* Posts by Ken Hagan

8139 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Dry those eyes, ad blockers are unlikely to kill the internet

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Ummm 2

I'd give you three out of four there. I think dropping a 3rd party tracking cookie is pretty non-intrusive in the sense that 90% of the population probably don't realise that it ever happens.

But the other three? Absolutely, and I'd be shocked to find anyone who reckoned that auto-playing audio was not intrusive. Makes me want to punch the advertiser in the face every time it happens and my usual response is to hit the back button in the browser and make a mental note not to visit the site hosting the ad.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Plenty, actually. Those cookies that track you from site to site [...]"

Which takes us straight back to the article, because those cookies *don't* track the sort of people who install ad-blockers.

"As to how do they know the ads are working in the absolute sense, I guess that the more tech-savvy clients have a good understanding of their normal sales patterns and compare that to the sales during and immediately after a particular campaign, adjusting for random variations, seasonal differences etc etc"

Good luck adjusting for all that. If we assume that one of the motivations for launching a new campaign is a dip in sales, then reversion to the mean will give you a rise after the campaign. Similarly, a new product launch will have associated ads but ... you've got a new product, dammit! Of course you'll see renewed interest.

So my guess is that *none* of the evidence of the effectiveness of advertising would pass peer review if submitted to a decent scientific journal.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: 99%

The figure was 90% when I first heard the story about 40 years ago and back then nearly everyone was watching the same few TV channels and reading the same few major papers.

I'm sure the only question now is how many nines.

Volvo to 'accept full liability' for crashes with its driverless cars

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: this issue will get solved eventually

"The only way premiums will drop is forcibly by legislation."

Why would the passengers need insurance? They don't at the moment.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What ifs

"Who is going to jail if something goes wrong?"

The same person who goes to jail when a plane crashes. If you can show negligence during design or manufacture, which is extremely unlikely, then the directors might have to carry the can because they are legally responsible for what their company does. In practice, you won't be able to show that and only financial penalties will apply, but that's probably sufficient to motivate a company because bankruptcy is death.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What ifs

"This means that it should be incredibly cheap for a private person to insure a driverless Volvo, and thus removes the biggest obstacle to takeup*"

It gets better. In the longer term, it will become increasingly expensive to get insurance to drive a car yourself.

Road accidents current kill a thousand or more people every year in the UK. The legal cost of accidentally killing someone is relatively low, because society accepts the argument that "everyone needs a car". Once it becomes clear that everyone can have a car at a much reduced risk of killing other people, those who insist on doing it manually will face stiffer penalties for their mistakes because courts will argue that they are negligent in not using the driverless option.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Crash for cash

"when thugs learn [...] they can block the road and the car WILL stop"

These thugs will also learn that those cars have excellent cameras that take legally admissable evidence. It may take a year or two, but they'll learn.

BBC bypasses Linux kernel to make streaming videos flow

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Aunty Beeb's a fibber then

have skills != have resources

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Smells funny

In the linked article, a diagram shows two copies of the packet being made, one entirely in kernel space and so presumably avoidable by kernel-space changes anyway. I can't see a couple of memcpy() calls being responsible for 90% of the CPU time (the article claims a 10-fold performance improvement) and so I conclude that the user-space implementation is actually missing out something pretty damn enormous.

I wonder if it is something I'd miss, like security, or routing, or...? Does anyone know?

China wants international peace pact online and under water

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: We are not yet the dominant force in these areas.

I think there are a couple of hundred countries who would gladly sign up to that statement, including a fair number of NATO members. This isn't all about China.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Read what these "rules" really mean

In every other respect, it is long established that countries are allowed to decide what enters and leaves. The Soviet bloc did it for decades and although we disapproved on principle, no-one except the most potty crank ever suggested we should take meaningful action to stop them. (I don't count radio broadcasts as meaningful action because you could get arrested for listening to them and there was nothing the West could do to stop that.)

Maybe we should just stop trying to rule the world and accept that we can't stop other countries being bastards unless we invade them and we aren't willing to do that (not even in North Korea's case) so the sensible approach is to put that unwillingness in writing and at least get some diplomatic credit for it.

Just because we accept their sovereignty over their own cyber-space doesn't mean we've rolled over and accepted their sovereignty over artificial islands in the South China Sea.

Oracle laying off its Java evangelists? Er, no comment, says Oracle

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: About Time

"Might I suggest you take a look at Qt."

I looked at it a year or so back. (Version 4 if I recall.) I saw a homebrew string class, homebrew collections classes, homebrew dynamic casts and a simple slots and signals framework. It reminded me of nothing more than MFC -- a child of the 1990s before C++ actually standardised all these things and forever-after encumbered with their now-non-standard solutions to the problems.

The cross-platform would have been nice, but if it forces me to divide my code into bits that can use C++14 features and bits that have to stick with C++98 (or even ARM), then I'd rather code a native UI for each platform.

China cuffs hackers at US request to stave off sanctions

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Logically ...?

It does seem to put PLA rank and file in an awkward position: they can either obey orders and get arrested by the US authorities or disobey orders and get arrested by the local authorities.

Playmobil cops broadside for 'racist' pirate slave

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: My outrage is up to you...

I think the joke icon is there, but the fashion in UI design these days is for visual cues to be completely transparent.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Thinking

"Actually committing genocide is a significantly worse atrocity than covering up the evidence of genocide."

Indeed, which is why the chap who asked "Who now remembers the Armenians?" gets rougher treatment than the people who forgot the Armenians. (Idle thought: would it be true to say that this quote is now what most people think of when anyone mentions the Armenians? Is the fact that everyone forgot actually more memorable? That would be ... odd.)

I also almost agree with what Voland's appendage was saying but I welcome your nit-picking.

NASA boffins on Pluto: We see skies of BLUE and... RED water ice

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Blue sky at night-

I think you meant <br>, or <br/>, but it doesn't seem to have any effect anyway. It would seem that it isn't one of the tags that is not filtered out.

PHONE me if you feel DIRTY: Yanks and 'Nadians wave bye-bye to magstripe

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Cards?

I'm not really surprised by your experiences, nor by the snarky remarks in the original article. ("It sounds appalling but compared to relying on carbon-copies of your credit card plus a signature, it must have been amazing.")

It has long been my impression that *technical* barriers to crime are less important than the *legal* ones. This applies just as much in banking as in, say, file-sharing. Despite the popular belief that humans have no "feel" for statistics, society actually depends on everyone being able to balance the chances of getting away with it against the costs of getting caught. (The good news is that the last hundred thousand years or so would suggest that we are, as a species, much better at such cynical Machievellian calculations than we might like.)

Crypto cadre cloud-cracks SHA-1 with just $75k of compute cost

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Compute" is a verb

...but in English, all verbs can be nouned.

Silicon Valley fights European Court of Justice ruling with small print

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The problem is.... IPv4 and IPv6 !!!

Actually IPv6 will work fine. The address space is easily large enough for each legal jurisdiction to have its own prefix. As a helpful side effect for most (non-business) end-users, a foreign address would then be a very powerful hint for your spam filter.

Of course, it would need someone running the internet who actually cared about running the internet rather than simply milking it.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Windows

"It does mean doing things the hard way and depriving yourself of shiny web toys, but it can be done,"

I think you mean: "As an added bonus, you will waste less of your life and money trying to grapple with something that previously worked fine but which has now been improved to the point of exasperation.".

4K catches fire with OTT streamers, while broadcasters burn

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "a decent fibre network connection (around 15Mbps)"

Zmodem: an interesting thought, and one for interesting times -- I'd never have thought ten years ago that I'd be able to undercut a landline with payg mobile.

(Sadly in my case the reason I have a landline is that none of the mobile companies can sustain a signal at my house in all weather conditions. Horses for courses, I suppose.)

If you wanted Windows 10, it looks like you've already installed it

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Optional?

No version of DirectX has ever been "killer" unless you are a games junkie.

Ubuntu 15.10: More kitten than beast – but beware the claws

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: when did. ..

I think Windows Vista was the pioneer. I can't help with the followup question of who ever thought that copying Vista was a good idea.

What is money? A rabid free marketeer puts his foot in lots of notes

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Whose fiat?

Government may be able to print more of their own money whenever it suits them, but they can't print anyone else's and sooner or later have to buy stuff from overseas. So your fears about modern monetary theory surely only apply once we have a World Government.

And then ... Nature typically has pretty rigid ideas about the cost of doing something and all sorts of activities (even those confined within a single currency zone) have to deal with her, so we're back to money being a measure of how much work you are owed. (On which note, I applaud Neil Barnes sentiment, but would point out that debt obligations are generally accepted to fade away with time (is that inflation?) whereas the good lady Emmy Noether tells us that the failure of physical laws to do so results in the conservation of the quantity measured in MWh.)

Woman makes app that lets people rate and review you, Yelp-style. Now SHE'S upset people are 'reviewing' her

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What was the business model here?

"It doesn't matter if your business idea involves serving turds on a stick, if you convince the VCs that you're going to reach X million people, you get the money."

Which merely defers the question: where do the (idiotic) VCs get *their* money from?

I'm genuinely puzzled because I appear to live in a world where large numbers of unspeakably idiotic twats have access to large sums of money, and I'm feeling left out. I'm as big a twat as the next guy, but no-one has ever offered me cash it.

Edit: It would appear that Craigness has found the source of money. Apparently we paid for it.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

What was the business model here?

Presumably it costs money to set this up and presumably she was hoping to make some money out of this once everyone started using it. Any idea how? Were the startup costs sufficiently great that she needed to convince an investor to back her? If so, how the hell did she do it?

Want cheaper AT&T gigabit service? Move to a Google Fiber city

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: AT&T have a new strategy

To judge from tacitust's post (which, at time of posting, was just below your one), all Google need to do is threaten to come to town and the incumbents will suddenly offer cheap long-term contracts.

Are Samsung TVs doing a Volkswagen in energy tests? Koreans hit back

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Thumbs up for "doing a Volkswagen"

Excellent verbal boffinry there. I look forward to seeing it on a regular basis when I go vulture spotting with my mobe.

Massive global cooling process discovered as Paris climate deal looms

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: neither a believer or denier make

"6. Who told you science was ever settled?"

Just for fun, I googled exactly that phrase. It would appear that quite a number of politicians and similar advocates have used either that exact phrase or something that any native speaker of English would take to mean the same thing. 'Tis true that there aren't too many (if any) scientists willing to put their names to such a daft suggestion, but 'tis also true that it is the politicians and activists that make the most noise.

Share-crazy millennials spaff passwords ALL OVER the workplace

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I'm confused

The article talks about people who can still access former workplace accounts and then implies that this is the fault of the former employees poor password hygience. Uh? Surely the previous employer should have revoked the youngster's credentials on their last day. I'd be pretty surprised if the average "former employee" ever had the admin rights necessary to do this for themselves, let alone still had them after leaving.

Move to the latest IE, or suck it: January’s cold comfort for Microsoft hangouts

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: where are all these people hiding?

"We've tried to convince our users that IE should be used ONLY for access to these apps"

Can you not enforce this through creative use of firewall rules or GPO? A little googling suggests that there are GPO options for blacklisting or whitelisting particular sites for IE, but I freely admit that this isn't my day job so perhaps it is harder than it ought to be.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I understand...

"The company invested millions at the turn of the century in this technology and aren't yet ready to re-invest in getting it updated to modern standards."

I wonder if the directors are still running around in company cars from the turn of the century. Oh, silly me, of course not. Something as important as a free set of wheels needs serious investment to keep it up to date, whereas the means to actually operate as a business can safely be neglected for a decade or two whilst we cash in our share options.

Lies from VW: 'Our staff acted criminally but board didn't know'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"One tiny accelerometer and ..."

I'm sure I read at the weekend that there was a concealed mini-tank of chemical designed in as well. It had enough capacity to get the vehicle through the test but obviously no long-term value.

It appears that the software has a legitimate reason to recognise that it is on rollers and the accelerometer would (I imagine, and let's concede) also be a legitimate part of the design anyway, but this tank is a piece of hardware (so, a different group from the software designers) that exists solely to cheat and presumably requires some explicit, if trivial, software control.

I think once you have several distinct groups of designers conspiring to create a system that cannot be used *except* to cheat on the emissions test, you have a problem that is larger than one or two rogue minions.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: We only found out about the problems in the last board meeting

Possibly better would if the shareholders decided that "Well, if you aren't paying attention and aren't taking responsibility for what's happening, you can wave bye-bye to your stupidly over-inflated compensation package.".

Time and again we hear that these board-level salaries are justified because you need the very best at the top level, and then as soon as it transpires that we haven't actually *got* the very best at top level, they swear blind that they have no idea what their minions are doing. W.T.F.??

Smuggle mischievous JavaScript into WinRAR archives? Sure, why not

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Wait...

Sadly not, because the world is full of people who think that you should avoid a widely implemented and published compression method just because an undocumented one with a single implementation is promising a percent or two improvement on some kinds of files.

Is Windows 10 slurping too much data? No, says Microsoft. Nuh-uh. Nope

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Where does this lead?

"Unless MS is prepared to write off this community of users, there has to be a paid, non-volume, version of W10 with no spying and no forced updating."

Just block the outgoing connections. Too much (ongoing) effort? Well...

It's a market opportunity for someone who already has blacklisting software and who already maintains the blacklists that drive it. Of course, that would require the AV companies to grow a pair and actually take on Microsoft, so I won't hold my breath.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Nothings Changed

"It's part of the whole BYOD thing. None of these will run on Linux and trying to run them in a VM will get me fired for going against company policy."

I'm not disputing that this is a "real world" example, but I have to shake my head at a real world in which employees are forced to buy their own computer and then told that they can't run a VM on it.

Will IT support please come to the ward immediately. Weeeee have a tricky problem

Ken Hagan Gold badge

We need a whoosh icon.

Dear do-gooders, you can't get rid of child labour just by banning it

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Child?

"As for dealing with poverty, the one thing that really matters is to bring birth rates down."

One thing that is quite strongly correlated with falling birth rates is rising female education rates, so it looks like school dinners could be the answer all round.

Official: North America COMPLETELY OUT of new IPv4 addresses

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: IP8?

That's roughly what they did.

*Any* address size other than 4 bytes is going to break wire formats not only for IP but also for pretty much every transport protocol that goes on top, so 16 is roughly equal to 8 in this context. Then, having broken all other protocols (mainly in layer 4 but obviously also some address discovery protocols below and DNS stuff above) you have to specify exactly how you are going to repair them. So they did that, too, because they had no choice.

Another area where they had no choice was to produce *some* sort of 4-6 interop and (would you believe it) they did actually try the obvious solution (a special 12-byte prefix means an IPv4 address) suggested by three or four commentards here. Sadly this turned out to have issues and even if it hadn't, *any* interop solution requires changes to the IPv4 stack as well as the IPv6 one, so you are still faced with the question "How many times do we want to change the length of an internet address?". (Clue: the answer is "Zero, but if you put a gun to my head I'll do it once and fix everything whilst I'm doing it because there's no fucking way we will ever get this chance again.".)

Beyond that, the extra guff in IPv6 is a load of security which is optional but increasingly implemented in IPv4, some working multicasting which is again optional but almost universally supported in IPv4 routers, and zeroconf LAN configuration, which turned out to be such a good idea that people have tried to reinvent it for IPv4.

So I'm struggling to see what the problem is.

NIST's quantum boffins have TELEPORTED stuff over a HUNDRED KILOMETRES

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Communication sub C

"I think it's value to crypto comes from the fact that it cant be fudged with along the way without messing up the entanglement."

That's my recollection, too, but there is nothing in the diagram that makes that point, which is a pity. As it stands in the diagram, the whole thing is open to a MitM attack. I assume there is an answer to that, but it doesn't appear to be in the article so I'm left thinking " Umm ... quantum ... magic .. awesome stuff ... too complicated for my little brain".

One shouldn't *have* to go googling in order to understand why an article is worth reading.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: AFAIK

Whereas having to subtract a well-chosen infinity from every calculation in order to get the right answer isn't magic at all. It's straightforward, in fact.

Sorry, but whilst I'm happy to accept that Bohm isn't any better than the conventional interpretation, I'm not happy to accept that it is much worse.

Look out, world! Apple is about to launch .apple

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Indeed, it has been proposed (by Google, if memory serves) and rejected by the IETF on the grounds that single-name URLs already mean something -- they refer to a machine on your LAN. Using them as suggested here would run a serious risk of hi-jacking either legitimate services on your LAN (by external agents) or legitimate services out there (by other users on your LAN). Probably both.

It's alive! Farmer hides neglected, dust-clogged server between walls

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "The farm decided to go with a more modern, off-the-shelf software solution."

In terms of the hardware, it is surely now possible to provide the same processing grunt in a box that requires *no* air cooling (except for exposing the case to room temperature).

I find it "surprising" that we still build, and buy, machines that require the circulation of clean air to keep them running, knowing full well that they will spend their entire working lives in a dusty environment, or worse. If you are a gamer -- fine, it's your choice and you know how to take care of your machine. If you are operating a server farm -- ditto. For just about everyone else, whether it be a laptop or a traditional desktop, just ditch the bloatware and run on a fanless, sealed, system that still has more power than money could actually buy just a few years ago.

Hate noisy jets above you? What if they were charging your phone?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Air

"So, if you're lucky, maybe a few watts from a big array."

So just to finish your calculation... Over an entire day, maybe a kilo-Joule of output, which is enough to run an electric fire for a second or two, in a world where you can run that fire for an hour for about 10p, so the earnings are about 3p per year.

I suppose if interest rates stay at 0% for the next couple of geological eras then you might turn a profit.

(Actually the best bit is that you'd need to keep the patent alive for several millenia to repay the filing costs. Even Disney might have trouble with that.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Sshhhhhhh!

This is clearly a case where an engineer was ordered by a PHB to produce more patents. As long as it doesn't go viral on social media, the engineer will get away with it.

If there are any PHBs reading this ... it's a fine idea and you can ignore the naysayers and detailed calculations in these comment pages.

D-Link spilled its private key onto the web – letting malware dress up as Windows apps

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I'm wondering

I think "best practice" is that these certificates are stored on a handful of machines, away from the developers writing the software, and that only a handful of staff are therefore able to sign executables and only then as an act outside of the normal development process. Passcodes would live in sealed envelopes, or something, and would not normally reside on any machine.

Clearly that didn't happen here and we know of at least one certificate that has escaped as a result. I'm somewhat staggered that a company as big as D-Link would be willing to play so fast and loose with their company's reputation. Let's be clear; as of this morning, a D-Link signature carries slightly less weight than, say, mine. (And I'm not boasting.)

One final point: if your only D-Link product is a cheapish ADSL box or network switch, rather than waiting for D-Link to re-establish some credibility, you could just replace the box. I wonder how many admins will respond to this by plonking D-Link on their Sony list.

US govt: Why we're OK with letting control of the internet slip into ICANN's hands

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"handing control to ICANN is like Caesar handing over his throne to Stalin"

There is no throne. The job is just keeping accounts and publishing standards. If ICANN were to try anything that actually stops foreign powers using the internet the way they want, those foreign powers would just tell ICANN where to stick it and do what they want anyway.

Or to use the traditional meme, the internet will just route around the damage.

Obama edges toward full support for encryption – but does he understand what that means?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"It has not been clear to me since the early 1990s [...] just why any government would entertain the notion that they would be able to prevent criminals from encrypting communications if they chose to do so."

It's because they didn't understand what was going on then and so didn't learn the lessons and so don't understand now, either.

You want to DISRUPT my TECH? How about I DISRUPT your FACE?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Quite right, but there's really no mystery here. Everyone agrees that being on the receiving end of disruption is unpleasant, so the consultants have noticed that they can sell disruption as a product, to the managers, with the line that "This way, you are the *cause* of the disruption rather than the effect.". From the viewpoint of a sufficiently dumb manager, that means they look far-sighted and perhaps get an opportunity to dispatch one or two disruptive employees (ironically using the excuse that they weren't disruptive enough). From the viewpoint of the consultant, they only have to deliver chaos -- the more the better in fact.