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Fourth option

Publish well-written content on your chosen subject. Google will index it and if the end-user, fed up with the usual dross, bothers to specify a detailed search query then you'll be at the top of the list.

You are competing with millions of other sites. You should not expect there to be an easy way to position yourself in the top 0.000001% (or whatever the first page of search results corresponds to). If you can't understand this then you are simply too innumerate to use a computer.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: correct

On the subject of impersonating the googlebot, can anyone explain why the spider actually owns up to its true identity? It would seem to me that pretending to be a normal user would deliver search results that are more useful for the normal user. (Obviously you'd have to respect things like robots.txt, so you'd make a first pass posing as the spider and then use those results to direct a second anonymous pass sometime later.)

Haiti study: Mass mobile phone tracking can be laudable

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Acceptability depends on context

I can imagine circumstances where I'd be happy for someone to cut off my arm, but generally speaking I'd prefer if they didn't.

This Haiti example sounds like a situation where a temporary invasion of privacy would have been tolerated. I don't think it sets any precedent for everyday life.

VMware sneak-peeks future 'disruptive' cloudy tech

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Keeping files forever

Even if I don't believe a file is special, figuring out a reasonable expiration date is generally going to be a lot harder than erring on the side of caution. Also, compare and contrast...

Lost a file? Poor you. Do we have a backup? Oh good.

Went out of your way to ensure that the file was deliberately lost? You idiot. No, it's not worth looking in the backups because they "honour" the expiration date you chose. You idiot. By the way, did I say you were an idiot, you idiot?

Pre-paid Chinese users still anonymous despite new law

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: where you live?

If anything, it is worse than that.

As you say, terrorists will presumably use fake IDs to buy their phones, but ... they then probably *don't* use the phones to call "fake terrorists". So the traffic analysis (cell tower accesses, who calls who, SMS records, etc...) that is already legal if you have a warrant is a far more powerful tool for the police than a purchaser-ID database. The latter is not useful for crime-fighting. It is *only* useful for targetting ads.

Online defamation suits on the rise

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Actually it's the flip

I think that depends on what the court reckons is the unit of communication.

If the court reckons the individual post is the unit, then a moderation that simply accepts or rejects individual posts (as here on El Reg) would be safe. El Reg is "simply a conduit" for those that are accepted and obviously those that are rejected don't defame anyone.

But if a court reckons that you and I are having a conversation (with, like, replies and shit) then the removal of any one post (such as my groveling apology for mis-understanding you) DOES alter the overall impression that other readers would have of me and presumably counts as "editing the overall communication" rather than simple rejection.

I presume the El Reg moderator who examines this reply knows what El Reg's understanding of the law to be. Perhaps they'll chip in.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Devil

We don't need any more concrete proposals

"Free speech campaigners said that amendments to the draft Defamation Bill should include "concrete proposals to stop legal threats against internet hosts bringing down entire websites," a spokesman for the Libel Reform Campaign said, according to the BBC."

Perhaps I'm missing something. (My first language is English rather than legalese, so it is perfectly possible.) But presumably it is already the case that no web-site is stupid enough to edit someone else's remarks and then present them as though they were original. That requires much more effort and judgement than the safe alternatives of either publishing as-is or refusing to publish at all.

If we now add a "conduit" defence in the new law then it will be common knowledge in legal circles that all such cases are groundless and therefore anyone bringing one is knowingly wasting the court's time and deserves to bear all costs and be marked down as a vexatious litigant for good measure.

Even if that isn't enough to stop some idiots, they'll only be able to do it once.

(Icon: I Am Not A Lawyer, but this is the closest icon I could find.)

Couple can sue service that monitored their net sex

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Wait

Perhaps you missed the judge's take on the matter:

"It is one thing to cause a stolen computer to report its IP address or its geographical location in an effort to track it down,” Rice wrote. “It is something entirely different to violate federal wiretapping laws by intercepting the electronic communications of the person using the stolen laptop.”

The anti-theft software should confine itself to figuring out where the laptop is. The judge clearly feels that "two feet south of a beaver" isn't useful in this regard.

Silence ≠ 'yes', watchdog tells lustful ad-biz bakers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: English is such an imprecise language

You don't want French. You want brackets and/or operator precedence. There must be at least a dozen ways of parsing that quote.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: There is no right to privacy

The first ten amendments were issued together and I've never seen it suggested that anything should be read into the order. I was thinking of the fourth item on the list, which clearly prohibits fishing expeditions. (Behavioural advertising is a perfect example of a fishing expedition because the information collected is useless at the time it is collected and only becomes useful when it is compared with other data that was previously believed to be unrelated.)

I'll grant that in this example it is only the state that is constrained, but that's an implementation artefect. It is presumed that most misdemeanours can be constrained by ordinary laws, possibly after the first offence that persuades people that it shouldn't be allowed, but mis-demeanours by agents of the law itself have to be pro-actively obstructed. Good minimalist design therefore results in a "constitution" that says very little about ordinary people.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: arguably

A poor argument. You can advertise without cookies. What you can't do is target those ads based on knowledge of the recipient's browsing history. Worse (for you), *no* advertiser could target their ads in this way until (in historical terms) very recently, so you are never going to persuade me that ads need cookies.

Does that spoil your business model? Sorry about that. Perhaps you should get a new business model that doesn't offend society's long established ideas about privacy. (And when I say "long-established", I'm remembering that those idiots who framed the US constitution reckoned it was important enough to retrofit "privacy" as their very first bug-fix.)

RAM prices set to 'free fall'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Gigabyte or gigabit

Two gigs for a pound (sterling, natch) sounds a bit cheaper than what I paid last time. Can I really have a 16GB RAM drive for a tenner?

DARPA drops another HTV-2

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: a falling brick

"The shuttle is probably a falling brick until a certain altitude and velocity."

As it happens, when the shuttle and I were both young, the claim was that the shuttle came down slightly /faster/ than a brick because it was more aerodynamic.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: reasonably good really

My impression was that they didn't manage to "fly" it at all, and that was the problem. It sounds like the "flight-path" in question (the one that was planned to intersect with the ocean) was more of a trajectory, in the ballistic sense. And that's much less impressive.

Google told to delete people from search results

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What's to stop

"some other site that has crawled"

Or, indeed, might crawl at some arbitrary point in future and might republish in summary or in translated form. Clearly Google's core algorithms need to be updated to include some form of AI so that this information remains excluded forever.

Or you could just honour robots.txt and ignore anyone who doesn't bother to use it.

Rootkit gangs fight for control of infected PCs

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Facepalm

No honour among thieves

So let's just get this straight. We have a guy who is smart enough to write a rootkit and who is intimately familiar with the criminal mindset, having one himself, but he didn't see a possible problem with selling his code to other crooks?

Words fail me.

Apple nudges out Exxon Mobil for top spot on Wall Street

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I think it's bubble time

Absolutely bubblemungus. This is a company that doesn't pay dividends and which nearly every pundit agrees is driven by one, terminally ill, man. Their "cash pile" is impressive, but still only about a fifth of this valuation. Perhaps the valuation is coming from those clever folks who thought you could use CDOs to make bad mortgage debt disappear.

Exercise for the reader: what happens when a stock market bubble bursts in the middle of the recession caused by the previous bubble bursting?

BBC testing fix for iPlayer on iPad ... 6 months later

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: The BBC are crap at bug fixing generally

"For a long time..."

"The problem lasted for ~5 months and got to the point I gave up on the iPlayer."

Umm, the tone of your post suggests that you believe this problem was eventually fixed. That must be a different iPlayer from the one I'm using here, then. Perhaps they only fixed the Windows version.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: too technical for Y&Y listeners

To be equally fair, the final lines of the article suggests that the BBC man considers the El Reg audience to be too stupid, too. After all, he said he'd be happy to explain it, so it must just be us.

US Air Force in a seriously stealthless state

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Complexity and expense

The serious answer to your question is that real life isn't so black and white, so for some values of grounded and some values of just works, you will be better off with the F-22s.

Oh and I think the price ratio is a little more than 4:3.

Reusable e-paper rolled out

Ken Hagan Gold badge

reuse "up to" 260 times?

Even once you add in the cost of consumables, the price for (black and white) printing on conventional paper is measured in pennies per sheet. So this stuff had better cost less than a fiver for an A4-sized sheet.

Oh, and what happens after 260 pages that makes it unusable? Is it a case of gradual degradation in quality that becomes unacceptable somewhere between 200 and 300 pages? If so, it will have to be even cheaper still, coz a pad of paper maintains maximum print quality right up to the last sheet.

Lightning strikes cloud: Amazon, MS downed

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Happy

Re: I've said it once...

"It's the people running just a single EC2 instance against all advice that were affected."

That would include Amazon's own shopping site, then.

Apple sued over Mac OS X 'quick boot'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Caching

It certainly does, and for proof you need look no further than the extensive prior art mentioned by earlier commentards.

Do El Reg commentards count as "skilled in the art"? Are these pages admissible as evidence? Certainly if I were the judge, this one case alone would be sufficient to mark the plaintiffs down as malicious litigants. No-one with even half a clue about operating systems could bring this case to court without feeling morally soiled.

Ofcom report: Mobile operators feel the squeeze

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Happy

Meta-answer

Maybe they get more page hits that way?

Remember, if you aren't paying then you are the product.

GE brings holographic storage back from the dead

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: All I want

"10, 20, or more years from now I know I will be able to retrieve it"

How about a RAID array of something cheap-per-megabyte? (I'm not sure if optical discs actually *are* cheap per megabyte compared with bottom-end external hard discs.)

DIY aerial drone monitors Wi-Fi, GSM networks

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Metric shit ton of evil

I guess you'd need to convert them both to milli-googles to know for sure.

Google erects master API for linking web apps

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Unhappy

Re-inventing the wheel

So, having determined that it is "obviously" better for everybody's apps to run on Google's CPU, they are now laboriously trying to re-implement the Windows API on HTML. Today's contribution appears to be some kind of registry where applications can be marked as "handling" particular content types and other apps can let the user pick from the available handlers.

Meanwhile, over the road, Microsoft have just finished re-implementing the entire Windows API on .NET, only to discover that no-one is really interested because running everything on an emulated architecture is *so* last decade compared with running everything on a VM in a random data centre.

Meanwhile, round the corner, the WINE people have nearly finished re-implementing the entire Windows API on Linux, only to discover that actually the documented API isn't the set of goalposts they should have been aiming at and so consequently only half the apps work.

Meanwhile meanwhile, anyone who actually wants to get stuff done is running the original Windows API on the original native hardware and wondering why the industry hasn't done anything innovative in the last decade or more.

The curse of Google?: Android licensees fail to cash in

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Big Brother

Re: Windows is our fault

"I know what ACLs and role based permissions and real limited accounts are, Win 7 does not."

Apparently you don't, since Win7 (and all its NT predecessors) has full support for these things. It takes about two minutes to set up, mind, and good luck getting any games to work in anything other than "pants down, bent over" mode, but that's hardly Windows' fault.

If games vendors did Linux versions, they require that you run as root. (Google Earth 5 had that property on my Kubuntu box until I switched off some sort of atmospheric effect. Performance was abysmally slow and the recommended workaround was to sudo the app.)

(Btw: where's that "Google sucks" icon? This one'll have to do.)

Researchers poke gaping holes in Google Chrome OS

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: While this is interesting

"When someone rootkits ChromeOS..."

Why bother? Since ChromeOS forces everyone to keep everything of value in the cloud, the browser is the only thing on the device *worth* exploiting.

State-sponsored 5-year global cyberattack uncovered

Ken Hagan Gold badge

But...

I trust China more than I trust McAfee.

Ofcom says no to web-blocking

Ken Hagan Gold badge

The power of a quango?

"Ofcom's report effectively kicked web-blocking into the long grass – and showed the power of a quango to make and break laws. "

Er, no it doesn't. It demonstrates that very occasionally ministers are willing to listen to the advice of people who they appointed, and then exercise the power of ministers to make or break laws, which itself only exists where parliament has seen fit to delegate it to them.

But to have Ofcom raise a technically literate objection AND for the ministers to bother to listen is surely unprecedented, so I'm not surprised you were thrown off base.

Adobe outs un-Flash web animation tool

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: program generators

If you *want* to produce pages that attack the end-user's browser, you don't wait for a program generator run by someone else to have a bad day. You create your own pages using hand-crafted code.

Moving away from flash means that end-users are no longer subject to weaknesses in Adobe's rendering of flash documents. They are instead only subject to the weaknesses in their browser's rendering of HTML5 documents. Such weaknesses exist, but we have a choice of browsers and nearly all of them fix problems faster than Adobe.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: On the surface

"I expect that creating such web animations in a text editor and Gimp will be a much more secure alternative"

I don't follow your reasoning here. The creation tools presumably run locally and merely generate data files that you add by other means to your web-site. You can make this process as secure as you like, since the PC that generates the files needn't have a network connection.

Truck nuts swing onto US freedom of speech agenda

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: political speech

"Also, while generally given as a lesser point, the 1st Amendment is primarily designed to protect political speech;"

Umm, I can't see how this could be anything *other* than political speech. Something like furry dice could be decoration or an indication of support for some sports team. But bollocks? Can that really be anything except an attempt to get up the noses of moral conservatives?

MPs slam government's 'obscene' IT spend

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Economics 101

Free markets are only efficient when both buyer and seller are knowledgeable about the market.

The other side are using every trick in the book to maximise their returns, so unless the civil service retains *some* in-house IT specialists and gives them real power during the planning and tendering stages, the taxpayer is going to lose out. Similar arguments could, of course, be made for the need to retain legal and even sales or marketing expertise within the civil service. You need to recognise the dirty tricks and weasel wording.

There's also an implicit assumption that both buyer and seller *want* the best value. Perhaps *senior* civil servants should feel a bit more heat when a few billion goes down the plughole.

George Lucas defeated by Stormtrooper helmet man

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Copyright

Yes, indeedy. I find the general reactions to this case curious. It seems that we're now so used to copyright being "essentially forever" that when confronted by an instance of "no longer in copyright" we can't quite believe that it's true.

I expect one reason why Lucas fought this case is that one could probably argue that other props from the original film are now similarly out of copyright. Is a light-sabre functional or sculptural?

Note to Apple: Be more like Microsoft

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: a bit medieval

Don't be too hard on the Middle Ages. If you're "tithing" less than a tenth in any modern society then you're either a crook or destitute.

Four illegal ways to sort out the Euro finance crisis

Ken Hagan Gold badge

er, what's failed, exactly?

"until we tackle the problems of unregulated greed driven banking, then this problem is not going to solved and will probably reoccur. The regan/thatcher light touch free market policies have failed, just as communism has failed,"

If we'd taken the light touch approach, the greedy bankers would have gone bust. Instead, we took the "massive state intervention" approach, plonking a multi-trillion dollar debt on our grandchildren in order to bail out the bastards and pretend the system was working.

For added irony, the UK PM who screwed the next two generations of working classes in order to bail out the plutocrats called himself a socialist and fancied himself as a bit of a economics whizz.