Posts by Ru 1818 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007
You can very economically fuel these by rendering electric vehicle skeptics into biodiesel and powering a nice efficient generator with the result. You can offset the small volume of emissions this results in against the vast reduction in future emissions that their energy intensive lifestyle would inevitably generate.
Every open source OS and their dog can support ARM as a bulid target, and have done for many years. The fact that a specific distro has broadened its horizons away from x86 doesn't really say much.
What are the actual *platforms* this build can run on?
It's all very well saying 'ooh, it runs on ARM! That's used for everything smaller than a laptop!' but I guarantee you that you won't be running this on your PDA or your smartphone or your washing machine out of the box.
Companies can absolutely function fine by hiring a bunch of people and teklling them to code up extensions to their favourite open source OS.
You get immediate and tangible benefits by paying a bunch of guys to rustle up some nice hardware drivers so you can run it on your latest shiny embedded system or whatever.
What on earth is in it for these companies, that they should foster community support? It sounds like a lot of time and effort, with no guaranteed return. *Maybe* you'll get a lot more testing and debugging, *maybe* you'll get patches from contributors. But if you don't waste their time playing nice to the community and just post a bunch of kernel source patches on a website somewhere, they still have a perfectly functioning system with none of the hassle.
ISPs are quite likely to allocate you a dynamic IP address from a block that reflects your region, for quite sensible routing regions. You can often see this sort of thing simply by looking at reverse DNS names for the IP address currently assigned to you. Here's an example, allocated to a person who indeed lives in Derby, routed via Leicester (as a traceroute proved):
cpc3-derb2-0-0-cust234.lei3.cable.ntl.com
An address being allocated to Cornwall in the morning and the Outer Hebrides in the afternoon is rather less likely.
Furthermore, some dynamic IP allocations are 'sticky' in that they can conceivably remain associated with your net connection for an extended period of time, even if they haven't been statically assigned to you.
Geolocation isn't what makes IP addresses personally identifying, however. It is just one piece of a much larger profile that google can build up about you. Knowing you are connecting via Zen from an IP listed as being located in Bracknell using IE7 on Windows XP means is going to leave you in a pool of perhaps a few hundred or a few thousand people. Once you start searching for baby clothes and donkey porn like you did last week, google will know and could conceivably carry on tracking you even in the absense of the usual google cookie.
That aside, given a time and an IP address, it is quite possible to find out where the connection was made from. Your ISP will have address allocation logs, for example. This can be tracked back to your phone line, your SIM number or a MAC address of a WLAN card, so unless you actively take steps to conceal yourself, you can be found.
This is *potentially* true. But look up the inverse square law, and then you can do a quick bit of calculation to see how many simultaneous calls by people using mobiles a kilometre away from you are required to produced the same microwave power density in your head as a single call coming from a phone you're holding against your ear.
Hint: the answer is something like 'a very large number of calls indeed', and in fact is probably more phone calls than the mobile mast could actually carry. So your 'logic' isn't quite.
The complaints about base stations is that they carry a very powerful transmitter, and their output power levels swamp the level of power it receives from all the associated mobiles phones talking to it.
Isn't the netbook edition of Windows 7 (called limited or basic or started edition, or something equally ominous) basically a crippled version of the full OS so it will run on low-spec hardware?
I wonder how that will go over in the long term, compared to a fully functional and entirely adequate OS like XP.
It seems to be a common theme with linux projects that it is better to blow away all existing code and start again from scratch, or better yet create a new project to duplicate the effort, attract all the cool kids and let the old project die through lack of interest.
The sheer amount of wheel reinvention is amazing. In that respect, Gnome should be praised for actually keeping and building upon existing work. Screw paradigm shifts in user experience; making what they have faster, lighter and more reliable would be a far more laudable goal.
I expect it is too much to hope that any such thing will happen, though.
People have spent many years and vast sums of money on developing bipedal robots, and they *still* such. They have absolutely no benefit, aside from looking vaguely human shaped, and thats hardly a worthy design goal for a robot which is actually intended to get out there and do something useful.
Trying to crack a good cryptographic hash function is so far beyond an exercise in futility I wouldn't know where to start pointing out what a hopeless idea this would be.
But as everyone else has pointed out, if the system doesn't need special hardware then it is inherently useless anyway.
You did manage to avoid noticing the vast swathes of bugger all that make up a significant proportion of the globe. The UK is pretty densely populated and relatively wealthy which will skew the statistics compared to a large but sparsely populated area such as Australia, or poor countriesa which would put CCTV everywhere if they could actually afford it.
Cameras per head of population is a fractionally more sensible metric. A more sensible one might take into account GDP too.
If you take my comfortable salary and extrapolate it out to a few billion people you'll see that most ofthe entire population of the world are reasonably well off.
Similarly, extrapolating the nice roast I had earlier would suggest that the whole notion of 'famine' or 'starvation' is clearly a huge fraud. Maybe all these charities collecting for the so-called 'starving' are paying a load of those rich people though.
Only you have to have the same sort of public key cryptography to show you that the VPN you are connecting to is the one it claims to be and not a fraudulent site, so the problem comes round again.
So your VPN suggestion is totally irrelevant for internet commerce which relies utterly on a trusted third party to verify identities.
Those trusted third parties have proven that they are anything but trustworthy; this is the major weak point not the underlying implementation.
Why have their CA certificates not been revoked?
The whole EV-SSL notion infuriates me. How dare these semicompetent organisations charge an order of magntitude more to do the job they were always supposed to be doing?
SIMS was my first exposure to real enterprisey software as a young and naive IT monkey.
Truly, it is an utterly repellent collection of buggy crapplets, ever so carefully obfuscated at the database and protocol levels to prevent people from attempting to replace any of the system with code that might actually *work*
I always loved the way that the support package was an optional expense... not that anyone would be able to use the software without it, given its tendency to break in various weird and wonderful ways throughout the year whenever an update to fix the last catastrophic problem was released.
Somehow I expect crapita to weather this economic downturn if all their projects work this way.
Whilst I agree that reams and reams and reams of dialog do not a good computer game experience make, reducing everything to 'kill this guy, fetch this crap' is not the answer.
A good *unobtrusive* story with well written dialog can be appreciated by anyone. Locking the player's controls and spewing minutes of exposition at them is infuriating; especially if you come to play the game a second time. Non-awful, non-intrusive background dialog like GLADoS or the Halo marines adds a lot to the game, for example.
Many of my favourite games (fallout 2, deus ex, system shock) could be boiled down to 'kill this guy, fetch this thing' but would be significantly less entertaining without the story that went along with them.
And as for funny-feeling floaty vehicles; one thing I will say about Halo was that the vehicles felt fun. Seriously; fuck realism. You could blast around and speed and shoot stuff up. I don't want vehicles which wallow and turn and accelerate realistically and are a total pig to drive. Where's the fun in that?
Equating civil disobedience with terrorism is a particularly unpleasant school of thought. Similarly equating industrial action with terrorism, as one Aussie politician did not so long ago.
Governments and employers would love everyone to assume they are equal... lets not encourage them, eh?
On the other hand, kidnapping your manager sounds like a crime to me; bit over and above strikes and pickets. He seems to have taken it remarkably well, which is somewhat surprising. I wonder if they gave him the Fight Club treatment.
High bandwidth streaming is pretty much what makes their usual business model fall over and die.
Would make a good market (and actually appropriate) for some kind of high priority traffic service, if it weren't for the enthusiams of net neutrality people to prevent any QoS.
Everyone knows the whole 'redundancy is not backup!' mantra, but evidently not everyone actually believes in it.
Well; this is what happens. If you don't have any disaster recovery plans, you are totally, totally doomed. Good luck suing your way out of a pit you've been digging for yourselves, Carbonite.
The inevitable failure of yet another MS toy notwithstanding, Apple cannot even be remotely described as a nice company and anything that offers an alternative to their heavily locked down and often feature-poor platform should be welcomed.
The fact that every realistic competitor seems to have either buried their heads in the sand or are busy running around like the aforementioned appendage has been chopped off does not fill me with confidence that the smartphone market is going to rise to the new level that the iPhone has set.
I most sincerely hope not. Apple have been dreaming about being a globe-spanning, high-margin monopoly for a long, long time. Quite frankly, if MS suddenly vanished today, you'd be more likely to see commercial linux distributions step in. People like their cheap, commodity hardware, after all; we can't all afford to have overpriced status symbols even if we'd like one.
Oh, and @Havin_it:
The plural of mongoose is clearly polygoose.
Yes.
The compromise affects a LAN segment; computers which will be communicating via network switches which are most likely dumb devices that can do no filtering. Sure, you could configure a firewall on each machine to only communicate with known safe DNS servers, but you're still left with a chicken-and-egg situation which is what DHCP was intended to correct in the first place.
As for blocking the rogue DNS server from accessing the internet, there is absolutely nothing preventing that from making queries to your legitimate DNS servers. Indeed, I'd be surprised if this malware didn't do exactly that, for exactly the reasons people have specified here. All it has to do then is pass on false information to its own clients.
If this version of the malware doesn't communicate with legitimate DNS servers (ie, the ones its own compromised host was originally configured to use, or ones gleaned from legitimate DHCP traffic) you can be assured the next one will.
There isn't a practical network level solution to this, as pretty much everyone, everywhere will be using DHCP on small networks... the fact that limited numbers of networks will have superior (but hugely inconvenient) security will be quite irrelevant compared to the pool of potential victims.
You know, there's a market there somewhere. What you need is a bunch of high speed, powerful 'deep packet inspection' boxes which scan traffic for evidence of malware, and trigger some suitable countermeasures.
Only those sort of devices are remarkably expensive, so I reckon you could probably (part) fund them by using spare traffic-analysis capacity to track browsing habits and serve adverts...
Has EDS ever:
a) completed a project on time?
b) completed a project on budget?
I'm not so naive as to assume that they've ever managed both.
So, moving on, has a major government IT project (regardless of the firm that does the damage) ever:
a) been completed on time?
b) been completed on budget?
I'm not so naive as to assume that they've ever managed both.
What on earth is wrong with these people? Words fail to describe my outrage and bafflement that the same idiots are allowed to keep on making the same catastrophic mistakes over and over and over again.
You rely on google to spend $bn on infrastructure from which they expect to get a $$bn return due to advertising revenue. That is why they can afford to give it away; there's precious little opportunity to make any money from letting people send teeny messages with no useful scope for advertising at them. Behaviour tracking isn't enough to justify the expense. See also: twitter, failure to make big bucks.
In the monumentally unlikely event of google withdrawing free search, there are and always will be free alternatives.
So yeah; poor example.
Soooo... anyone every heard of OpenMoko Neo range? No? Fair enough. There's always projects like RepRap which have full board schematics and firmware code freely available. The arduino system which reprap uses takes the same approach itself.
Then there are things like opencores.org which provide free hardware specifications which you can run on an FPGA.
Of course, most of these have the minor disadvantage that the key components of the system themselves (microcontrollers, FPGAs) are not fully open in the sense of opensparc, and nor do I ever really expect them to be. There's always the risk that the hardware upon which you depend will simply stop being produced, and I do not see home semiconductor foundries on the horizon
Presumably the 'open source hardware' envisaged here is more about standardisation of interconnects and full and open documentation of communication protocols?
Well, good luck with that. I'd be looking at more like 20 years instead of 10.
Off you go then. You won't be missed.
Honestly, does this sort of statement not strike you as utterly retarded? 5 seconds downtime, and in return a secure browser, straight away. None of this wait-til-next-month-if-its-only-critical rubbish you might get with other browsers. Or better yet, maybe they could just ignore these problems, and keep you happy so as to not make you suffer the outrage of automated updates.
Perhaps you get utterly sick of windows update too? When you've found a fully featured and usable and totally bug free system that never requires any security updates ever, let us know.
How on earth did they hit each other anyway? Given the enormous amount of space available and the tiny size of the protagonists, what are the chances that their courses should intersect like that?
If they weren't both missile subs, I'd expect that one was trying to track and follow the other. But this seems totally baffling.
You can see that one of the offending chunks of code is a mindbogglingly stupid hack to get around the fact that all sensible versions of PHP disable the 'register globals' configuration which it would appear that PHPList depends on.
'register globals' was a huge, gaping chasm of a security hole, and pretty symptomatic of the deplorable state of PHP security at the time... re-enabling it to save time updating code was never going to be a good idea.
Ease of coding in PHP, combined with a lassez faire attitude to security, combined with lazy hacks like this mean that cracking a PHPList installation wide open was only a matter of time. I wonder how well other such flaws in the code have been sorted out; the 'patch' issued for this one appears to be yet another hack to cover a hack rather than actually fixing the issue at hand.
Personally, I've always treated PHP applications with far more skepticism than their counterparts written in other languages, for reasons much like this.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
