* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Google Play infested with cash-stealing web apps

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Trusted site: None.

"convenient to use on-line banking from a mobe, maybe just don't."

What, from an app, or by browsing directly? If you are running a version of Android that actually gets security patches in a timely manner, the Chrome on that device is no more dangerous than the Chrome on your desktop, no?

The EU wants you to log into YouTube using your state-issued ID card

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Oh Boy !

You missed the hyphenated "platform-markets", "adverse effects" and "imbalanced relationships".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: 1984, anyone?

Sadly, the Brexit bunch are just as likely to come up with stuff like this. I'm following the debate and trying desparately to find way that both sides can lose but I fear that the referendum question has been phrased so that at least one side wins. (I think a narrow victory for exit would probably be treated as a victory by both sides, because such a result would then be followed by years of agonising (to watch) politicking over the exact terms of exit, caused by both sides believing that they had sufficient votes to be entitled to a say.)

Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Perhaps you were downvoted

"I knew that Ubuntu were the reason that systemd got forced into Debian, "

S'funny what different people know. I knew that Ubuntu wanted to stick with upstart but were strong-armed into adopting systemd because the Debian community had a big vote and systemd got more votes than either upstart or "stick with the present system".

Mind you, I also knew that Devuan posted a formal notice around March time that they were abandoning the whole project because of lack of interest, so this article surprises me too.

Windows 10 handcuffs Cortana web search to Bing and Edge browser

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Unfamiliar name

Bing is the *highly irregular* subjunctive of google. Fortunately, the subjunctive has all but disappeared from English, so you'll probably never encounter it.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Proprietary code hardwired to use proprietary APIs to do stuff shock!

"Why the hell do people demand Microsoft's code run on magic and rainbows when none of their competitors are required to do so?"

Because Windows is still a monopoly on the desktop and the (century-old?) competition laws that MS have had to comply with for the last quarter of a century are still in force.

Or, if you prefer, there really *is* one law for Microsoft and one law for everybody else.

America edges closer to get-a-proper-warrant-to-read-my-email law

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The goverment should....

You are forgetting that the American Way is to let private enterprise do these things. In other words, they already did "set up some email servers and ...".

'Impossible' EmDrive flying saucer thruster may herald new theory of inertia

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: tests in Germany, China and at NASA have corroborated

Probably worth pointing out that an experiment that shows an effect that is on the edge of significance is also showing an effect that is almost indistinguishable from zero. It all depends on how you choose to present the results.

If you've got experimental evidence that Noether's Theorem doesn't apply in the real world, you've got a Nobel in the bag for the experiment and someone (perhaps even you) has another one for the first theory that makes a decent stab at going beyond the Lagrangian formulation of mechanics.

If, on the other hand, you've got something that is almost indistinguishable from experimental noise and a null result, there are no prizes on offer. Sorry.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: the crew need to be shielded

If you've got a crew, you're doing it wrong.

Ten years in the clink, file-sharing monsters! (If UK govt gets its way)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Well, yes, obviously, and since these large companies are obviously acting on a "large" or " commercial" or "industrial" or "any other word you choose" scale, I'd expect the maximum penalty that the law allows for every Director who knew that it was going on.

The web is DOOM'd: Average page now as big as id's DOS classic

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I don't mind the weight of pages

Perhaps time for a browser extension that detects when the knock on effects of a single page exceed 10MB and puts up a message saying "Fuck Me! This web page is a bloated abomination written by a total idiot! Aborting page load and adding this domain you your ad-blocker list, before your monthly data allowance is pissed into the ether.".

And yes, I'm serious about the message, which is why I've set the limit at 10MB. Despite that absurdly large threshhold, I'm sure it would catch a few. Alternatively, if script exceed displayed content by more than 100KB, trigger a similar warning. (Actually, the weak point in this plan is the "extension" bit. Until browsers start protecting end-users in this way *by default*, the more moronic fraction of the web designer population isn't going to get it.)

Aside: Kudos to all those web authors who have chipped in on the side of users here. Your efforts, however futile, are much appreciated.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"The HTTP Archive report places the average web page at around 2,301KB. Most of the page bloat is due to images, which take up on average 1,463KB of data. Next is script code, which occupies 360KB, followed by video, averaging 200KB per page on average."

That leaves about 300K for text and ... not sure. Even with markup, 300K of text is a lot. Are people pulling in 290K of CSS for every page?

How IT are you? Find out now in our HILARIOUS quiz!

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I went to university down in Brighton...

You have to sympathise with these folks, though. If you don't answer then nothing happens. If they don't ask, they GO TO HELL AND BURN FOR-EVER!!

What the world needs now is... not disk drives

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Perhaps the Utah Data Center has been completed?

"Oh, yeah. Windows 8 or higher ..."

...and don't forget the requirements soon to be imposed on all ISPs but every government, to make copies of everything that everyone pulls down off the internet, just in case.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Two questions

The article makes a case that spinning platters will disappear from smaller (person-facing) machines in the near future, but what about the rest of the market? Will we be reading, in a couple of years time, about how spinning rust is going the way of mercury delay lines because some slow but capacious form of flash now actually matches even the largest drives on cost and knocks it into the sidelines on performance?

And, separately, does this actually matter to the business prospects of existing drive manufacturers, since they are the ones mostly likely to be offering those products anyway?

Hands up, who prayed for AMD? Well, it worked

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: AMD is much needed

Nice, we need <chinese startup you've never heard of producing surprising high quality x86-class chips>, competition is good.

Fixed that for you, as they say. More seriously, there have been a number of stories over the years about how some western company strikes a deal with a Chinese partner, only to discover a couple of years later that their best technology has been reverse engineered and is now being sold back to them by an increasingly competent manufacturing arm of the PLA. They've tried making their own chips in the past (with some sort of MIPS-based design IIRC) but it wasn't hugely successful. This might be a second attempt.

It may not happen in this case. The rate of development in the field of CPUs means that you need to do genuine innovation if you want to keep up. On the other hand, China is not short of smart people.

Utah declares 'war on smut'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: If porn is so bad

...because otherwise you wouldn't be able to find your arse with both hands.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Just go on one of the reputable pornography sites"

Ha ha ha. I see what you did there.

Peak Cable looms: One in five US homes now mobile-only for internet

Ken Hagan Gold badge

That, and the "doubling" is from f*ck-all to b*gger-all, and it is apparently mostly happening in households where the cost of two connections rather than one is felt most keenly.

So you’d sod off to China to escape the EU, Google? Really?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Protectionism

"I can't help but be impressed by China's home-grown tech companies, but they needed the protection to get established."

That depends on how much of their business is software. In software, you can "catch up" with the West simply by copying stuff. Actual manufacturing capability takes a few rounds of evolution, but you at least know what processes you are trying to perfect. I am therefore never surprised when a "third world" country catches up with the West in just a few decades.

Pulling ahead requires genuine skill and is no easier or harder for any country than any other. That said, there are simply more people in China than elsewhere, so if they have the education system sorted out (unlike us, sheesh!) then they are a very credible threat. In this context I would note the thousands of graduates from China who go to other parts of the world to study at a graduate or post-doctoral level. There's not much wrong with their education system. Right now, our best hope is that those students notice how much nicer it is to live outside China than inside it.

Google's 'fair use' mass slurping of books can continue – US Supremes snub writers' pleas

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"effectively read (meaning you can read the bit you're looking for, not the whole thing) for free"

Well if there are only three pages worth reading in the entire book and they happen to come one after the other, then perhaps the book wasn't all that good in the first place.

Alternatively, perhaps you actually *would* be tempted to buy the rest of the book if only it wasn't so expensive. In that case, is it not reasonably to argue that Google are making it possible to sell the book at a lower price by making it easier for readers to find that, yes, this probably is a book they are interested in.

I've certainly bought books after reading tasters and snippets online. I've also browsed books in a real bookshop. I don't see much difference. It certainly seems at least a likely to reward authors as putting books in public libraries and paying authors some fraction of a penny each time their book is borrowed. (I've bought books after borrowing them from the library, too, which presumably paid the author and publisher an order of magnitude or two more than simply having the book in the library.)

Lastly, I think the ability of almost anyone to self-publish on the interwebs probably does as much to kill organised scholarly textbook writing. There's some great stuff out there on way out subjects, written by people who apparently do it for the pure joy of getting their *own* heads round the subject matter. The world is changing. Google is actually quite late to the party and is only picking at the left-overs. In this case, the left-overs are "anything from the past five centuries that still seems interesting, which to be honest is less than you might think".

Hey, Atlantis Computing. What the heck is this in your EULA?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Try this on for size

So ... *she's* running an unlicensed copy of Windows and *Microsoft* upgraded the machine to Win10 without legal parmission. Piracy on the one side and unauthorised hacking on the other. Let's hope the lawyers never find out.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The same wording...

Is it? I don't have a Microsoft EULA handy, but my memory is that they forbid disclosure of test results but the one in the article forbids *opinions* as well, which strikes me as a new low. Maybe I'm just not paying attention, in which case the entire industry can go forth and multiply without me.

US anti-encryption law is so 'braindead' it will outlaw file compression

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Just a point of clarification...

Perhaps you're mis-parsing it. The BSA strongly urges (again) Congress to think.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Math cannot frustrate court orders"

The sad thing is that this is *so* obvious that it didn't make it into the constitution. Perhaps an amendment is in order: Congress shall make no laws that conflict with those of mathematics or nature.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: If passed

"it will give FOREIGN encryption providers and software and device makers AN EDGE over U.S. businesses,"

So, consititutionally speaking, it impacts on foreign policy and defense issues, so lies outside Congress' remit anyway. Your commander-in-chief can therefore veto the bill regardless of what majority it gets.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: regardless of God

Perhaps that is the line to take. This bill attempts to defy essential Truths of the universe that God created. Congress is not above God, so the bill is blasphemous and has no place in a right-thinking society.

This headline will, in part, cost pepper-spraying University of California, Davis $175k

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: That reminds me...

Googling for "Streisand" delivers a top link to her own home page plus a wikipedia article on the Streisand effect, because that (to be honest) is what she is now best known for.

Googling for "Davis University" delivers a top link to their home page, but if you append "news" to that then I'm afraid you get a slew of articles about this incident.

Line by line, how the US anti-encryption bill will kill our privacy, security

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: ORLY?

Interestingly, the use of encryption in https is not to hide anything, merely to prove that it really is you.

I'm sure it is well understood in these forums that a back-door would not only blow open secrets, it would make it impossible to trust anything. However, I see no wording in this bill about making it possible to impersonate others (perhaps, for the purposes of emptying their bank accounts).

Perhaps the best response to this bill is "Please publish your online banking details.". The idiots will wonder what you are talking about and deny that it is relevant, but if it becomes the stock response to all such requests, perhaps the more curious idiots (like, the ones voting in November) might make further enquiries and enlighten themselves.

SQL injection vuln found at Panama Papers firm Mossack Fonseca

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Bandwidth ???

Fair point. Two terabytes is about three weeks of maxing out a 10 Mbit/s connection. Doing it on the sly would require longer, or a fatter pipe, or MF's IT people being asleep at the wheel. What you wrote, though, was 2Tb and two terabits is something you could suck out in one night. Also, I imagine that these guys can afford a pipe the size of the nearby canal.

Dear Windows, OS X folks: Update Flash now. Or kill it. Killing it works

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Well, time to zap the blight

As far as I'm concerned, the BBC is the only one left. (That is, I've removed flash and the only site I care about that is broken by this is the beeb. Thanks to Man Bras!' comment above, I may not even care about that anymore.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Get the content producers to kill it

@To Mars in Man Bras!:

Fantastic! Thanks. (To everyone else, the links describe how to get the (fixed) URLs that you can then use in (say) VLC. You only have to do the hard bit once.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Get the content^H^H^H^H^H^H^H producers to kill it

I wonder why Adobe doesn't just document Flash (ie, publish the source code, coz I'm sure that's the only accurate documentation there is by now) and leave it to others to produce a secure player.

They don't actually make any money selling the player, so this would reduce their costs and (if anyone managed it) might actually boost the market for the tools (which they do sell) to produce content.

Microsoft rethinks the Windows application platform one more time

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: OSaaS anyone?

Changing the terms and conditions, retrospectively, to turn something that worked into something that didn't unless you pay money. Hmm? How would that be different from injecting a virus that encrypts the hard disc and refusing to decrypt it until the owner pays you money? It wouldn't? OK, welcome to jail.

You *may* find that Win11 is OSaaS and that the support for Win10 expires 5 years after launch, turning it into a huge malware target like XP. If so, you *may* find that most customers just ignore the issue and carry on using their preferred OS, behind a firewall and/or in a VM as necessary.

To be honest, I can't see any long-term future for Windows *except* as a vehicle for running legacy Win32 software. If MS want to repeat billg's success, they need to do it with an entirely new product (and almost certainly not in the OS market, which looks incredibly hard to break into right now).

PayPal freezes 400-job expansion in North Carolina over bonkers religious freedom law

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Pervert.

"I feel sorry for Americans."

Objectively, then, you are in a minority because most of the world's population would be happy to have been born there. (The same goes for most of Europe, as is now painfully obvious.) Nowhere is perfect, but the USA is one of humanity's better efforts and we should recognise that even as we lay into its more imbecilic aspects and reactionary tendencies.

"America is held back by its Big Johns."

Not really. The Big Johns are making a lot of noise because the writing is on the wall and they've lost. Fifty years ago you would have found similar attitudes almost everywhere. Now they are confined to just a few places. In the USA, it is possible for the rest of the population to turn round and say "You're a reactionary imbecile." and then campaign against you and turf you out. In most part of the USA, this has already happened. The system works, eventually. (Obligatory, but affectionate, dig: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else,”)

Adobe preps emergency Flash patch for bug hackers are exploiting

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: BBC's HTML5 beta

It doesn't work on all devices. (Presumably I need to reverse engineer something to figure out what unmentioned dependencies are missing on my (ARM-based) laptop, but at the moment the beta just says "Sorry, but not all device types are supported and guess which group you fall into.".)

I appreciate that this isn't necessarily the fault of the BBC's code, but I hope the error messages in the final product are significantly more helpful.

3D printers set for lift off? Yes, yes, yes... at some point in the future

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What I've learned from the 'How It's Made' TV series...

"There will, of course, be useful exceptions for unique low volume items. By definition, that's not mass production. It's niche."

True, but there is currently a huge chasm between "mass produced and cheap but only barely suitable for the role" and "bespoke and expensive but ideal for the task". 3D printing may provide a third point on that continuum, or even several depending on the technology you want to use. Even the materials may not be a restriction if you can 3D-print the tooling for some other process.

At the moment, I can't see any of the above being interesting to hobbyists, but I'm not one of these people myself so perhaps I'm just ignorant.

Windows 7's grip on the enterprise desktop is loosening

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Microsoft are keeping quiet

"they're literally signing away their ability to get out in future"

In what way, exactly? If they need Windows, why would they not want the updates? If they don't need Windows, there's still nothing stopping them from installing something else, because all that UEFI FUD is still just FUD.

Every update published is an exploit given away for free to the Bad Guys. Month after month, a steady stream of ways to take over your PC and steal your work or identity. Why would you want that? Well, you wouldn't, obviously, so if you need Windows then you need the updates. Yes, the new UI sucks, but it isn't quite as bad as 8.1, which in turn was marginally better than 8, and let's be honest about 7 -- huge numbers of people thought that sucked so hard that they are still running XP.

But ... if you need Windows then you need Windows, so you've just gotta suck it up. Deal with it, or bite the bullet and figure out how to make an alternative OS work for you.

Tay talks back: What made you think you beat me?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: was this Tay or a human?

"I'd convince Tay into being a Tea Party Donald Trump supporter."

I thought that was the original story. To be honest, I'm not sure how a politician on the stump (any flavour) would do in the Turing test.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Coat

Re: Tay, Tay Go Away...

Re: Shakespeare. The proof of his (or her, I read yet another "the plays were all written by..." story yesterday) genius is that if you ask a second human to read the plays they'll find a different deeper meaning. Ho ho. And the AIs can't even find one.

I'm with the mouthing and parsing robots.

Blighty starts pumping out 12-sided quids

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Betty's looking good on those coins

Likewise, let's hope they don't have to rub out all those thistles.

Slack smackback: There's no IRC in team (software), say open-sourcers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: swimming against the tide

Nothing wrong with swimming against the tide if the tide is going out.

In the short run, Slack does seem to be getting lots of attention, but I wonder how much of that is VC-driven. It is pitched explicitly as an email replacement by people who would clearly profit if we all stopped using email and started using Slack. Frankly I can't see the point, since email is a better interface for the sort of communication I do, but I'm aware that others like to work differently.

In the long run, Slack will survive if the people who use Slack actually *are* more productive than those who don't.

Bash on Windows. Repeat, Microsoft demos Bash on Windows

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Hardly entirely new ...

"Really MS should scrap Windows 10 and either give people a MS Linux distro and properly port all their applications as Linux native"

Whooosh! Way to miss the key point of the last 30 years of Windows hegemony over the desktop. Those apps that don't run on Linux? 99% of them aren't Microsoft apps and for half of them the chances are that *no-one* has the source code anymore. If MS ported their entire product line to Linux tomorrow and offered a completely free internet upgrade to the new versions, most MS customers still couldn't migrate.

Oz uni in right royal 'indigenous' lingo rumpus

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Two things

Firstly, I'm astonished that anyone could seriously claim it wasn't an invasion. They were there first. They didn't arrive in boats afterwards.

Secondly, outside of the specific context of Australian peoples, "aboriginal" just means "They were there first". It's more or less a synonym of indigenous and therefore hardly worth the argument. My guess is that in another few decades, there will be people insisting that the phrase "indigenous peoples" is patronising and must be replaced with ... who knows. (Perhaps something in one of their own languages?)

Still, I'm not one of the indigenous people myself so I'll let them choose their own name. To insist otherwise would simply be impolite and that's terribly un-British.

Oculus Rift review-gasm round-up: The QT on VR

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Article in brief

Funnily enough, I thought the article eventually homed in on *exactly* the point of this product and then failed to notice.

This product is supposed to be bought by commercial games writers (for whom the price can be called an investment) so that when version 2 (or 3) eventually turns up good enough for Real People to use, there will actually be some decent software for them to buy for it.

The hope of all the players in this game is that the best titles will be written for *their* gizmo, leading to an MS-DOS-style monopoly of VR in the next decade. As venture capitalist punts go, it's not the silliest proposition out there.

Your broadband speeds are up by 6Mbps, boasts UK watchdog Ofcom

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: So what actually has increased in average speed?

The article suggests that measured speeds were used: "[Virgin's] “up to” 200Mbps service recorded the highest average actual download speed at 174Mbps." (emphasis mine).

Mud sticks: Microsoft, Windows 10 and reputational damage

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: It's the data harvesting

"If you're not paying for a product you're not a customer, just another product."

I agree, but the logical corollary to that is that MS are no longer in the OS business (at least for non-business users). Perhaps that is the reason why they no longer have a decent product offering in that market.

"Windows 10 is NOT an update to 7/8, it's a different OS."

I disagree. There's eff-all difference under the hood and it is being pushed like a service pack. The main difference from 7 is the amount of spyware and nagware.

Bristol boffins blast 1.59 Gbps down ONE 20 MHz channel

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Is this not something we should expect an alien civilisation to use when communicating between systems?"

What "this"? Radio, transmitted conventionally through free space? Don't think so.

Ask yourself this: Do you really believe that in the next few thousand years we won't invent anything better?

Now ask yourself this: If alien civilisations only use radio on a large scale for a few centuries of their entire history, what are the odds that one of those civilisations happens to be passing through those few centuries at the same time as we are AND is within range for us to pick it up?

How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Looks like everyone is being a dick

"At least the pitfalls of using something hosted elsewhere have been highlighted. If you want it, it should be on your own server."

I think it was demonstrated about 5 seconds after the web was invented that if you depend on an image from a third-party site then the site can replace your image with something defamatory. Translating that experience to "code from a third-party site" doesn't seem a very big leap IMHO.

On the other hand, I suspect that if web browsers started refusing to load images from third-party sites, we'd discover that people hadn't learned this lesson at all. (There must be a Firefox extension that flags up cases where this is being done, but it probably counts as a terrorism tool now.)

So my guess is that *we* already knew that third-party code was a rubbish idea, just as *we* know about source code version control systems. But I'm sure there are a lot of people out there whose web-sites were hit by this and who told their bosses in all honesty that it wasn't a problem with *their* web-site. It was a problem elsewhere and could (and did) have happened to anyone.