Re: Scam adverts served by The Register
I'll make sure the ads team sees this. Sometimes, we'll run ads via a network. We have some control over the ads placed.
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3261 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011
Here (paywall). Basically, Philip Nye, an IBM security architect, tweeted: "Since Australia doesn’t have mandatory disclosure laws, will we ever find out when Census data is inevitably breached?"
Which ppl took to mean: "Census will be breached." He deleted the tweet, it seems.
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It's kinda unofficial, really. Up to layer 7 is officially defined, then it gets messy. Typically, layer 8 is the human layer.
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Twitter employs 3,900 staff and is based in San Francisco (a 10 min walk from our office). $700m divided by 3900 is $179,487 per head per quarter, which if you factor in server costs and other expenses isn't too crazy.
Sure, not everyone at Twitter works in SF, I appreciate that. Basically my point is, it employs 3,900 highly paid people who burn through cash like it doesn't really matter.
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You send out an initial message to start the process of mathematically proving that future messages aren't tampered with. You don't route all messages through all nodes.
Basically, you can't hide the fact you're using Tor or Riffle - a snooper can see you interacting with an entry node. However, the snooper isn't supposed to see where you're connecting to. Networks like Tor are supposed to disconnect you from your online activity.
So, for example, snoopers can see you using Tor to reach some kind of system but they don't know which system you're visiting - well, not without some sophisticated timing attacks.
With that in mind, you might as well ping all entry nodes so they can collectively ensure future messages from you aren't tampered with.
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All the money is coming from the UK government. The ESA is just on board to oversee the administration of part of it. Like a startup bringing in managers approved by investors. The UK gov bankrolls the project knowing that clever folks at ESA will be overseeing part of it as well as the UK Space Agency.
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We here in San Francisco published the news hours and hours before the BBC did by listening to the Assembly meeting. At the time we couldn't reach DRS for comment and went with what we had for the UK early breakfast time.
It looks as though the BBC got more info out of them during the day, and really the extra info is that they used a spreadsheet to count up the totals. The main problem, that their software was broken and they had to manually query the database, was broken by us hours ago.
So, OK I'll add in the bit about the spreadsheet. We strive to get all the techie details into stories, but sometimes we have to call time and publish what we've got.
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Can't you even email corrections@theregister.co.uk if you spot anything wrong, so errors can be fixed up straight away, or do you like your comments sitting buried unread for hours?
Edit: Actually, I think it's OK. The article linked to says: "The name is said to derive from one Ned Ludd, an apprentice weaver, who some years earlier smashed a loom in a rage at his master who had beaten him."
So... they did smash looms. They may have smashed other devices, but they also smashed looms - so the article's right and you deserve the down votes.
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"he is here to be the one writer pushing the balance to the right "
The Register is a broad church; Andrew's articles are not our only coverage of the Oracle-Google issue. It's good to air opinions that might otherwise be suppressed because they are unpopular.
FWIW, my personal opinion is that there are pros and cons to not extending fair use to APIs, I just don't want to live in a world in which software interfaces are not covered by fair use. If you want a world with strong control over API ownership, be my guest. I don't want to be on that planet.
For one thing, no fair use means discouraging common interfaces to databases, operating systems, web servers, networking devices - it'll be chaos with no sign of any interoperability.
Sure, you can potentially pay a royalty for using an interface, but then you're at the mercy of whoever is licensing the tech to you. If they play fair, perhaps it'll work out OK. If they play nasty, then you'll refuse to use their interface, come up with or use something similar, and get sued anyway for infringement.
Just make APIs fair use - make it OK to reuse function names and call/return definitions - and then may the best implementation win.
Having said that, I respect Andrew's opinion and I don't see why it should be squashed because it's unpopular in some quarters.
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A code snippet [PNG] appeared briefly in the article, but it was removed because it was a slightly confusing example.
Yes, it showed that Google's implementation of a particular function was very very similar to Oracle's in the Java SDK.
However, the code (dating back to 2010) was used for testing other library functions, rather than providing an app-facing library function, so it never shipped on devices, and would only have been seen by other developers.
It was removed within 30 mins of the story going live after we had second thoughts on it. No conspiracy, just a change of mind. Although it showed Google and Oracle's code were very similar in this instance, It wasn't one of the 37 APIs at the heart of the matter.
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" know the article mentions this, but the headline and the PR department claims still rankle a bit."
Yeah, yeah, all right. I did point out it's based on the A17 and the opening line says "more or less from scratch" – I couldn't really squeeze it into the headline. The A73's microarchitecture borrows a lot of the A17's structure, but various crucial parts have been rewritten like the branch prediction and memory system... if you take a broom and change the stick, head and bristles, I don't think you've got the same broom.
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