Posts by Mo

My draft response to the proposals

(to be submitted this week, hopefully)

http://nevali.tumblr.com/post/107732395/protecting-the-public-in-a-changing-communications

Er, hold on

The problem here is that a piece of dubious AdWare is able to serve Google Ads.

And, er, that's it.

The fact that an Ad for RCN shows up - as a result of the adware - when the user is on the RCN site is down to the adware, rather than Google or RCN directly.

Last I checked, Google didn't promote or endorse Adware (quite the opposite, in fact). Did Ben Edelman contact Google to alert them of this issue? What response did he get? -That- would be the story. Instead, this is just another "Google is not not evil" piece of puffery with little substance.

@Adam T

It means you should build it with the 2.x SDK, but Apple's policy is (now) that you should test with both 3.0 beta and 2.x

There are plenty of alternatives

In my experience, searching TPB for anything has given awful results without some serious massaging of the query.

I've not looked at Sphinx itself, but Xapian, on the other hand, is absolutely fantastic (and is used by all manner of sites out there).

Running it here

My home network has a /48 allocated to it. When I hit Google, I do so over IPv6, because my upstream DNS resolver is registered in Google's v6 programme as one of the resolvers it should always return AAAA records for (as opposed to normal, where they only return them if you look up ipv6.google.com to avoid breakage):

[mo@pip ~]$ host www.google.com

www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.

www.l.google.com has address 209.85.135.99

www.l.google.com has address 209.85.135.104

www.l.google.com has address 209.85.135.147

www.l.google.com has address 209.85.135.103

www.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2001:4860:a003::68

Excepting my iPod touch (see iPhone comments from Jez above - and rdar 6747399) and PSP, I think every device on this network has a public, routeable […and firewalled] v6 address. I'd be reading this via IPv6 now if El Reg had v6 transit to its servers. Even The Pirate Bay has an IPv6 tracker.

Indeed, that's the problem: hosting providers aren't willing to support v6. I asked ours and they told us they had no plans at all. MInd you, the more people who ask, the more providers will start to think about it. Same with ISPs (though it's arguably easier to get a tunnel into your network that's suitable for browsing as compared to one for hosting critical stuff).

I think the point of Google's statements isn't that 2009 will be the year of IPv6, but that it'll be the year that IPv6 gets talked about a lot more, and will probably see a lot more growth than it has previously. Lots of people *are* taking an interest, and a lot of the hassles in getting set up from years gone by just don't exist anymore. Getting a tunnel is easy, if you know how.

I'm usually the first to defend Apple...

...but this smells anti-competitive to me. You'd have to go some way to convince me that this clause is legally-enforceable.

@Chris

"Since Google have no clear support route"

If you use paid-for Google Apps, you get dedicated e-mail and telephone support.

Forget the root

The DoC has operated the root zone forever, and the only alternative is worse (IANA itself), so bitch about it *now* isn't likely to achieve much unless a viable alternative is mooted.

But, that has little to do with DNSSEC, other than cementing authority that's already pretty firmly held.

The solution is to distribute the public keys of the TLDs alongside the root NS hints. That _file_ can be signed (e.g., by PGP), which the OS/DNS resolver vendors (who are the ones who pick up the root hints file and distribute it to their users) can verify that it was generated and signed by somebody that they—on behalf of their users—deem trustworthy.

The benefit of this over simply signing the root zone is that it's not any more complicated than the key-distribution mechanism that'll be required for the root zone signing key anyway, and it makes the signature of the root zone irrelevant for most purposes: because the TLD signatures can be verified without referencing the root, it can be signed by the US, or IANA, or nobody at all, and it doesn't make one bit of difference. If the world has a falling-out with the DoC (or IANA), it's a matter for the world's Internet users (via the resolver distributors) to decide who the new trustworthy source of TLD keys is. They could even form a web of trust whereby each vendor picks a TLD, verifies its key in person, and distributes it to the others; no single-point root key distribution required.

Of course, the danger with this is that it would demonstrate how irrelevant IANA really is.

The real question is…

WHY doesn't this set a precedent, and—more importantly—why wasn't this enshrined in law from the outset?

What's the point in feasibility studies if the Government are free to ignore them?

Now all we need…

…is for Google to join the campaign, and we can all watch IE6’s browser-share drop to the 3% of people out there who neither use Google nor an alternative browser.

Moral of the story

a) Don't price EV certificates out of the market. Most clients I know won't bother because the cost/benefit ratio is all wrong

b) Encrypt everything.

I can't see either happening in the near term, to be honest.

NATO

given that Sarkozy is due to reverse de Gaulle's decision and push the French military back into NATO's command full-time, I suspect it's only a matter of time before France is sharing said joint manoeuvre C&C systems.

This is new?

I run applications on a cloud computing platform running OpenSolaris. My apps live in zones. Storage is a combination of ZFS, and ZFS-via-NFS to a Thumper. I pay for it monthly by credit card. Just to complete the circle, I do, from time to time, run MySQL on those servers (though the only bit of Java is a JavaScript minifier). The cloud provider I use isn't exactly a nobody, either.

So, er, what's so newsworthy?

Might it be perhaps because…

…nobody had ever heard of it?

Seriously, it really hacks me off when companies do this: the only time you hear about a potentially good service is when they announce they've canned it through lack of interest, yet no attempt was made to market the service to anybody of any note.

@AC (SVG)

It's PDF rather than SVG because Mac OS X's underlying graphics engine—Quartz—natively renders graphics in terms of PDF-like streams (it's not actually PDF itself, but an internal representation of the primitives, but it means that displaying a PDF is an utterly trivial operation).

Rendering SVG, on the other hand, is fine in a web browser but horrible for basic UI elements given the architecture.

Proper Skype client?

The iPhone/iPod touch is certainly capable of running a full-blown client. It'd be a shame if all we got was the 'Lite' version (which would only work on the iPhone—not the iPod touch).

The biggest thing I use Skype for is SMS from the desktop, to be honest. I'd pay a couple of squids to have that as an iPod touch app.

Is that Safari on the Mac, or on Windows?

’cos on the Mac, passwords are stored on the Keychain, and if you don't unlock your Keychain in the first place, Safari can't decrypt squat.

The default configuration is for your Keychain to be unlocked when you log in, but you can change that easily enough, and set it to to auto-lock under various circumstances, which means you'll be prompted for your Keychain password whenever Safari wants to auto-fill a login form. Hit Cancel and it won't auto-fill a thing.

If memory serves, other auto-fill data is stored in the same way.

Thorny

It's thorny for two reasons, though one far moreso than the other:

1. Trademarks are granted in specific categories (McDonald’s restaurants and McDonald’s Shoe Emporium are two different kinds of business who might hold a trademark on the same thing)

2. The companies aren't actually *displaying* the trademark, the user is just searching for it. To the letter of the law, they've actually not done anything wrong (unless the ad text contains the mark in question).

Users know that sponsored links are just that, which reduces the risk of “likely confusion”, and so are likely to be aware that the sponsored links may include competitors (which could well be to the consumer's advantage, after all).

If the advertisers aren't actually claiming to _be_ the company associated with the trademark, I say let them bid.

iTunes?

One route would be to simply offer programmes as free rentals on iTunes UK for 7 days. BBC WW and Channel 4 (and Sky, and many others) already *sell* the programmes on iTunes, and we know the iTunes Store supports rentals now. I suspect some hefty negotiating regarding the logistics of it would have to be done, but that's a business, not a technological issue.

It's not the ideal, universal solution for several reasons, but if they want a unified platform which isn't tied to any of the channels.

Inflicting?

I'm not entirely sure how complaining that it's broke is inflicting a view on users, really?

Sounds a bit like Zattoo

…except as a web site instead of a (rather good) standalone app.

Or, you could just…

…serve up a local copy of urchin.js, neatly avoiding the whole problem.

next version of AIR to use Squirrelfish?

So if the next version of AIR is going to use Squirrelfish, does that mean Adobe will contribute ActionScript language features (packages, classes, method/property visibility, etc.) to it?

By the sounds of it, ECMA's going to end up irrelevant—even though they rejected ECMAscript 4 as proposed by Adobe, all of the runtimes will likely end up with support for all of the proposed ES4 features *anyway*. Possible exception of Microsoft's, but Adobe could possibly pull a clever trick in bundling a WSH engine along with the Flash player to render this moot.

I think you'll find…

Apple just missed a trick when they approved this initially, that's all, and have belatedly pulled it when they should have to begin with.

No conspiracy, really.

In the US…

…this is illegal (First Sale Doctrine).

Don't know about Blighty or the rest of the EU; I suspect similar measures exist, though.

Whu…?

Let me get this straight… a lawsuit over an anti-piracy system introduced by an OPTIONAL update that does nothing except reset your wallpaper once an hour?

I thought the USians were lawsuit-happy. Jeezo.

Presumably then…

…you'll be required to provide your passport number when making a call from a payphone?

Or will they all just have CCTV and facial recognition?

So, what's next?

Terrorism is the current hot potato killer issue.

What's next?

How ridiculous does it get before people start to say “actually, hold on… this is entirely disproportionate?” I know it IS disproportionate now, but it's still an (admittedly vocal) minority actually saying as much. Perhaps everybody should be monitored to ensure that errant pedestrians can't stray onto a busy road and get themselves knocked down? Perhaps police officers should be stationed at the doors to every local pub to ensure that drink driving doesn't occur? Perhaps all kitchen knives should be licensed to qualified “home chefs” to ensure that knife crime is kept to a minimum?

Sorry, Mr Hoon; you were an idiot in defence, and you're still an idiot now. The biggest civil liberty of all is to live without repression, either from terrorists OR from the Government. At the end of the day, if you can't have that, it doesn't matter who's doing the repressing, as many other governments of dubious repute across the world have demonstrated.

Newsflash

Cheap application of some kind doesn't have five-nines uptime.

If you don't want the trouble of installing, configuring, patching, feeding, watering, developing and otherwise maintaining your own global e-mail infrastructure, you either pay for it or get it for free. Either way, you get what you pay for.

Last I looked, Google Apps was quite explicit about exactly what guarantees you get for your money (free or premier). The fact is, the occasional glitches pale into insignificance as compared to the cost of running the infrastructure yourself for many people. You don't get something for nothing, though.

wee?

Defacement, disgruntled columnist, or PEBCAK?

Uh, so…

So if he's been indicted, does that mean the accounts DID belong to Palin?

Define 'background'?

My iPod touch receives push notifications of e-mail when I've got other things running (it 'pings' at me at exactly the same moment my Mac does, give or take half a second, when new mail arrives)

Are you perhaps confusing push e-mail notification with the generic push notifications SDK which was removed during the 2.1 beta timeframe, and is expected to make a return once Apple is damned sure it's got the infrastructure right for running it?

Not being funny

But I'm not sure we've got £12bn to spare, let alone what it'll *actually* cost.

I'll chuckle

If it turns out they were right and a black hole does accidentally get created which ends up destroying the whole planet.

I see the point

I think creationism is bunkum (lots of natural things don't demonstrate a huge amount of intelligence in their design, unless you can also attribute malice)

However, being able to explain why creationism isn't science and evolution is is entirely sensible, and that sort of analysis is a skill that children should be taught (logical, rational, reasoning applies to a whole bunch of things, after all).

The money quote is:

“teachers need to be in a position to be able to discuss science theories and explain why evolution is a sound scientific theory and why creationism isn’t”.

This is entirely spot on. Teachers AND children need to be able to do this.

Re: myspace - on a BB screen?

It probably does it the same way MySpace for the iPhone (launched months ago, incidentally) does it: by not rendering any of the actual pages, and instead presenting the information from them within a useable native UI.

Indeed, the MySpace iPhone app is quite nice… at least, compared to actually having to use the MySpace site, at any rate.

What's the point?

I mean, seriously. Why?

It's lovely that Seoul and Stockholm have mobile coverage underground, but the reason we haven't done this is that no bugger actually *wants* everybody to have mobile coverage underground.

It's a PR exercise and a source of irritation.

Free

It's pretty simple, really…

With e-mail providers, you have many many choices. You are under no obligation to pick the one which is free and serves targeted ads. Personally, I do… for some things. For others, I have a server (which I own) in a rack (which I rent) which handles things instead.

If you want free e-mail, there's going to be a trade-off. There has been for as long as free e-mail has existed. If you don't like it, pick another option.

No uptake?

Let's see, the serviced offices I'm in? Free wifi for all tenants and visitors (there's a Café on the middle floor), with encrypted/authenticated VPN access to the tenant’s VLANs if required.

If I go into the city centre, I can't move for useable networks. My iPod touch has Wifi most places, thanks to a £3.99/month subscription to The Cloud (the only exceptions seem to be places where BT OpenZone or T-Mobile have muscled in first, with their exceptionally expensive Wifi-only packages). If I really have to, I can fall back to my 3G phone, but in all honesty it's rare most places I go.

Femtocells are currently even more bluesky than metropolitan WLAN. It's probably more likely to happen (although very likely restricted to the enterprise space), but it's hardly the case that people are dropping Wifi for cellular all over the shop.

Um

The icon is retarded.

However, defaulting to compatibility view JUST for intranet-mode sites is entirely sensible. it completely avoids the problem that Microsoft has had in the past—that enterprise customers and the entire rest of the world had differing requirements.

Let intranets be viewed in compatibility mode. None of us web developers will actually care, because all of the stuff WE deal with will be standards-compliant.

Meanwhile, enterprise developers who are stuck with a horrific godawful legacy mess won't have to scramble to fix them.

The fact that IE has "security zones" is something that was completely forgotten about in the debate over the IE8 meta tag, and making use of them is a rather elegant sidestep of the whole problem.