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User: JJC

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  1. What this is about on McAfee Worried Over "Ambiguous" Open Source Licenses · · Score: 2, Informative

    So as far as I can tell, here's what this story is actually about:

    McAfee makes a virus scanner for Linux. Presumably the "on-demand" scanning uses a closed-source kernel module. Some kernel developers (i.e. copyright holders) assert that it violates the GPL to distribute closed-source kernel modules (although NVIDIA's and ATI's lawyers presumably disagree). This has never been tested in court. If one of the kernel copyright holders decided to litigate and won, then McAfee might have to stop selling their product, or significant alter it. Since there is a risk of this happening, they are required to disclose it to investors.

  2. Some observations... on Apple Hides Account Info in DRM-Free Music · · Score: 1
    • It's trivial to change or remove the metadata.
    • Since it is trivial to change, it would seem highly unlikely that anyone would rely on the metadata alone as evidence in a court. Thus your chances of getting into any trouble because of the metadata are very close to zero.
    • If it still bothers you, you can remove the metadata yourself (legally, I believe, since you don't need to bypass any DRM to do so). Tools already exist that can do the job and I suspect a user-friendly single-purpose "iTunes Anonymizer" will be released within days.
    • Today is the first day of the death of DRM. Be happy. Applaud those involved.
  3. Re:WaterMarking on Steve Jobs Announces (some) DRM-free iTunes · · Score: 1

    6) The defendant says "my iPod was stolen" in court, wins the case.
    7) Whoops.

  4. High quality stream of the Macworld Keynote on iPhone, Apple TV Headline MacWorld Keynote · · Score: 1

    Here's a higher bitrate version of the keynote stream. This link doesn't seem to be on the Apple site at the moment.

    http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/jan/j47d52oo/88 48125_1_650_ref.mov

  5. Ahh well... on No Ceasefire in DVD Format Battle · · Score: 2, Funny

    If only he'd said it was in the "final throes": then we'd have known he was worth taking seriously...

  6. Re:I'd say more than 35% on Spam Volume Jumps 35% In November · · Score: 1

    Sounds like DomainKeys.

  7. Storm in a teacup on Jeremy Allison Resigns From Novell In Protest · · Score: 0

    I find it very difficult to see how the patent agreement hurts anyone. If you're a Novell customer, then you enjoy the warm, snug feeling that Microsoft won't sue you for using SUSE. If you're not a Novell customer, then your life is exactly the same as it was before. Is there some subtlety I'm missing here?

  8. Halifax and Cyota on How Well Do Businesses Respond to Phishing Reports? · · Score: 2, Informative

    I recently received a phishing mail pretending to be from Halifax (a UK bank). I clicked the link and it worked so I forwarded the mail to the address (onlineemailinvestigations@hbosplc.com) listed on their real web site. I've done this before and got the usual instant form response but this time I got that and a bounce message saying that my message could not be delivered to HBOSfeed@cyota.com. Cyota appears to be a company which Banks outsource their phishing responsibilities to.

    I figured this was just a misconfiguration somewhere so I tried mailing postmaster@cyota.com and that bounced too so I think I then filled in the Contact Us form on their web site (I'm not certain if I got round to doing it, but I think I did). Next time a phishing e-mail came I forwarded it as usual but I got the same bounce so this time I tried mailing postmaster@hbosplc.com. This one didn't bounce so I figured someone was sorting it out.

    Then yesterday another phishing e-mail came so I forwarded it to the designated address again and got the same bounce again. Now I'm out of ideas, but to answer the original poster's question: In the case of Halifax and Cyota, I'd say, "not very".

  9. Zap Plugins Bookmarklet on I Dream of Silence From My Web Browser? · · Score: 1

    It's cure rather than prevention but when I'm faced with these things (and animating ads that pull the eye away from whatever I'm trying to read) I use this nifty Zap Plugins bookmarklet which I keep within easy reach on my browser's toolbar. Apparently it works on IE, Firefox and Opera.

  10. Teaser on 'The IT Crowd' UK Sit-com · · Score: 1

    In the teaser trailer that's currently on TV one of the characters is wearing the great 256th Level of Pac Man T-Shirt from errorwear, which I think bodes well for the show.

  11. Re:Good for them. on Lloyds TSB Pushing New Online Security Protocol · · Score: 1

    Ahh yes, sorry, I was talking about personal accounts, of course.

  12. Re:Good for them. on Lloyds TSB Pushing New Online Security Protocol · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I told them that the "memorable phrase" thing wouldn't work for long, and wouldn't provide much extra security, but they went ahead with it anyway.

    I think that the value of the "memorable information" stage is that it protects against the problem of someone from occasionally logging on at an insecure computer.

    Say if I log on to my account once from an Internet cafe, where a rogue employee has installed key-loggers/screenshot-takers on the terminals. Say my memorable information is 10 letters long, there would be.... 120 different combinations of the letters that could be asked for. That means that the information the attacker has from my one compromised login will be useful once every 120 successful logins. So the attacker would have to very lucky in timing his attack to coincide to when that combination of letters has come around again and would probably have to make a noticeably large number of unsuccessful login attempts, which would presumably cause access to be frozen.

    Was that scenario part of the decision to use this feature, or was it purely to protect against keystroke loggers?

  13. Re:Good for them. on Lloyds TSB Pushing New Online Security Protocol · · Score: 1
    Next up, perhaps they can fix it so their online banking isn't offline between 12am and 4am. Not everyone is tucked up in bed at that time!

    ...Done. I know it used to be like that, but I believe they haven't had this restriction for some time.

  14. Re:I can see it all now... on Google And NASA To Collaborate On Technology · · Score: 1

    I was watching a lot of NASA TV during the recent shuttle mission and you could hear some of the minutiae of the astronauts' daily lives in the communications between the shuttle and the ground. In the morning, the capcom reported that they'd finished syncing the astronauts' e-mail and they actually used the phrase, "You are go for Outlook".

  15. Outsourcing? on Defeating Captcha · · Score: 1

    I was thinking about captchas (didn't know they had a name) when signing up for a Gmail account today. I wondered if it would be profitable to set up a company somewhere where labour is cheap to employ people to read captchas on demand. Apparently the British postal service scans images of letter envelopes and sends them abroad where the postal codes are read and sent back. If a person could read, decipher and type, say, 3 captchas a minute, and you paid them 50 cents an hour, you could make a profit charging half a penny per captcha to nefarious blog spammers etc.

  16. Re:Trumba on Where is the Killer Calendar? · · Score: 1

    Well, silly me. I read another comment, and apparently there is a standard, or at least a draft thereof, which is supported by the various Mozilla calendaring projects.

  17. Trumba on Where is the Killer Calendar? · · Score: 1

    I've recently been using Trumba, which is a commercial web-based calendar service that recently came out of beta. It has a nice interface (I think it's just as good as Evolution, which I was using before), and a number of nifty features. It can import and export ICS files (iCal format), although I should mention that the last time I tried it, it didn't import recurring events correctly. I thought the export feature in particular was cool because you don't have to worry about being locked-in to the service. There's also a tool for synchronising calendars with Outlook, but I don't have Outlook so I can't tell you how well it works. Trumba also has quite a large focus on sharing events and calendars between different users and groups of users, but I don't know anyone else using it at the moment, so I haven't tried those features either.

    The best thing about it, of course, is that you can access your calendar anywhere where you can use a web browser. You can get a free 60-day trial and it costs $39.95 a year after that. That's about the same as I pay for my IMAP mail account. I'd prefer it if there was a standard for remote calendaring, but there doesn't seem to be one at the moment, and a web-based service seems to me like a fine substitute in the meantime.

  18. In what order would you show your kids the saga? on 7-Year Old Prequel Fan On ANH · · Score: 1

    On the train home from seeing ROTS, me and my friends were talking to a couple who were at the same screening, and one of them posed the question of what's the best order to show the Star Wars saga to your kids (or someone else who hasn't seen any of it before). The obvious choices of I-VI and IV-VI then I-III have their drawbacks so I suggest doing things a little differently.

    How about starting with ANH and TESB, but then only showing ROTJ up to the point where Luke surrenders to the Empire. Then show TPM, AOTC, the Clone Wars cartoons and ROTS. After that, show the climax of ROTJ.

    Good things about this order are that you preserve all the original trilogy revelations about the Skywalker family tree, the lightsaber battles and special effects get increasingly cooler and you get a happy ending!

    One point that I'm still debating about is whether to stop ROTJ just before, or just after Luke surrenders (around chapter 20 of the DVD IIRC). The scene where Luke and Vader are talking alone is the first time you see a "human side" of Vader, which you might want to preserve until the end. Up until that point the audience might well be thinking that Luke will kill Vader, and that scene probably seeds the first doubts.

  19. Re:spoiled? no. on 7-Year Old Prequel Fan On ANH · · Score: 1

    Episode 3 SPOILER below...



















    At the end of Episode 3, the children are named by their mother and placed with their foster parents.

  20. Re:I found out about the "leak" from BBC News. on Was the New Dr. Who Leaked on Purpose? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It was even on the headlines of the Six O'Clock News. Seemed odd to me that they were so pissed off about the leak that they decided to announce it to millions of people.

  21. Re:I'm not into FPS games anymore... on NovodeX Physics Engine SDK/Demo Released · · Score: 1
    ...so is it worth buying a new box just to run the test_boxstack map?
    Just in case you were serious, no, not at all. It's simply a small room with a stack of boxes in the middle. The tall Jenga tower in NovodeX Rocket is much more entertaining.
  22. DirectPad Pro on Converting a PSX Controller for PC Use · · Score: 2, Informative

    Hello. There's a driver for PS-PC parallel port adapters in the Linux Kernel (2.4 at least). The file 'Documentation/input/joystick-parport.txt' contains a schematic for an adapter and mentions that it's DirectPad Pro compatible. The DPP web site doesn't appear to be there any more, but there's a mirror.

  23. Re:I'm impressed with Steam on Newest Half-Life 2 Movies Impress · · Score: 1

    What format was it in?

    Bink

  24. Re:Get the advert + making of FREE (For UK ppl) on 606 Takes To film Rube Goldberg-like car ad · · Score: 1

    It's presumably still limited to the UK, but it looks like this DVD can now be ordered online too.

  25. Valgrind? on Secure Services on Virtual Machines? · · Score: 1

    When I read this I thought of Valgrind. It's a program designed to find memory management problems such as memory leaks and using unitialised memory. The program being tested runs under Valgrind so it is very much like a virtual machine. I've never thought of running a server under it, but if you can stand the (probably substantial) performance hit it would probably do what you're intending.