Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
"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.
"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?
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
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.
"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.
" 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.)
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.
"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.
"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.
"Killing it all at the ISP (or even at the in home router) kills it for adults as well..."
whereas trying to kill it at any interior point in your home network means it doesn't cover all the devices that the kids have access to. Particularly if you are relying on some PC software, you are missing your telly, your tablets, your gaming consoles, your phones, and quite possibly other gizmos that an old fart like me isn't aware of yet.
"I ride to work with a helmet cam for this reason."
Car drivers can get dashboard cameras, too. I think this will become increasingly common. A relative was involved in an accident recently and pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the cars coming the other way was a driving instructor with a dash-cam and so there was HD video footage of the whole thing. Made the insurance paperwork *much* easier.
I can see a time coming when you get a reduction in your premium if you have cameras on your car. This is not because it lets your insurance company screw you when it was your fault, but rather because it makes it so much harder for the other guy's insurance company to argue when it was his fault.
"The U.S. has between 15 and 40 million people here illegally. We have no idea who their allegiance is to."
If a foreign power was able to land an army of 15 million troops (or spies) on your territory, I think you'd reckon you'd lost whatever war you'd been fighting. It seems a safe assumption that most of these people would, given the choice, gratefully pledge their allegiance to the US, just like your ancestors did. They're probably doing the jobs that US citizens don't want to and keeping their noses clean in the process because they *really* don't want to get involved with the police.
It is an established fact that in the immediate post-war period, the US intervened to prevent Italy from going communist. They then spent the next few decades interfering in all sorts of countries to swing the local government their way. We now also got all the post-Snowden fallout about what the NSA have been up to.
I'd take it as read that any electronic voting software used in national elections in any country in the world has been the target of a serious effort by more than one foreign power to force a particular result. It is simply naive to imagine that these people would leave such things to chance, or to the enemy's hackers.
Your story actually flags up the article's example as slightly bogus. If the "Thing" is important enough that I worry about it falling off the net even temporarily, then I'm going to insist on it phoning home to the router every so often. OTOH, if I'm more concerned about saving power, I don't mind if it falls off for a while and then sorts out its new address when it finally returns.
And one of the big differences between now (as well summarised in h4rm0ny's reply) and then is the off-the-cuff remark that Thompson was able to give the first version of his most evil compiler (that didn't need the hack to appear in the source code) to all the relevant people under the guise of an update. I don't believe anyone could do that now, so the hack would always be in plain sight if you went looking for it.
Deprecation achieves very little unless you can persuade people to re-write old code. Otherwise, compiler vendors have to provide two "modes" of compilation: strict and legacy.
Much the same goes for loud compiler warnings. People just compile their "old" code with the warnings off. However, these *can* be used to ensure that nasty old practices are not accidentally re-introduced in a modern codebase.
From your heartfelt complaints, I infer that you were once exposed to some complete idiots who took the C++ language spec as a challenge, and you've developed a hyper-sensitivity to feature abuse as a result.
For code like this, I'd reckon that idiomatic C++ would differ from idiomatic C only in using constructors and destructors to automate memory management and structure initialisation/cleanup. There might be a large-integer class with overloaded arithmetic operators, but if you can't handle using infix operator notation for integer arithmetic then you probably can't handle the theory behind SSL.
I'd expect an almost line-for-line correspondence between the two code bases. I'd expect the two compilers to generate almost identical code. I'd expect an experienced C coder with only a passing knowledge of C++ to be able to read and maintain the C++ safely.
C++ was largely developed by experienced C coders who wanted to make it easier for themselves to write C code, and one of the basic design principles is "no room for a lower level language, except assembler", so all the bare-metal tricks beloved by C coders are valid C++. A Real Programmer, of course, can write FORTRAN 66 in either language.
/* can't happen */ ??
Isn't that most portably spelled "abort()"?
If the compiler can prove your assertion, it will generate no code. If it cannot, then it will cost you a few bytes of code. Either way, each time you change the surrounding code, the compiler will re-check. On any given platform, there may be non-portable alternatives that turn mistakes into a compile-time error.
"And you can't afford to leave any clues in memory which might be reallocated to a different process afterwards."
Perhaps I'm just playing Devil's Advocate here, but if you are running on an "OS" (and I use the term loosely) that doesn't zero pages before handing them to another process, then you're wasting your time worrying about security.
"I wonder what it feels like to work on this stuff?"
You tell yourself that snipers are the most efficient and humane operators on the battlefield. You tell yourself that this will help our side win against their side. You tell yourself that the basic tech will be developed anyway and in twenty years it will be trivial to buy the necessary parts off the shelf, so you are simply making sure that our lot get it first.
You tell yourself that our arms dealers won't be given special credit facilities by our government to enable them to sell this to the other side, who can't otherwise afford it because they've hammered their own people (and economy) into the ground. Then you shoot yourself.
I wonder what it feels like to work in the foreign office.
"This is also what all those US startups developing "NSA proof" email don't seem to get: the technology becomes entirely irrelevant if you can be legally forced to cough up the data in cleartext."
I'm sure the startups understand this point. It's their prospective customers who don't.
"Browsers aught to have a 'Allow Tool Bars' option, which if not enabled, won't allow their use at all."
The difficulty there is writing such a browser in a way that lets the human make the decision but prevents a copycat program from automating exactly the same steps. Generally speaking, the programmers most willing to spend time and effort posting "raw input" messages are exactly the ones that sane users least want to be able to impersonate them.
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