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EU court just told UK that the data retention law is illegal - so what did they do? make another law to do exactly the same thing, WTF?

Well, not quite. As far as I understand, the ECJ declared the snooping law unlawful because it was too broad, and outlined what restrictions would need to be placed on any replacement snooping law. So parliament is basically just passing a new law with those restrictions in it to satisfy the ECJ.

Of course, that doesn't make the law right, but then neither was the original law.

I've written a bit about it on my blog.

The ISPs claim that it is impossible for their filters to be 100% accurate

Nobody's asking for it to be 100% accurate, but there's a huge difference between 100% and just 93% accurate.
Considering this is automated restriction of speech, you'd better make damn sure you're atleast in the 99.99% range of accuracy.

Not gonna happen - you just can't make the filters that accurate. The point you seem to be missing is that the people implementing the filters (the ISPs) have been saying all along that it can't be done and they don't want to do it. But the government has ignored them and basically threatened to legislate unless the big ISPs implement filters. So the big ISPs know they have to implement filtering either way, and figure that if they do it "voluntarilly" (i.e. because of threats rather than because of legislation) then they are less likely to end up in court over all this.

So that's where we stand - the government doesn't understand technology so is just demanding the impossible, the ISPs know this is never going to work but have been left no choice.

In a way, I kinda wish the ISPs had just refused because if the government has to legislate there might be a bit more debate over the whole issue. More opinion here.

That depends on how much you're letting spamhaus validate actual positives. It has to go both ways.

We've been having significant problems with the CBL's ill-thought-out policies (and Spamhaus imports data from the CBL)...
http://blog.nexusuk.org/2013/09/problems-with-cbl.html

FWIW, I now have a policy of avoiding Acer like the plague and advising my customers to do the same, owing to their appealing customer support when advised that an entire product line had a bios bug.

http://www.nexusuk.org/~steve/acer.xhtml

TL;DR: one of their lines of laptops has a dsdt bug, I informed them, they weren't interested. I even sent them a patch, still not interested (and decided that completely ignoring my emails was the best approach). To this date they haven't released an updated bios.

FWIW, I now have a policy of avoiding Acer like the plague and advising my customers to do the same, owing to their appealing customer support when advised that an entire product line had a bios bug.

http://www.nexusuk.org/~steve/acer.xhtml

TL;DR: one of their lines of laptops has a dsdt bug, I informed them, they weren't interested. I even sent them a patch, still not interested (and decided that completely ignoring my emails was the best approach). To this date they haven't released an updated bios.

On a related note, I bought an Acer notebook computer this past summer to replace an antiquated IBM (not Lenovo) ThinkPad. The advertisement did not mention hardware VT-x support in the CPU was non-existent.

I've got an Acer... Won't be getting another one - their customer support is atrocious:

Fell at the first hurdle - it ships with Windows and they flatly refused to refund the Windows licence without me physically sending the machine and paying them a "handling fee" far in excess of the licence fee itself (a French court has since ruled that this is illegal, unfortunately the ruling was too late for me).

Secondly, the TravelMate 6410 line (at least) has a firmware bug - the DSDT is broken, I informed them of this, even fixed it and sent them a patch. Their support people did the usual job of only bothering to read the first sentence of each of my emails and drawing their own conclusions about what the rest of the email said. When I asked them to actually read my email they told me they were escalating to a supervisor - I never received any further response from them and they flat ignored further emails from me. In the 3 years since I reported the issue they have not released an updated firmware, despite the fact that they have been made aware of a bug (and been given a fix!) in that entire product line. http://nexusuk.org/~steve/acer.xhtml

Thirdly, it eats batteries for breakfast. I don't know whether its a poor battery or a poor charger, but after a year the battery capacity is down to a fraction of its as-new life. I know that batteries don't last forever and that leaving the machine on charge for most of its life isn't great for it, but no other machine I've ever had has been this bad - the Macbook Pro I've got for testing is subjected to similar working conditions and the battery (over 3 years old) still has excellent life. To make matters worse, Acer consider the battery to a consumable and therefore only consider it (or the charger) to have failed if it dies within 6 months - they flatly refused to replace the battery.

Over all, the hardware itself is not bad, but their complete failure to offer any kind of an after-sales customer service means that I won't be buying another, my company won't be buying any and we won't ever recommend them to our customers.

I have owned a couple of Acer laptops over the years and they were great bang for buck. They were cheap and broke down, but by then I wanted an upgrade anyway. Buying a higher end machine would have still been out of date, I would still want to update, and the resale value would not pay back the difference I initially paid...

I've got an Acer laptop and will never buy from Acer again.

It kills batteries - after only a year their capacity is significantly degraded. But Acer considers batteries "consumables" so the fact that the charger in the laptop kills them isn't covered by the warranty.

They flatly refused to refund my Windows licence fee (first thing I did when I got the machine was wipe Windows since I have no use for it). Not that long after they did this a French court ruled that they weren't allowed to decline to refund the Windows licence so I guess I should've tried again.

The machine has a DSDT bug, which I reported to them, then I wrote a DSDT patch and sent that to them too in the hope that they might release a new BIOS for the machine to correct it. They won't even acknowledge my emails any more: http://www.nexusuk.org/~steve/acer.xhtml

I find the hardware largely ok, but their complete refusal to provide any kind of after-sales support, even for design defects, would stop me buying from them again.

I would say avoid Acer like the plague. I've got an Acer TravelMate 6413 and the whole experience of owning it has been repeated kicks in the teeth.

It shipped with Windows (for which I have no use) and they refused to honour the refund clause in the Windows EULA.

It has a BIOS bug that they refuse to acknowledge or fix, even though I engineered and sent them a fix for the broken DSDT.

It also eats through Li-Ion batteries like nobody's business - I have to replace the battery about every 12-18 months. The battery calibration is also completely broken - I have to recalibrate every few weeks.

The TPM also appears to be broken and I have to pass workaround parameters on the kernel command line to even get a modern kernel to boot, otherwise it hangs up trying to initialise the busted TPM (even when the TPM is turned off in the BIOS).

I would say avoid Acer like the plague. I've got an Acer TravelMate 6413 and the whole experience of owning it has been repeated kicks in the teeth.

It shipped with Windows (for which I have no use) and they refused to honour the refund clause in the Windows EULA.

It has a BIOS bug that they refuse to acknowledge or fix, even though I engineered and sent them a fix for the broken DSDT.

It also eats through Li-Ion batteries like nobody's business - I have to replace the battery about every 12-18 months. The battery calibration is also completely broken - I have to recalibrate every few weeks.

The TPM also appears to be broken and I have to pass workaround parameters on the kernel command line to even get a modern kernel to boot, otherwise it hangs up trying to initialise the busted TPM (even when the TPM is turned off in the BIOS).

It's not illiteracy, it's attention deficit. Why read the whole sentence when you can just read until you've formed an opinion and ignore the rest?

Must work for Acer customer "support"

A quick look at my wardriving log on Google Earth indicates that whilest there are still a lot of unsecured routers the vast majority are secured. And of course, you have no idea how many of those open APs are legitimately open...

So do I, but the data that was on them now occupies a tiny portion of the hard drives in my current computers. It's been copied onto half a dozen different backup formats, and I expect it'll migrate across a multitude more in the course of my life.

It's obvious to us techies, but sadly "normal people" just burns their photos to CD-R and put in on the shelf, expecting it to still work when they next want to use it. Yes, it's stupid, but they don't realise that.

I wrote an article on the subject a few years ago - really the best method is to take regular backups *and* keep the data on a running hard drive.

Either use a VGA card that has composite and/or S-Video outputs that are supported by X, or build a VGA-to-RGB-SCART adaptor if your TV has that as an input option. I guess you might be able to adapt the circuit for displays with RGB component inputs too.

You can make your life a lot easier by using the Fedora Myth(TV)ology FAQ, or, as another poster suggested, Knoppmyth. Personally, I've been using RH since 1996, so I felt much more comfortable using the former approach, and my MythTV box has now been running for about a year. It's a puny Celeron 1.7G with an equally puny 64MB nVidia graphics card, 512MB of RAM (256MB would probably have been enough), 2 Hauppauge Nova-T DVB-T tuners and a 300GB HDD. About the only seriously geeky thing I did was build a VGA-to-RGB-SCART adaptor because I loathe composite and S-Video output.

I remember reading a while ago that NAT actually turned out to be better than IPv6 by virtue of it "solving" the limited number of addresses problem and simultaneously providing a defence against simple hacking attempts by hiding your real IP address.

NAT in itself doesn't provide any extra security - the connection tracking needed by NAT is what provides the security (and you can do this equally well without using NAT). I wrote an article on this subject a while back.

Whiles NAT does to some extent "solve" the limited number of addresses problem, it also creates many more problems. The Internet was designed to be peer to peer but NAT turns it into a client/server model. Whilest client/server works fine for "traditional" applications such as web surfing, it's a major stumbling block for peer to peer services such as VoIP, which have to employ various hacks to trick NATs into letting the peer-to-peer traffic through (with varying degrees of success). The likes of Skype are designed to hijack the connections of random Skype users who don't have NAT and use them to route traffic between peers who do have NAT when the NAT traversal hacks fail.

Even most of the geeks I know don't have new computers. The 1GHz mark was the turning point - machines more than 1GHz are fast enough for most uses.

Yep, I can concur with this point. When I bought my P200MMX workstation, it was a fairly dogs-danglies PC. You couldn't get much faster at the time - I think 266 was about the fastest you could get in the Pentium MMX desktop CPU line. After 3 years it was really starting to show it's age, and after 5 it was painful. My current Athlon XP 2100+ is now 4 years old, certainly wasn't top of the range at the time, and is still perfectly fine speedwise.

Assuming it lasts that long, I'll probably still be happilly using it in another 3 years. (Ok, so the motherboard probably won't last that long - it's suffering from capacitor plague so I'm gonna have to replace the caps). Certainly the only times I find myself wishing for a faster CPU and more memory is when stitching massive panoramic photos.

I'm just waiting to see at what point the computer market collapses - there's only so much bullshitting the marketting people can do before even the most non-technical people realise that upgrading their 2.5 GHz machine to 3.5GHz really won't make web surfing over their 512K DSL any faster. Sooner or later, the majority of people are only going to bother replacing their PCs when important components start dieing (brings me back to capacitor plague...).

With that, harddisks are completely reliable *enough*. Maybe burn a DVD of pics every once in a while, the digicam ones are pretty big. But that's it.

For digital cameras for Joe Public I think the industry needs to develop a _really_ long term and cheap storage medium. I.e. the digital equivalent of 35mm negatives that can be left on the shelf for decades without any problems. I certainly wouldn't trust any of the current technology for that: Writable optical media (CD-R's, etc) has a habit of degrading over time, hard drives eventually die spectacularly (and are rather big for leaving on the shelf) and Flash is quite expensive and I'm not sure I'd trust leaving it untouched for decades. A write-once card the size of Compact Flash that's designed specifically for long-term storage would be nice. (Long term meaning over 100 years I think).

I keep all my photos on my server and they get regular backups to optical media, but "normal people" don't want to do that - they want a cheap memory card that they can burn a set of photos to and then leave in a cupboard.

I personally think that the approach towards broadband was mostly done wrong. The large majority of users should never be fully visible online - those broadband routers should be doing NAT for all but a small minority of users.

NAT is not a security thing. The vast majority of people only want to connect 1 PC to the internet anyway so are far better off with a stateful firewall instead of throwing NAT into the mix (which will come back to bite them in the arse as soon as they use more complex protocols to do stuff like VoIP).

Part of the issue also lies with the fact that most "concious" users load up their PC with firewalls and zonealarm and so forth to the point where its slow because of all the crap on the system.

Sorry, sticking a stateful firewall on the end of a 2Mb DSL connection should have a relatively negligable performance impact. Hell, my old 486 was quite happy doing stateful firewalling on a 10Mb connection.

I don't think that how NAT changes the way the 'net works (I wouldn't go so far as to call it breaks) is going to be that big a deal for most consumers and it's probably a good thing from an ISP perspective.

If the normal customers are doing simple stuff like surfing the web then NAT won't have much impact on them. However, more and more people are doing more complicated things and NAT can be a headache for stuff like VoIP.

Unless you actually need to connect more than 1 machine to the internet you're far better off using a stateful firewall instead of NAT.

Also, while ISPs can't track down all the compromised machines, some simple steps can massively reduce the damage

Blocking stuff by default is a Good Thing so long as the user can remove the blocks easilly (the IETF has made similar recommendations). Unfortunately I think that once a number of ISPs start implementing these default blocks, the rest will follow with a large proportion providing no way of removing the blocking (or maybe an extra pay-for service). Unfortunately I have no faith in the majority of ISPs (especially the larger ones like NTL and BT) having the knowledge or sense to do the Right Thing.

Oh, and my views on NAT are that unless you actually need it to connect multiple machines to the internet it's a headache and should not be regarded as a security thing.

When you go out and buy a new XP PC, or have to reinstall it using the restore CD.. and if you;re a clueless noob like most surfers, that's when you find that NAT is the answer.

NAT is Not a security thing. The security you get out of NAT is a site effect of the connection tracking nature of NAT. If you don't need NAT (i.e. if you're only connecting 1 machine to the internet) a firewall that just does connection tracking is a far better option. Sadly I have yet to see a consumer DSL router that lets you do stateful firewalling without the added headache of NAT.

• Sites dedicated to flash movies (the aforementioned http://www.happytreefriends.com/)
• Places where it will enhance the functionality of a specific part of the site, and there must always be a good fallback for when people don't have flash - i.e. I use Zoomify on my photo gallery pages but it falls back to a perfectly good static image if someone doesn't have Flash installed.

About 2 years ago I bought a HP Photosmart 850 - one of the better prosumer cameras at the time (prices have come down lots and better cameras have appeared in the affordable price ranges now - if I was buying a new camera now I'd be seriously considering an EOS 300D). Up until then I'd not been into photography much, using a APS compact camera.

The HP850 really opened things up for me and I now enjoy taking anything from landscapes to nature to motorsport and other cool stuff

I certainly don't pretend to be good, and often look at professional photos and wonder what they're doing that makes them so much better than mine, but I certainly enjoy doing it.

About 2 years ago I bought a HP Photosmart 850 - one of the better prosumer cameras at the time (prices have come down lots and better cameras have appeared in the affordable price ranges now - if I was buying a new camera now I'd be seriously considering an EOS 300D). Up until then I'd not been into photography much, using a APS compact camera.

The HP850 really opened things up for me and I now enjoy taking anything from landscapes to nature to motorsport and other cool stuff

I certainly don't pretend to be good, and often look at professional photos and wonder what they're doing that makes them so much better than mine, but I certainly enjoy doing it.

About 2 years ago I bought a HP Photosmart 850 - one of the better prosumer cameras at the time (prices have come down lots and better cameras have appeared in the affordable price ranges now - if I was buying a new camera now I'd be seriously considering an EOS 300D). Up until then I'd not been into photography much, using a APS compact camera.

The HP850 really opened things up for me and I now enjoy taking anything from landscapes to nature to motorsport and other cool stuff

I certainly don't pretend to be good, and often look at professional photos and wonder what they're doing that makes them so much better than mine, but I certainly enjoy doing it.

About 2 years ago I bought a HP Photosmart 850 - one of the better prosumer cameras at the time (prices have come down lots and better cameras have appeared in the affordable price ranges now - if I was buying a new camera now I'd be seriously considering an EOS 300D). Up until then I'd not been into photography much, using a APS compact camera.

The HP850 really opened things up for me and I now enjoy taking anything from landscapes to nature to motorsport and other cool stuff

I certainly don't pretend to be good, and often look at professional photos and wonder what they're doing that makes them so much better than mine, but I certainly enjoy doing it.

It's funny how an entire feature can be so insightful about digital cameras, and totally leave out suggestions about photo printers. Quality in prints now is limited to printer quality, not image resolution, if I am not mistaken.

One thing that worries me about non-techies using digital cameras is that they don't seem to give any thought to the safety of their photos (the same applies to other sensitive data - it just seems to be assumed by people who aren't in the know that their data is automatically completely safe, nomatter what they do with it). They seem to do several things with them:

1. get them printed professionally (no problems here, but what do they do with the digital copies incase they want a reprint? Remember that the digital version is the equivalent of 35mm negatives)
2. print them on their inkjet (questionable longevity - photos may well fade quite quickly unless you're using a really top quality printer)
3. Stick them on CD-R (Urk - I've got stacks of CD-Rs that are bitrotten after only a few years - these poor sods are going to come back to their photos in 10 years to find them unrecoverable!).

My personal solution to this problem has been to store my photos on my hard drive and make regular write-once backups of the whole lot onto optical media. I have been asked for my opinion on the storage of long lasting data such as photos a number of times so I eventually wrote a short article on the subject so I could refer people to it when asked. (Comments and insight welcome)

But do not think writing a web site in CSS will solve all your browser compatibility problems.

It solves most of them... especially if you remove IE from the equation.

In the mean time, stick with a combination of CSS AND minimal tables.

I recently redid my website in XHTML 1.1 and made sure I used the correct tags for the data I wanted to present (not the layout). i.e. only use tables for tabular data, menus are lists, etc. It resulted in far neater code and (importantly, IMHO) it presents very readable results in lynx and elinks, which should help provide much more accessible results to people with disabilities. I believe that it is more important to cator for people who are restricted by their disabilities than cator for people who are simply too stubborn to use a reasonable browser.

Since it is my personal site (i.e. not at all commercial - I maintain it purely as a hobby), I decided that as long as it's readable in IE then it doesn't have to look especially nice. Working around all the bugs in IE and making it look perfect would be a complete PITA, but then it always is, nomatter what type of markup you use. Ignoring IE for the most part makes it easier, neater and might encourage people to switch to a real browser.

Get real... the people who want security in the first place WON'T USE WIFI.

No - people who want real security will use secure protocols over WiFi. I want security, and as such I run IPSEC over my WEP encrypted 802.11g network.

Of course a bit of driving around Southampton (UK) shows that there are a hell of a lot of insecure networks and a worrying number where the access points are left in their factory default configuration.

People who don't understand security should not be allowed to set up any publically accessible networks (publically accessible == internet facing or wireless). Like it or not, security does (and probably always will) involve a clue and no amount of whinging by the unwashed masses is going to change that. And why should it - you don't expect someone with absolutely no idea about cars to be able to rebuild their car engine do you?

If anyone has any bright ideas for what to do with really old crap like 386 and 486 era... I can't even get rid of it on ebay.

MythTV works perfectly with a decoder box - you set the input to S-Video (or composite if you can put up with composite quality), tell it to use an external channel changer script and write a short script to send the right commands to the decoder using LIRC and a IR diode.

I use Myth with my Sky Digital box very happilly - my LIRC configuration and channel changer script is on my website. The hardware required is just an IR LED across the serial port (as described on the LIRC website). I also have an IR receiver plugged into the same serial port so I can control Myth with my original Sky remote control.