* Posts by Ken Hagan

8139 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Google flushes out users of old browsers by serving up CLUNKY, AGED version of search

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"I spend a lot of time on client locations and systems, and very few offer me the option to use my own laptop on their network."

Fair enough, although it cost us bugger all to provide a separate free WiFi on site for visitors. However, have you priced up mobile broadband recently. Unless you spend a lot of time on site watching videos, your usage will be fairly light and so quite cheap. Also, if you spend a lot of time on client locations, you probably spend a fair amount of time travelling, too.

Virgin Media blocks 'wankers' from permissible passwords

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Merde!

Passwords should only be seen by the person who created them. The fact that Virgin cares about profane passwords (though only English profanities) suggests they are storing them in the clear for the use of their own support staff.

Britain's housing crisis: What are we going to do about it?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Abolishing the green belt would hurt

The problem lies with all those people whose houses adjoin the green belt. Since, under current law, they are immune to some jerk building an eyesore on the other side of the fence, these properties have a higher market value than others. Since the laws have been around for donkeys, it is almost certain that the properties' current owners have paid that higher value when they bought it. If you simply abolish the planning laws at a stroke, you wipe that out at a stroke. Abolition is an attempt to transfer thousands of pounds from the pockets of voters into the pockets of developers.

I say "attempt", since this is almost certain to face a legal challenge, just as the proposed HS2 route did. HS2, however, affected relatively small numbers of people along a single route. Green belt abolition would affect far more.

'Stop dissing Google or quit': OK, I quit, says Code Club co-founder

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: So they asked her

" So they asked her to take the same stance any reasonable business or organisation would take"

Except that I presume she wasn't being offered the big fat compensation package that any reasonable business might offer.

Premier League wants to PURGE ALL FOOTIE GIFs from social media

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Do not piss off fans

I think it is more like "Do not make copyright law the subject of mainstream pub talk, or else the whole show is over.".

Let's be honest here, most *normal* folks tolerate copyright law and most probably reckon it serves a useful purpose in allowing artists to make a crust. However, if it stops them enjoying their footy with their mates then IT SUCKS AND MUST GO IMMEDIATELY REGARDLESS OF THE CONSEQUENCES.

This may be where the Premier League's gravy train hits the buffers, a bit like the music industry.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: IANALBIPOOTI

IANAL But I Poke One Of Them Intimately?

So, you aren't one yourself, but you are fairly knowledgable because your other half is?

Only joking, but I'd be genuinely grateful for an explanation, since I haven't seen this one before.

The internet just BROKE under its own weight – we explain how

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Thoughts from a mere user ...

This is getting silly.

Maybe we're pampered here in the UK, but I have half a dozen routers collecting dust on a shelf nearby, some going back over a decade, none costing more than a few tens of pounds and *none* of them have no firewall. So, just to illuminate the discussion, can someone please name a router (not a modem with a single port, which you'd have to plug into a PC, which all have firewalls these days and have had for about a decade), which is IPv6-capable, which doesn't have a firewall?

Sorry, but since the firewall is just software, and routers all run Linux, where the firewalling capability is free, and since IPv4 routers even at the cheapest end of the market have had proper firewalls since forever, and since IPv6 support is going to require a slight tweaking of the vendors preferred Linux image anyway, and since failing to include a firewall *might* be grounds for a case of negligence against the provider, I just can't imagine anyone producing an IPv6 router without one. So I'm rather minded to say "put up (examples) or shut up".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Please refrain from NAT66

" but requires updating all your hardware and software and relying on a daemon on one box correctly informing everything else it needs to be updated."

Every desktop OS has been able to do this for donkeys years, and apps couldn't re-implement the network stack even if they wanted to. So for your PCs the hardware upgrade is going to cost you nothing. The OS upgrade will cost the same and the rest of your software will be half as much again.

There may be some devices that will require an IPv4-capable LAN, but I doubt that many of them need to talk to the internet, so a dual stack LAN and IPv6-only WAN is now perfectly viable and has been for many years.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: We need IP6

Ah, yes! The famous compatibility between IP versions. We wouldn't want to lose that.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"NAT, itself, however, evolved into a critical part of networking and much is built around it, not least the idea of a central device controlling access in and out of a network."

Firewalls and routing rules predate NAT by several years and both clearly involve the idea of a central device controlling access in and out of a network. I respectfully suggest that you present a fresh argument.

"The problem is that those pushing IPv6 view NAT purely as a work-around - a band-aid covering a problem of limited public IP addresses."

Perhaps they were around when the NAT RFC was published, and read it. I'm afraid that NAT *is* just a band-aid around limited public addresses.

Furthermore, not a lot of the coverage here is bothering to mention *why* the number of global routes has now passed 512K, so I'll let you into a secret. It is caused by people buying up small allocations of IPv4 one corner of the globe and using them in another. The address space has become horribly fragmented and the IPv4 internet is going down like a 99%-full hard disc using the FAT file system. And of course the reason everyone is still on IPv4 is because NAT has allowed them to punt this problem into the long grass for almost 2 decades. Well done NAT.

Govt control? Hah! It's IMPOSSIBLE to have a successful command economy

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Red Plenty...

That tendency to deadlock indecisively might have been partly inspired by Stalin's own well-known methods of dealing with people who decided wrongly.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: yeah but what about the jobs...?

"Another robotic task?"

There would always be "connoiseurs" who claimed to be able to tell the difference between a robot and the real thing. More darkly, there would always be some who did it for reasons of power over another rather than the physiological response.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Mega Corp" proves command and control can work!

"Command and Control DOES work. BP, HSBC, Ford etc all perform over decades, and typically out perform."

That's partly because you've just chosen the ones that haven't gone bankrupt yet, and partly because they aren't a complete society. The comparison just doesn't stand up.

Awooga: August Patch Tuesday incoming – with two remote-code exec bugs in IE, Windows

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Pro

The actual bulletin (link in the article) certainly suggests that several consumer editions are not affected.

Microsoft throws old versions of Internet Explorer under the bus

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Fix the installer first

"My perfectly legal Windows 7 VM is stuck on IE 9 because Microsoft wants to install some kind of spyware to let me use IE 10 or IE 11."

Get over it, dude. If you use a computer with a non open source OS, you handed over the keys to the kingdom on the day you installed the OS. Since we're talking Windows, MS could have built in spyware in the original release, or they could have slipped some in as a security fix under Windows Update (if you've applied *any* updates since installation, which I hope you have). Whatever *named* package you are worrying about, if it is from Microsoft then it doesn't increase your risk of being spied on, even if it says "Microsoft Shafter for Windows" on the tin.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Of everything

"IE is the underdog we have to pitty,"

I'd rather target a recent IE than an older webkit. The problem is not IE, per se. The problem is that Microsoft don't make their recent improvements to IE available on OSes that they claim to still support. I don't suppose it is even the fault of the IE product managers or developers. I'd be amazed if these decisions were not handed down from Stevie B, in a desparate and demonstrably self-destructive attempt to wring a few more upgrades out of "customers".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Product to Service

"Google gives away Android ..."

...because most of it was originally free.

And in any case, one of the frequent gripes about Android is that they *don't* give it away free. Instead, you are frequently left with the version that your product shipped with, bugs and all.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Product to Service

"Believe it or not, once upon a time that you might charge money for that was absurd."

Ah yes, the good old days when total vendor lock-in was just taken for granted as the only conceivable business model, if only because no-one except the original vendor had adequate documentation to write programs.

Now even Internet Explorer will throw lousy old Java into the abyss

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: but not Vista?

I'm puzzled too, but for a different reason.

" Only IE8 and later will get it, and then only when they're running on Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.x."

What sequence of dodgy upgrades do you have to dance to end up with IE8 on Win7sp1?

Simian selfie stupidity: Macaque snap sparks Wikipedia copyright row

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: So the monkey owns the copyright

"And if I record a movie with a camcorder or a concert with my phone, then I own the copyright?"

Yes, you do. Come back after you've googled "derivative work".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The debate reveals that Copyrights are unnatural.

"but often they just happen to be in the right place at the right time"

In the case under consideration, the right place was a remote part of Borneo and the right time required a fairly prolonged stay. I'd call that fairly heavy investment, but maybe you spend months lurking in tropical rain forests as part of your day job.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"For example, if I photocopy an A4 page using a normal photocopier in the normal way, do I own copyright in the photocopy? Probably not."

Probably. You could argue that it was a derivative work and that others should not be allowed to copy your copy without your permission. They'd have to go back to the original. However, none of this sophistry would exempt them and you from obtaining the permission of the original creator if the page you copied was itself a copyrighted work.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Good article.

"Personally, I think that the monkey has a good case for ownership of this picture. Inasmuch as the photographer must prove that the photo is his creation, he clearly can't. Therefore, he cannot claim copyright over it."

If I use the time delay feature that has been standard in cameras for decades, the camera takes the picture (usually with me in it), but I set it up. No-one in the last few decades has seriously attempted to claim that I don't have copyright in that picture.

So if I give the camera to a monkey, hoping that the monkey will take a selfie, I've set up that picture too. Why shouldn't I have the copyright? If the monkey is too stupid to have any legal standing, why should it be smart enough to trump my IP rights? Where do you draw the line, and are you trying to stand with one leg on either side of it?

HTTP-Yes! Google boosts SSL-encrypted sites in search results

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: $10/yr is the tip of the iceberg

"Browser's hoot when they see a new self signed certificate because there's no trust involved. Anyone could have made that certificate."

Nit-pick: the *next* time you see that certificate you are assured that you are talking to the same person as last time, and with a certificate signed by a CA you are not assured that the person you are talking to is trustworthy, merely that they were prepared to splash the cash for that certificate.

If this is the first time you have visited the site and the certificate claims that it is owned by a big-name brand (and so the CA has a reasonable chance of detecting fraudulent registrations), then the conventional wisdom holds. Otherwise, it's more complicated.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: On balance...

I'm wary, too, and I expect Google to announce next month that they are setting up as a CA, but you are right about encouraging people to use SSL and I agree that this would be a good thing.

Google's 'right to be forgotten': One rule for celebs, another for plebs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: No tax breaks without representation

"2) Google's search index/results for a person is considered to be data regarding that person."

...and that's the mistake, right there. Once you start shooting messengers, messengers learn that the only safe option is just to stop delivering the news. Today's story is that Google now check your location before deciding what to say. It is only a matter of time before they start choosing whether to say anything at all. After all, their core business is a bunch of datacenters in the US. If they were to stop doing business in the EU (ie, start forcing advertisers to do business in the US, in dollars), they'd be pretty much untouchable in a European court. And even if they stopped serving search results to RIPE addresses, the European multinationals would still do business with them.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Slebometer

"In a letter to Europe’s committee of data protection authorities the search giant revealed that any [sic] search query involving a name will trigger the “some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe” notification - whether requests to take down results have been received or not."

Demonstrably not true, as big_D and I have just discovered.

Apple wins patent on charging iThings THROUGH THIN AIR

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Inefficiency is irrelevant

"For example it's generally reckoned that all the TVs we leave on standby require a whole major power station all by themselves. If we banned the power button on TV remotes we could close that station down."

My telly uses about 1W on standby and I don't think it is particularly frugal. Unless you are talking about "we" as in humanity or a fairly small power station, the maths doesn't add up. However, when "standby" was invented about 40 years ago, tellys ran on valves and standby achieved its effects by keeping the valves warm. Maybe that's where this myth came from.

Windows Registry-infecting malware has no files, survives reboots

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: For those that missed it in the article....

"Why the fuck is it possible for a word processing document to reach that deeply into the registry and affect those changes?"

Because the luser in question has loaded that document from their admin account, like everything else that they do. Sane Windows users will probably find that they are immune because the malware authors didn't bother to include a privilege escalation attack in the WORD payload.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "a tool Microsoft uses to hide its source code from being copied"

"Certainly flat text files are LESS resilent than a database with transaction logging and commit / rollback like the Registry. Better in that they can be sometimes human readable maybe. Inferior in pretty much any other respect."

/etc on UNIX systems is often kept under some kind of revision control system.

A similar system could be written for the registry, but I'm not aware of one.

Registry hives can be mounted on other systems if you want to read or recover them offline.

The registry's pre-parsed content is more efficient than plain text, but harder to include comments.

But GUIDs everywhere are just plain evil.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Facepalm

Re: "a tool Microsoft uses to hide its source code from being copied"

Yeah, dunno what the blazes the reference to source code was for and it seems pretty obvious to me that an AV tool could scan the registry as easily as the file system, but why let obvious facts stand in the way of a good piece of scaremongering.

AV tools have been lagging actual malware for ages now. The AV business is a giant scam. Windows is pretty secure if you aren't a dick and use the same account protections that UNIX users have practised for decades.

Oh, and I gather there's a film at 11.

Microsoft's Euro cloud darkens: US FEDS can dig into foreign servers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Since the 90s if not before, the web has been a system - way of life - built (not quite exclusively) on American investment; boat loads of investment. Everywhere else let a few US universities - and businesses spawned from them - get paid to set it all up ... No wonder everyone is now in the mess they are in."

I doubt whether what you say is even true of the English-speaking internet. Also, unless we are restricting ourselves to the protocols rather than the hardware they run on, much of both the telecoms infrastructure and the devices that now hang off it have actually been manufactured outside the US and bought by people outside the US. The internet is more than just Intel, Google and Microsoft. Perhaps even US judges will come to realise this one day.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Nail in the cloud?

I don't expect to see the EU and China frozen out of USD-denominated markets anytime soon, and they are both Quite Likely (tm) to get at least a little arsey about any attempt by US courts to tell them what laws apply to systems sitting on their soil.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

" Because Microsoft is a US company and it "controls" the data held in its overseas servers, they reasoned, the same rules apply."

It would be interesting to hear the opinions of an Irish judge on the question of whether Irish data protection laws don't apply to Microsoft servers in Ireland simply because MS are a US company.

Operators get the FEAR as Ofcom proposes 275% hike in mobile spectrum fees

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: On what planet is the Ofcom spokes person based?

I doubt it matters what Ofcom believe. This will be decided in court, and if the mobile operators lose then they'll find creative ways of ending contracts early and thereby pushing customers back into the marketplace. A marketplace, of course, that now will only include far more expensive offerings.

Has Europe cut the UK adrift on data protection?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: On a personal note

"Should Scotland get "independence", ..."

...then the logical approach for everyone to take in the ensuing negotiations is for RUK to leave the UK, taking the nuclear weapons with them. That leaves the part of the UK north of the border still in the EU, still in NATO, but nuke free and the seccessionists in the south free of the EU but with a boatload of nukes to grease their NATO application.

British Lords: Euro 'right to be forgotten' ruling 'unreasonable and unworkable'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Or we could all just grow up

A simpler approach is for dumb search engines just to deliver results and for the human beings that use them to deploy their far greater intelligence to apply some sense of proportion and fairness to the results.

On the purely technical front, quite a lot of mitigation would be had if search engines didn't bother with results that are more than 10 years old, unless you explicitly ask for it in the search query. Those too stupid to learn how to construct a search query with the relevant syntax would be automatically protected from finding stuff that they didn't know how to handle.

Senate introduces USA FREEDOM Act to curb NSA spying excesses

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Yes, the three-letter agencies will find workarounds and will use them unless there is adequate oversight, but it is still worth replacing legislation that says it's OK to treat your own citizens as the enemy until proven innocent.

El Reg's tone seems to suggest that foreigners shouldn't be too impressed by any of this, but to be honest I am more worried by the US spying on Americans than I am about them spying on me. The latter is, I'm sure, reciprocated. The former is a deeply worrying development in a country that has spent much of the last century saving the human race from some of its worst governments ever. So yeah, go America and re-read that constitution of yours and kick your institutions back into shape. We'll all be better off for it, even if you're spying on us.

Just TWO climate committee MPs contradict IPCC: The two with SCIENCE degrees

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: A Physicist and a Chemist

On the other hand, our two scientists actually said:

"However, there remain great uncertainties about how much warming a given increase in greenhouse gases will cause, how much damage any temperature increase will cause and the best balance between adaptation versus prevention of global warming."

and apart from the first, these are not questions for climate science. The other committee members, with more of an economic background, might be more able to judge.

Scotland's BIG question: Will independence cost me my broadband?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Cameron in the Shetlands

"Why isn't Cameron up there side-side with the Salmond promoting freedom for the oppressed haggis eaters?"

Because he is more effective when he is pretending to be in the "No" camp.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Realism

"Ah yes - Ireland - a little failed democracy inflicting tax after tax, and cut after cut on its citizens."

I haven't noticed anything wrong with Ireland's democracy recently. In the recent past it was a little theocratic for my tastes, but even that seems to be fading. Ireland's problem is that it got savaged by the bankers who were then bailed out by incompetent politicians. *Lots* of countries had that problem recently. (The UK, for one.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Realism

You're assuming that Spain in its current form still exists after the Basques and Catalans realise that you *can* win independence if you just dig your heels in, vote for it, and resist the temptation to shoot anyone.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Realism

BBC Scotland and RTE could just club together. An independent Scotland and an independent Ireland would presumably be friends, right? And they both have *one* language in common (and it ain't Estuary English). And they will both be small countries within the EU with a long shared history and culture.

Stick a 4K in them: Super high-res TVs are DONE

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Speaking as a CRT user...

"So I should pay for crap I don't use?"

No. Someone else pays for the crap you don't use. Once you've designed and tested a universal telly, the cost of taking out features and re-testing exceeds the savings of doing so. It's the same reason Intel put instructions on their chips that most programs can't even see, let alone want.

DAYS from end of life as we know it: Boffins tell of solar storm near-miss

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: power grid

I agree with Ledswinger. 0.88 to the power 5 is about 0.5, which gives a roughly 50:50 chance of a Carrington class event since the sixties and presumably a much higher chance of smaller events that would be a regular problem in the grid, even if they weren't fatal to it.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Ouch

"Too bad most of the oceanic links would get their amps fried and there aren't enough spares to fix even a small fraction of them."

I wouldn't expect EMP to penetrate more than a few feet into salt water, let alone miles, so the oceanic links should be fine.

Sysadmin Day 2014: Quick, there's still time to get the beers in

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Some nice messages

They aren't proper devs if they don't have machines of their own on a private network.

UK.gov's Open Source switch WON'T get rid of Microsoft, y'know

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Macros

"However I don't see the people who have invested time and money into integrated workbooks and documents with dozens of macros & templates dropping them any time soon"

I was one of those people about 15 years ago (when the plumbing was OLE). It took the best part of a decade before MS produced a version of Office that behaved the way it was supposed to, and then for 2007 they just broke it all again and it hasn't worked since. Unless MS have produced a new glue that is *massively* more stable and bug-free than their first effort, I sincerely hope there aren't many people investing/wasting their time on such ventures.

KISS.

MPs to sue UK.gov over 'ridiculous' emergency data snooping law

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Wrong end of the SAM

That "dude" was Mr Putin.

If you really want to "go after" him, you're going to need more than the ability to snoop on UK telecoms.

NO MORE ALL CAPS and other pleasures of Visual Studio 14

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: re: C++11/C++14 features

Thanks for the link. The list under CTP2 looks to be basically empty, but CTP1 seems unusually rich by the standards of recent years.