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User: Antony+T+Curtis

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  1. Hmm... perhaps a more passive review? on French Blogger Fined For Negative Restaurant Review · · Score: 1

    How about leaving a review which essentially only states: "I cannot complain about the service nor the food."

  2. Re:1990 called on Philips Ethernet-Powered Lighting Transmits Data To Mobile Devices Via Light · · Score: 1

    1990 called. It wants its IR LAN back.

    Oh cool... I have an old Nokia which supports IRDA.

  3. Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons, on Harvard Study Links Neonicotinoid Pesticide To Colony Collapse Disorder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder how Bayer is going to keep this new study out of their court case where they're suing the EU for banning neonicotinoid pesticides.

  4. The real solution... on Internet Transit Provider Claims ISPs Deliberately Allow Port Congestion · · Score: 1

    The real solution is that:
    1. More content needs to be accessible via peer-to-peer.
    2. ISPs need to have content proxies and encourage their users to use them.
    3. Don't use "transparent proxies" because they're frequently worse than useless.
    4. Static data shouldn't be served via HTTPS but instead by some kind of GPG content encoding via HTTP so that it may be cached.

    Just my 2.

  5. I have it disabled. on New Zero-Day Flash Bug Affects Windows, OS X, and Linux Computers · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I deliberately do not install Flash on my computers _and_ I deliberately choose to not install any of the third-party work-alikes.

    If the content owner only publishes content in a SWF, it is not worth my bother to look at it. Okay, I can't view video clips in Facebook, but if it is an embedded youtube video, usually I can view it just fine by going to youtube's website.

  6. Democracy at work on Verizon and New Jersey Agree 4G Service Equivalent to Broadband Internet · · Score: 1, Insightful

    People get the government that they voted for. If they are upset, they need to regard and blame their neighbours.

  7. Re:Nonsense. on Should Microsoft Be Required To Extend Support For Windows XP? · · Score: 1

    Microsoft should be under no further obligation to its customers with respect to Windows XP.

    For free? I agree they should have no open ended support obligation. That does not mean however that their customers should be forced to spend money on software that does nothing new that they need.

    However, if individual customers are willing to _pay_ a subscription for further support from Microsoft, they should be allowed to do so.

    Microsoft has taken that option off the table. So exactly what do you propose as an alternative that doesn't involve paying hundreds to thousands of dollars to buy new computers and software that many of us do not actually need?

    The UK Govt is among one of their customers who is going to pay Microsoft for further Windows XP support.

    For people who are not willing to pay, Windows XP will continue to work as it currently does. Third party vendors are likely to continue to provide antivirus updates or perhaps even binary-patching the existing code to continue to operate - that is the model with OS/2 continues to exist today even though the product hasn't been supported by IBM since 1998.

  8. To be expected. on Dyn.com Ends Free Dynamic DNS · · Score: 1

    Just for convenience, I have been a paying customer of Dyn for a couple of years, now.
    It is a sad end but it will not change my use of their services.

  9. Microsoft has gone above and beyond... on Should Microsoft Be Required To Extend Support For Windows XP? · · Score: 1

    No other publicly available product has ever had such a long support duration as Windows XP has had.

    Microsoft should be under no further obligation to its customers with respect to Windows XP.

    However, if individual customers are willing to _pay_ a subscription for further support from Microsoft, they should be allowed to do so.

  10. Smart move, on Microsoft Ships Surface Pro 2 Tablets With Wrong, Slower Processor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Lets face it: They're probably sitting on a huge amount of old inventory and for every 1 semi-tech savvy customer who specifically wants the faster CPU version, there will be 1000 customers who wouldn't know the CPU from their elbow.

  11. Leverage existing users.. on Microsoft Dumping License Fees For Windows Phone? · · Score: 2

    If Microsoft is really playing serious to make people switch to Windows Phone, they will have to somehow make syncing contacts, emails and calendars between Windows PC and Apple/Android not work as well as with Windows Phone.

    It would likely open themselves up to anti-trust suits but they already know how to handle that.

  12. Re:Low hanging fruit... on BPAS Appeals £200,000 Fine Over Hacked Website · · Score: 1

    That's not how ICO fines work.

    The way they work is this: If you suffer a data breach that the ICO hears off, they'll investigate.

    Once the investigation is complete, they'll do a few things:

      1. Write a beautifully-worded press release explaining exactly what you did wrong and put it on the news wires.

      2. Write an equally beautifully-worded report explaining what you did wrong in explicit detail.

      3. Issue a thumping great fine.

    It's important to note that they don't have to take an organisation to court to raise this fine. It's the other way around - if your organisation gets fined, it's down to you to raise an appeal.

    Parent posting needs to be modded up.

  13. Happens in more paranoid outfits on Ask Slashdot: Does Your Employer Perform HTTPS MITM Attacks On Employees? · · Score: 2

    A previous employer, a game company whose name rhymes with lizard, uses MITM proxy ... All their machines use their custom cert so that their made-up cert shows 'green' on the location box when any user uses a secure web site.

  14. Re: Warranty Shouldn't Matter on GPUs Dropping Dead In 2011 MacBook Pro Models · · Score: 2

    This is an industry wide issue thanks to RoHS. This isn't just Apple, this effects Dell and HP laptops that have high temp GPUs. The XBox 360 is another perfect example. The problem is caused from the constant thermal cycling causing expansion and contraction as it cools. Like bending a paper clip, over time metal fatigue sets in and cracks the solder.

    AFAIK, they still use tin-lead based solder in medical equipment, even the new stuff, for this reason. The consumer industry went along with the RoHS stuff because they knew it was a form of built-in obsolescence. Even the tin whisker problem has been known about since the 1960s.

  15. Symbolic on Alan Turing Pardoned · · Score: 1

    A gesture that the UK Govt did wrong at the time ...

    We must never forget that sometimes, the laws are wrong and cause great people to suffer or die.

  16. Re:fun trivia on Can the US Be Weaned Off Ethanol? · · Score: 1

    Hmmm. Yeah, you're right. The stuff I had seen is for an obsolete manufacturing process and doesn't apply to the bio-engineered solution which is used in the USA.

  17. Re:fun trivia on Can the US Be Weaned Off Ethanol? · · Score: 1

    Do you have a link describing this process? Or are you making this up?

    http://www.iatp.org/files/421_2_105026.pdf

  18. fun trivia on Can the US Be Weaned Off Ethanol? · · Score: 1

    The ethanol used for fuel is made from industrial grade corn syrup. Because the corn syrup used is not food-grade, it is usually made using a process which uses mercury. So, the combustion of fuel with ethanol is actually putting mercury into the environment.. Mercury is considered a worse toxin than lead but it's arguably at much smaller quantities.

  19. Re: @slashdot: use https per default! on British Intelligence Responds To Slashdot About Man-in-Middle Attack · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Although I like where your head is, wouldn't the CPU power required to do on-the-fly GPG decoding of content be prohibitive? Or am I misunderstanding the proposed solution?

    A large amount of the content on the internet is static. The static assets can be stored on the disk, already signed. This has the added advantage that HTTPS cannot provide: The static assets are cacheable and they are tamper-proof, should the server be compromised.

    When it comes to dynamic content, one can 'cheat' a little by reusing the same session key for the same connection. The startup cost is not much different than existing HTTPS which uses DH for key exchange.

    It's not going to be much slower than what we have today with HTTPS for interactive sites, where humans are the slow link in the chain.

  20. Re: @slashdot: use https per default! on British Intelligence Responds To Slashdot About Man-in-Middle Attack · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Using HTTPS is not the solution when the only thing people see is that some trusted certificate was used. If a trusted Certificate Authority was compromised or issued `fake' certificates for government spy agencies, the target wouldn't know that a MITM attack has occurred because the little green icon is showing just fine.

    However, if we had something like a GPG content encoding, if the site hasn't already been trusted by the user, red flags will immediately be showing.

    Like as like not, with the proliferation of CAs which exist, MITM attacks are easier than ever because people have been conditioned to trust HTTPS.

  21. Playing devil's advocate... on CryptoSeal Shuts Down Consumer VPN Service To Avoid Fighting NSA · · Score: 1

    I wonder what the public reaction would be if some pro-democracy dissident who is operating covertly in their own hostile country is murdered and the country gives a press release saying that they couldn't have found their criminal if it wasn't for the help of the NSA compromising internet security...

    Does that put the NSA/FISA on the side of dictatorships and other anti-freedom nations?

  22. Power management on NSA's New Utah Data Center Suffering Meltdowns · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They probably used a power budget similar to the public Facebook datacenter data but then decided to run their machines on Windows Azure.
    I have noticed that power consumption of my computers is significantly higher when running Windows - and the laptops have seriously reduced battery life, even while doing nothing.

  23. Open Government Inituitive on Microsoft Azure Platform Certified "Secure" By Department of Defense · · Score: 1

    This must be part of the Open Government Initiative that the US administration has been promising: http://www.whitehouse.gov/open

  24. Re:Fascinating... on New Real Life Laser-Rifle Cuts Through Metal Like a Blowtorch · · Score: 1

    Ahh... While I am doing programming, I watch videos on mute because it will disrupt the music.

  25. Devil is in the details, on Automatic Translation Without Dictionaries · · Score: 1

    The amusing side effect of the effectiveness of statistical machine translation is that more and more people would use machine translation instead of employing fluent humans to do the translation and that is where the fun begins: The machine-translated phrases will reenter the corpus as seed data and as the percentage of human-origin data in the corpus reduces, so does the quality of the translations as subtle errors are magnified over time.

    There should be some kind of "fingerprint" added to the machine translation which can be trivially detectable so that such work doesn't reenter the corpus. Of course, the quantity of human text will decline but that will degrade the quality at a slower pace.

    Fun to think about.