Posts by Nick Kew 2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
You're doing better than me if you could contact Virgin in the first place. And when I tried, I had evidence like speedtest results.
I must've been lucky with BT. When my line died, I got a fix within a few hours.
Could it be because I'm a "boiling frog" customer, and don't trouble a provider just because the speed I'm getting is only 10% of what's advertised, but only when it fails altogether?
The "upskirting" bill[1], recently in the news, had a two-year maximum sentence. So would appear to be serious crime.
So can we infer this bill is all about permitting investigators to collect and use up-skirt data?
Elements of the BBC seem to be firmly on that hard-brexit bandwagon now.
When the news of Davis resigning came, I naturally thought "He's getting out before the blame gets big". Kind-of like Blair did.
But then he was interviewed on the Today programme, and he convinced me it wasn't just that. He was actually pretty supportive of his leader, just saying he was no longer the man to deliver. On the other hand, the interviewer was trying hard to goad him into a proper Toffoon[1]-style attack on May. Indeed, come to think of it, the Beeb seem to have been trying hard to goad every recent (brexiteer) Tory interviewee into talking about a new leadership challenge: "won't the 52% feel betrayed?"
I predicted two years ago the extremists would hijack the brexit agenda ("The tail that wags a very big dog"). I couldn't have put so many faces to those extremists back then, and it's interesting to reflect how, for example, Boris and Farage seem somewhat to have swapped roles since then.
[1] Boris or Rees-Mogg. The ones who should have stayed firmly within the pages of P G Wodehouse.
Hmm, this reporter evidently isn't in Blighty, where the trains have been kind-of stopped for months now. Is there an evil government (other than our own) we can blame?
Does Oz have a problem with other Chinese suppliers of IT/comms kit? And on a slightly similar note, are they on the anti-Kaspersky bandwagon?
You're on much the same page as Darwin's contemporaries who "disproved" evolution by cutting off rats' tails and observing that the rats' children - through a number of generations - were still born with tails. It's easy to knock down a strawman.
The problem with the patent system today is in the practice - as a deadly instrument of piracy - not in the original principle of rewarding inventors. AKA, rule by lawyers.
In response to some of the comments here:
A patent isn't for some broad, familiar concept like searching a filesystem. It's for a particular method of search. Thus for example something like a hash or a btree might be the basis for a method. But not an actual hash or btree - as those are of course obvious prior art. The concept of an SQL View wouldn't be patentable, but a method of doing it might be.
I certainly wouldn't want to defend the patent system, particularly as practiced by the US as a weapon of economic imperialism. But better to focus attention on what patents really are, rather than a misunderstanding.
Has anyone looked into whether this story (last week) might be relevant? California's own GDPR?
Many years ago I used to frequent newsgroups on web development subjects. This was a big FAQ: lots of people asking how to protect a page, and many who had trouble with "you can't". Even when viewing source was explained (as in the FAQ).
@Mycho - alternative solution - read the page in question in a text-only browser such as lynx. I do that from force of habit, having started before the days when graphical browsers had the kind of tools you use.
Many years ago I had a friend at college who, for a kind of party trick, would easily pick the padlocks on student trunks. Took just a few seconds and you'd have to be watching quite closely to see he didn't have a key.
He never abused his ability, but he would pick a lock, then put it through a piece of paper on which he'd written "Get a better lock!".
I don't recollect witnessing it, but I think he also did that to bikes, and was dismissive of big heavy expensive D-locks that were really secure against being broken but could be quietly picked in a few seconds.
Not sure which of them should be fired ...
But surely not the security guard scapegoated in the first story. When you smell and see fire, you don't hesitate, you use the emergency button to shut down kit that could turn it into something much, much bigger and altogether more catastrophic.
Well, on that basis, this is entirely Gentoo's screwup and could equally well have happened on their own non-github infrastructure.
More than that, it was github noise - automatically generated email - that alerted folks to the issue. You tell us that, without that noise, it might have remained undiscovered for ... who knows how long? I hope gentoo's non-github infrastructure benefits from the safeguard of a comparable level of noise!
Whoops!
Never mind the Sermon on the Mount. The Bible contains more hatred and hate speech than you've probably encountered anywhere else in life.
Dixit Dominus? This is a God who not merely perpetrates unimaginable horrors, but revels in ever-more-horrific weapons of His genocide.
Elijah? The absolutist Man of God who brings destruction on the godless, brings down the wrath of the powerful on himself, perpetrates massacres and genocide, flees into the mountains, and is eventually elevated to heaven in a euphemistically-violent death. The perfect role model for Bin Laden (or perhaps for what Bin Laden might have been if the 9/11 planes had set off nukes).
St Paul? The classic psychopath who founded a Church in the name of a prophet who had conveniently been dead for a generation.
Samson? The hero who falls from grace but redeems himself in a final glorious act of suicide bombing?
Blessed is he that taketh the Children of the Heathen, and casts them upon the stone.
Swings and roundabouts. The '80s were much worse than today if you had to rent a home in the open market (which basically didn't exist - the 1977 Rent Acts had scared off landlords, leaving only those who were at least borderline-gangsters in the market). But the student life was great!
And "snowflake" is another inappropriate term. It's not the young folks who chose to grow up in bubble-wrap, or who created the environment that elevates a noisily-self-indulgent minority and portrays them as representative.
However with secret budgets you can hire the most expensive, who might even be good at their job.
My experience on MoD contracts (back in the 1980s - I've avoided it since) suggests otherwise. Secrecy was a great cover for spectacularly bad work.
Broadly his response is that Article 13 doesn't break anything, but that it has the potential to cause a lot of harm if applied badly or worded poorly.
Seems reasonable. And certainly an approach Sir Humphrey would be happy with.
Isn't there an additional problem with an EU directive, in that national governments might twist implementation of it to their own Agendas? In the case of UK governments, that could be anything from US or other lobbyists to deliberate sabotage in the interests of discrediting the EU directive.
You may be reading the wrong Penny Dreadfuls.
I have quite a lot invested in VC: the dividends pay the rent! No debt involved: just supporting growing business.
Though not mature business like SuSE: that's a different ballgame. In the absence of actual knowledge, I shall reserve judgement on the new owners.
I call BS, there's not a developer alive who doesn't think he can do a sysadmin's job better.
I've certainly encountered sysadmins whose job I can do better than them. In some cases I did - 'cos otherwise it just wouldn't have got done.
But I wouldn't say that of sysadmins in general. Nor would I wish to antagonise a sysadmin by backseat-driving the job, unless it was clear that the individual was one of those who really need my help.
I must be too boring: always been too super-careful with distant machines. In setting up a firewall, I've used a cron job to reset-everything every few hours, as an ultimate failsafe against accidentally locking myself out. Stop the cron job only when finished configuring and verified my own access.
Nowadays I have a cloud-based server and a web-based control panel. I can ssh in as root, but for something like a reboot I'll use the web panel to protect from certain possible accidents.
If you take a look at the time configuration in a typical consumer computer, you'll see one or two NTP servers nominated.
Erm, yes. A typical consumer computer is a consumer of NTP. It doesn't need nor expect atomic-clock accuracy. If it's within UDP-packet timeout time of its ISP's ntp server, that's plenty adequate. Or if it just polls time hourly, daily, or probably even weekly, that'll do.
Need more accuracy? Then you're not a consumer-grade 'puter. You want a competent sysop to configure your NTP with lots of peers, and no doubt other critical setup.
Methinks this is baked in. The protocol is the quintessential UDP user: better to lose a packet than to use a delayed packet! Configuration allows for different levels of operation: peer network, polling frequency, etc. Dammit, when I first set up NTP I used chrony not ntpd, precisely because of its advertised ability to deal with intermittent connections.
I think you're saying much the same as I was about to.
We seem to be describing a (new?) set of methods to accomplish attacks that are already well-known on the 'net in general. Traffic interception and misdirection are risks we all know about, and choose whether to live with or protect against according to the nature and sensitivity of whatever we're doing. Thus reading El Reg, it's no big deal if Evil-MITM interferes. But doing my banking, I want security!
There seems to be a deeper unaddressed question, of which this assumption is just one facet. What is ad fraud in the first place?
I'm sure we could all devise examples that are or aren't ad fraud. But more fundamental than just the inevitable big grey area, the whole term is undefined. Even the examples in the article are mostly vague as hell.
Where do we all stand on El Reg's more egregious clickbait? Or the high-pressure announcements: you have until midnight tonight to register for [foo] (before the already-outrageous cost doubles)?
Where you download from should have very little bearing on security. A cryptographic chain of trust works just as well with something off the back of a lorry as with the most trusted origin.
I wouldn't rely on a "gentoo.org" address for my security: that would open me to any number of attack vectors. Verifiable PGP signatures of verifiable gentoo personnel work altogether better.
If you happened to download a fresh .iso, and have no or inadequate connection to the Strong Set, then you have a bootstrap problem.
Anyone else should surely be protected by a chain of trust leading at the very least back to what they originally installed, and supported by signatures within the Strong Set.
Or are you suggesting that (of all things) a techie-oriented Linux distro has no basic security in its distribution? That Gentoo is doing the spooks' bidding by laying itself wide open to the insertion of spyware, government-sanctioned or otherwise?
I see the acquisition *as such* as neither good nor bad. I'll reserve judgement until and unless MS do something that affects me and/or my projects, such as change the T&Cs or push me towards their choice of dev tools/environment.
I'd say exactly the same if it had been borged by Google, or A N Other bigco.
Certainly wouldn't change the name. Despite being very disappointed by the only other "git" I've encountered in recent times: namely a wine branded as "Old Git" which I bought on the strength of the name and a "try anything once" principle.
@Teiwaz - we were just talking about that a couple of days ago, as we walked a scenic section of coast path with ample scope for smugglers alongside the leisure boats of the modern rich. Can't see anyone finding the money to restore Napoleonic-era defences.
Though of course if there's no enforced border in Ireland, the smugglers will have a line of even less resistance to bring Trump's industrial-scale farmers' growth-hormone-filled beef into the EU until road and rail capacity is exhausted.
You describe the very battle the US government attempted to fight back in the 1980s and 90s: the early days of modern cryptography.
I don't remember just when they gave up that battle (sometime around the turn of the century), but I do recollect it was standard that you'd have to go to a non-US download site for a crypto-enabled version of anything, and that US-based organisations had to leave crypto to non-US parties: hence for example early SSL versions of Apache from Ben Laurie in the UK using an OpenSSL predecessor from Eric Young in Oz. Unless you were prepared to do long legal battle with the US govt!
That reminds me of the splendid comedian and activist Mark Thomas, who has indeed pulled stunts like that when the law gets too stupid.
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