Probably because it's a damn sight easier. Clinicians don't need to jump through a bunch of IT hoops (bureaucratic and techie); they need an It Just Works solution, and as we see repeatedly, if you don't give 'em one, they work around the secure-but-cumbersome system in place with a convenient-but-insecure kludge.
Not really: we're not trying to hide, just to leave no trail for use by malicious fishing expeditions (imagine the RIAA getting into this? or the Met thinking you're a bit too brown and bomby for their liking? or Orlovski and Page hunting hippies?).
3D printing is currently being used by -ahem- artisan sex toy houses to produce very creative bits of kit in small production runs. Design onscreen, fab off a mould, fill with elastomer glurp and ta-da. Expect custom scan-and-fab kits once a nice detailed 3D scanner is available (mmm, kinect hax)...
But identity can be ever so relevant - location for disease clusters, age and sex for patterns, relationships for genetics, treatment history for complications. Good data is rich and revealing and that sort of quality is opt-in stuff.
If you just take the names out, it's pretty easy to re-nonymise too: how many poorly old grannies are there in my street, well, Mrs Miggins must be [GUID].
My .02, if the anonymous summary data is so useful, open-source it, make it available to us taxpayers to do surprising and incredible things with.
Half-life's pretty short: the iodine threat is in weeks, not months. The great majority of the radioiodine from Fukushima has decayed by now, and the prevailing wind would have to wrap it around the globe.
One thing missing from the big socials is the ability to present different profiles. Same core identity, but Fred Bloggs to your family, SkiFreddo to your winter-sports community peeps (booze party pics to share!), and RandomActivist to the political stuff you don't want scaring your boss, mum or ski mates.
Profiles aren't hard to do: have a default and then have the option (in G+, for example) of an alternative set of info items, including pic and visible emails.
Nice to see that they've addressed the enterprise complaint of insecure droidery with that Good kit. Just don't let my consultants see them, or we'll have to buy a bunch for them to wave x-rays at punters with..!
It'll be good for Devon too. Connectivity down here is a bag of old lady pants.
Vint (you know, for years I thought that name couldn't be a person, it had to be an org) is wise when he talks about crowded mobilespace. Which would you rather do on New Year: text your Mum twenty times getting the failwhale, or text her once and let the machine do the drudgery of finding a gap in the traffic?
Cirby, so could any hospital staffer, by that measure. I'm not feeling the pain.
What is confusing me is how a CERN-grade boffin gets sucked into fundie nonsense of any variety. It's such obvious tosh. Makes me suspect that he was being groomed by dimwit Al Q goons who thought he could give them a Dan Brown Bomb.
Postcodes ARE public, it's just the database that isn't. There's nothing to stop you getting all your mates to tell you their postcodes and addresses and drawing up a whole new database.
It's already being done, at www.freethepostcode.org, a spinoff of openstreetmap.
Hey coward, your points are bogus. 1: Same way you do with the radio on; 2: Not me, so don't judge me on someone else, jeez, you may as well hate all black people 'cos Mugabe's a wanker; 3: Ditton. 4: Ditto 5: The middle is the safest place, just like for motorbikes, it stops drumb drivers making stupid illegal overtakes; and for a special bonus there's no such thing as road tax you ill-educated buffoon.
Seriously, everyone should share the roads nicely.
Equally seriously, I know too many dead people made that way by boy-racer cretins who think that driving like Martin suggests is big and clever.
So quit with the tired old repetition and behave like a grown-up.
John G Imrie asks "what exactly were they trying to share?" -- in my experience, it's really boring stuff like next month's staff rotas for their little department, staff assessments that they can't concentrate on in a busy office, and CBT packages to take home and learn.
La vie quotidien est la vie quotidien.
As for Autorun, bane of the world, look at it from a user perspective: Shove thing in, thing does stuff. Why they hell should a human have to intervene? They've already done the shoving. Give 'em a browse window and they'll click the wrong thing. No autorun = worse user experience.
Great - this will mean higher-rez terrain data for Openstreetmap once the coders get their hands on it. Most OSM terrain stuff is SRTM right now and the detail and voids are occasionally vexing. Congrats to NASA and the Japanese for a useful, free, primary resource. :)
Maybe it was the biggest cyber-attack in the BNP's petty little history? Woo, frightening, just like the party itself.
Austin, hosting companies routinely have terms that say they won't host you if you post a variety of unsavoury material, including hate-speech and racism. That's their choice - they're a private company, they make the rules, and not everyone wants to say "absolutely free speech for all". Most ISPs choose to have terms that are vague and woolly and broader than the legal minimum, so that they can yank odious stuff that catches their eye.
...is another man's subtle. Anything moving is too damn intrusive for me. The good ads - like Google's ones and some of the ones on el Reg - are hard to block anyway because they're just bits of text.
It's not designed for a fat Dilbert arse. In its riding position, it'll support the sitbones without fouling the free movement of thighs built like angry, knotted trees.
My understanding of the Data Protection Act would say not. Certainly this is outside the reasonable scope of the original data provision. And DNA uniquely identifies us - that's its whole point.
An idea's memetic fitness isn't related to its truth or usefulness, just how strong a competitor it is in the idea-pool of memes. So yes, some ideas can be dangerous, just like Aqua's Barbie Girl polluted the charts for months despite having almost no musical merit. Simplistic ideas score highly on virulence, and the Literal Word Of God is a simplistic idea.
WW1 was one grumpy Russian, not a government attack. He was sentenced and everything. Do try to keep up.
As for blaming China, that's not *nearly* sneaky enough. This could just as easily be a setup to make China look like villains; there are many axes to grind here. Block off national comms because of one script-kiddy's unsourced, unverified trojan? Get real.
Users will always click on cool-looking stuff. Sigh all you like, that won't stop it happening.
...it's not thinking at all. So it doesn't know if it's in free fall, what time it is, or the price of apples.
The self destruct for these things is usually "fire the thrusters into a de-orbit burn", by the way. Exploding it would be a debris hazard and pain in the diplomatic arse.
A de-orbit burn is tricky with dead electronics and a frozen (hydrazine) propellant tank. This thing is as responsive and as controllable (and about as big) as a VW Camper with a flat battery. Tumbling through space. Full of seekrit tech.
The Google contact lens for that instant genius-on-the-go. Enhanced-reality that makes sat-nav look pasty and amateurish? A second-life interface for the most immersive furry teledildonics ever.
Sign me up for a pair. Working in IT's given me scratchy dry eyes anyway, I may as well get some private smut for my trouble.
The posters who say that nobody wants to share a terabyte of awful home content is missing the users. In our regular "naughty file types" policing, user-generated content has taken over from ripped media. They're making this stuff, and they're sharing this stuff. WD have really shot themselves in the foot with this one: if their punters can share holiday photos but not movies, that's broken.
Better hire some more tech support staff for a while...
Oops, my bad, no Bluetooth. Actually, that's a dealbreaker, because no Bluetooth = no headset.
Ryan - the appeal for extreme sports is partly in being able to survive the times when you are base-jumping with a surfboard strapped to your forehead; it's also partly in the lifestyle cachet of having extreme sports gear in the office. Let's go offroad!
A nice antidote to the delicate, mimsy little fragile flowers the phone industry is producing nowadays. Touchy-feely and with multi-axis slides to break and crack and jam roadkill into, eee, I dunno.
Mind you, I'm biased. After finding my Nokia 6210 floating cheerfully in a bike-pannier full of paraffin -- still working just fine -- I've come to value rugged kit.
I just wish that "fairly tough" made it to the mass market more often. The XO lappy is fairly tough, so was the 6210. Amazing what you can do with a membrane keyboard, silicone case and some bumpers inside the tin. And they're good cheap bits of kit. The 6210 is called the "builders' phone" round here.
Most of us who want tough gear don't need mil-spec tough. Unless the boss is paying, that is...
The green-ink paranoid responses to this news can be dismissed pretty easily: this is a clear and shiny newbie error. As someone who once built a public site with the "Little Bobby Tables" vulnerability, I can speak on newbie errors, I think :)
Thing is, it takes time and testing to pick up this stuff. You can say "hire boffins" all you like: if you've got your internal dev team, and this isn't their specialty, they may cock up and only testing will catch that. And time and testing are the first things that project managers cut out of any project.
Of course, this highlights the risks inherent in One Database Of Everything; when (not if) someone cocks up, only the data in that database is exposed.
And smugly calling them idiots won't solve anything - least of all, reducing the levels of infection. What they are is less savvy about computer security than you. The mechanics, pilots and brain surgeons who don't have time for IT security might think that the nerd elite are a bunch of self-satisfied wankers, y'know.
Anyway, most links to nudie pics on the net do actually take you to nudie pics. In that respect, their behaviour is nothing unusual.
More seriously, the antivirus companies can't infect people with goodware. That is just as much an unauthorised use of the PC as malware. Imagine the backlash when buggy goodware brings down an important machine.
Sidestepping the suitability, wisdom and morality of general taser use, here's some tech: Modern tasers can be capable of recording every use, in sound and video with a datalog of discharges. Starting with this trial, this should be absolutely mandatory.
There is no excuse and - considering the furore that claims both legit and spurious will generate - no sense in not recording everything. That way we can see what's being done, and the cop and (alleged) perp have some evidence other than he-said-she-said.
Taser-camera products are already on the market. Here's one: Taser-Cam: http://www.taser.com/products/law/Pages/TASERCAM.aspx
I want to take these comics and go - not that I'm necessarily bothering the badger with downloadable super-hotties in lycra at all, no no. Honest.
It's the same old digital content / distribution / DRM argument in a new form (Ultimate DRM? Uncanny DRM?) I say let people share if they want, lock it to the player, and build a new generation fanbase for all that wonderful old classic stuff. Marvel's lawyers will probably say "lock it down" :(
The porn industry is printing its own money right now, and producing new, high quality product. Yet it has no DRM, doesn't exactly fight P2P distribution, and "fair use" teaser segments of their products are so ubiquitously available as to be barely worth mention.
Somehow, the porn industry is handling the internet correctly (I'd suggest it is accepting a revised model where it only receives payment for a small fraction of their market, but uses the internet's virulent distribution mechanisms to ensure that that market is absolutely vast. Smaller slice of a larger pie).
Perhaps the mainstream studios should take a leaf from their book?
"Good thing is was Germany, if it had been the UK the blind guy would be up on assault charges,"
Rubbish. That only happens in cases of disproportionate violence (kicking someone repeatedly in the head, say, or shooting them in the back). A friend who was jumped by two thugs broke one's arm and got the other down; when they told police they wanted to press charges, they were told in no uncertain terms to "sod off and stop taking the p!ss". And that was Bristol.
David Beck seems to live in "Political Correctness Gone Mad!" land, not the UK.
Register
53 posts • joined Thursday 10th May 2007 13:29 GMT
Page:
90 bomb threats since February? That's not a credible threat, it's a knob. Disregard utterly.
Re: I'm missing something as well...
Probably because it's a damn sight easier. Clinicians don't need to jump through a bunch of IT hoops (bureaucratic and techie); they need an It Just Works solution, and as we see repeatedly, if you don't give 'em one, they work around the secure-but-cumbersome system in place with a convenient-but-insecure kludge.
Re: Right then...
Not really: we're not trying to hide, just to leave no trail for use by malicious fishing expeditions (imagine the RIAA getting into this? or the Met thinking you're a bit too brown and bomby for their liking? or Orlovski and Page hunting hippies?).
Re: Oh, really?
Ah but actual scientists have to do actual work. All this lot are doing is making crap up.
3D printing is currently being used by -ahem- artisan sex toy houses to produce very creative bits of kit in small production runs. Design onscreen, fab off a mould, fill with elastomer glurp and ta-da. Expect custom scan-and-fab kits once a nice detailed 3D scanner is available (mmm, kinect hax)...
But identity can be ever so relevant - location for disease clusters, age and sex for patterns, relationships for genetics, treatment history for complications. Good data is rich and revealing and that sort of quality is opt-in stuff.
If you just take the names out, it's pretty easy to re-nonymise too: how many poorly old grannies are there in my street, well, Mrs Miggins must be [GUID].
My .02, if the anonymous summary data is so useful, open-source it, make it available to us taxpayers to do surprising and incredible things with.
The unit of thrust must surely be the Grunt.
Half-life's pretty short: the iodine threat is in weeks, not months. The great majority of the radioiodine from Fukushima has decayed by now, and the prevailing wind would have to wrap it around the globe.
Even if it worked (LOL), they'd still do nothing when presented with a priest fiddling kiddies.
He makes a good point
One thing missing from the big socials is the ability to present different profiles. Same core identity, but Fred Bloggs to your family, SkiFreddo to your winter-sports community peeps (booze party pics to share!), and RandomActivist to the political stuff you don't want scaring your boss, mum or ski mates.
Profiles aren't hard to do: have a default and then have the option (in G+, for example) of an alternative set of info items, including pic and visible emails.
Good is good
Nice to see that they've addressed the enterprise complaint of insecure droidery with that Good kit. Just don't let my consultants see them, or we'll have to buy a bunch for them to wave x-rays at punters with..!
I hope it works for black people...
It'd be a hell of an embarrassment (hello, HP webcam face detection!) if it didn't work on dark fingers.
Dr Xym...
... they swap the core out for refuelling. A bollixed core is less of a big deal than you might think.
Hee hee
"Anonymous coward" rants about what makes a real warrior. Prep my ROFLcopter, sarge.
Neat
It'll be good for Devon too. Connectivity down here is a bag of old lady pants.
Vint (you know, for years I thought that name couldn't be a person, it had to be an org) is wise when he talks about crowded mobilespace. Which would you rather do on New Year: text your Mum twenty times getting the failwhale, or text her once and let the machine do the drudgery of finding a gap in the traffic?
Excelsior!
Comics. That's why colour would be great.
That and porn, obviously.
Hurm
Cirby, so could any hospital staffer, by that measure. I'm not feeling the pain.
What is confusing me is how a CERN-grade boffin gets sucked into fundie nonsense of any variety. It's such obvious tosh. Makes me suspect that he was being groomed by dimwit Al Q goons who thought he could give them a Dan Brown Bomb.
Postcodes ARE public
Postcodes ARE public, it's just the database that isn't. There's nothing to stop you getting all your mates to tell you their postcodes and addresses and drawing up a whole new database.
It's already being done, at www.freethepostcode.org, a spinoff of openstreetmap.
Oh dear...
...and Demon used to be the good guys.
Penguin-chops is right though
About the form factor, that is. Made me want an OLPC 2 and oh boy, makes me want this :)
They missed a trick
Should have included at least a digi compass. *Then* it would be a proper AR toy and teh sexy would start to flow.
Hm, thinking of sexy, I can use this for pr0n and nobody will know? Score!
Cor, this has got hilariously tribal
Angry bike-haters, please, why are you so grumpy? S'plain please!
It's not that you're stuck in traffic again just like yesterday, ad groundhoginitum, is it? ;)
Bless.
Yawn, same old same old
Hey coward, your points are bogus. 1: Same way you do with the radio on; 2: Not me, so don't judge me on someone else, jeez, you may as well hate all black people 'cos Mugabe's a wanker; 3: Ditton. 4: Ditto 5: The middle is the safest place, just like for motorbikes, it stops drumb drivers making stupid illegal overtakes; and for a special bonus there's no such thing as road tax you ill-educated buffoon.
Seriously, everyone should share the roads nicely.
Equally seriously, I know too many dead people made that way by boy-racer cretins who think that driving like Martin suggests is big and clever.
So quit with the tired old repetition and behave like a grown-up.
What's on the stick?
John G Imrie asks "what exactly were they trying to share?" -- in my experience, it's really boring stuff like next month's staff rotas for their little department, staff assessments that they can't concentrate on in a busy office, and CBT packages to take home and learn.
La vie quotidien est la vie quotidien.
As for Autorun, bane of the world, look at it from a user perspective: Shove thing in, thing does stuff. Why they hell should a human have to intervene? They've already done the shoving. Give 'em a browse window and they'll click the wrong thing. No autorun = worse user experience.
Good stuff.
Great - this will mean higher-rez terrain data for Openstreetmap once the coders get their hands on it. Most OSM terrain stuff is SRTM right now and the detail and voids are occasionally vexing. Congrats to NASA and the Japanese for a useful, free, primary resource. :)
Ha! Ha!
Maybe it was the biggest cyber-attack in the BNP's petty little history? Woo, frightening, just like the party itself.
Austin, hosting companies routinely have terms that say they won't host you if you post a variety of unsavoury material, including hate-speech and racism. That's their choice - they're a private company, they make the rules, and not everyone wants to say "absolutely free speech for all". Most ISPs choose to have terms that are vague and woolly and broader than the legal minimum, so that they can yank odious stuff that catches their eye.
One man's intrusive...
...is another man's subtle. Anything moving is too damn intrusive for me. The good ads - like Google's ones and some of the ones on el Reg - are hard to block anyway because they're just bits of text.
Easy?
If it was that easy, it'd be done already.
I say yay - and stick one of these gadgets onna stick in a town square. Sorted.
Ah but..
It's not designed for a fat Dilbert arse. In its riding position, it'll support the sitbones without fouling the free movement of thighs built like angry, knotted trees.
Fugly machine, though, really really fugly.
Is this even legal?
My understanding of the Data Protection Act would say not. Certainly this is outside the reasonable scope of the original data provision. And DNA uniquely identifies us - that's its whole point.
Some ideas being dangerous?
An idea's memetic fitness isn't related to its truth or usefulness, just how strong a competitor it is in the idea-pool of memes. So yes, some ideas can be dangerous, just like Aqua's Barbie Girl polluted the charts for months despite having almost no musical merit. Simplistic ideas score highly on virulence, and the Literal Word Of God is a simplistic idea.
Sighfest
WW1 was one grumpy Russian, not a government attack. He was sentenced and everything. Do try to keep up.
As for blaming China, that's not *nearly* sneaky enough. This could just as easily be a setup to make China look like villains; there are many axes to grind here. Block off national comms because of one script-kiddy's unsourced, unverified trojan? Get real.
Users will always click on cool-looking stuff. Sigh all you like, that won't stop it happening.
Daniel...
They shoot you eight times in the head and lose your luggage.
"I hope they get Alzheimer's"
They probably *will*, as science has cured so many of the other things that would send a fellow to his grave.
Bah, tiny cell-balls aren't people. They're lost every single day in vivo and nobody even notices.
Simply: If my ISP uses Phorm, I'm changing ISP
Which would be a pity as they're pretty good.
Except that...
...it's not thinking at all. So it doesn't know if it's in free fall, what time it is, or the price of apples.
The self destruct for these things is usually "fire the thrusters into a de-orbit burn", by the way. Exploding it would be a debris hazard and pain in the diplomatic arse.
A de-orbit burn is tricky with dead electronics and a frozen (hydrazine) propellant tank. This thing is as responsive and as controllable (and about as big) as a VW Camper with a flat battery. Tumbling through space. Full of seekrit tech.
Are any bookies offering odds yet?
Genius
The Google contact lens for that instant genius-on-the-go. Enhanced-reality that makes sat-nav look pasty and amateurish? A second-life interface for the most immersive furry teledildonics ever.
Sign me up for a pair. Working in IT's given me scratchy dry eyes anyway, I may as well get some private smut for my trouble.
Stop having fun!
http://xkcd.com/359/
nuff said.
Footshooting at its finest
The posters who say that nobody wants to share a terabyte of awful home content is missing the users. In our regular "naughty file types" policing, user-generated content has taken over from ripped media. They're making this stuff, and they're sharing this stuff. WD have really shot themselves in the foot with this one: if their punters can share holiday photos but not movies, that's broken.
Better hire some more tech support staff for a while...
Avoiding or bluejacking?
Oops, my bad, no Bluetooth. Actually, that's a dealbreaker, because no Bluetooth = no headset.
Ryan - the appeal for extreme sports is partly in being able to survive the times when you are base-jumping with a surfboard strapped to your forehead; it's also partly in the lifestyle cachet of having extreme sports gear in the office. Let's go offroad!
Nice 'n' tough
A nice antidote to the delicate, mimsy little fragile flowers the phone industry is producing nowadays. Touchy-feely and with multi-axis slides to break and crack and jam roadkill into, eee, I dunno.
Mind you, I'm biased. After finding my Nokia 6210 floating cheerfully in a bike-pannier full of paraffin -- still working just fine -- I've come to value rugged kit.
I just wish that "fairly tough" made it to the mass market more often. The XO lappy is fairly tough, so was the 6210. Amazing what you can do with a membrane keyboard, silicone case and some bumpers inside the tin. And they're good cheap bits of kit. The 6210 is called the "builders' phone" round here.
Most of us who want tough gear don't need mil-spec tough. Unless the boss is paying, that is...
Cockup, not conspiracy
The green-ink paranoid responses to this news can be dismissed pretty easily: this is a clear and shiny newbie error. As someone who once built a public site with the "Little Bobby Tables" vulnerability, I can speak on newbie errors, I think :)
Thing is, it takes time and testing to pick up this stuff. You can say "hire boffins" all you like: if you've got your internal dev team, and this isn't their specialty, they may cock up and only testing will catch that. And time and testing are the first things that project managers cut out of any project.
Of course, this highlights the risks inherent in One Database Of Everything; when (not if) someone cocks up, only the data in that database is exposed.
They're not idiots
And smugly calling them idiots won't solve anything - least of all, reducing the levels of infection. What they are is less savvy about computer security than you. The mechanics, pilots and brain surgeons who don't have time for IT security might think that the nerd elite are a bunch of self-satisfied wankers, y'know.
Anyway, most links to nudie pics on the net do actually take you to nudie pics. In that respect, their behaviour is nothing unusual.
More seriously, the antivirus companies can't infect people with goodware. That is just as much an unauthorised use of the PC as malware. Imagine the backlash when buggy goodware brings down an important machine.
Accountability is essential
Sidestepping the suitability, wisdom and morality of general taser use, here's some tech: Modern tasers can be capable of recording every use, in sound and video with a datalog of discharges. Starting with this trial, this should be absolutely mandatory.
There is no excuse and - considering the furore that claims both legit and spurious will generate - no sense in not recording everything. That way we can see what's being done, and the cop and (alleged) perp have some evidence other than he-said-she-said.
Taser-camera products are already on the market. Here's one: Taser-Cam: http://www.taser.com/products/law/Pages/TASERCAM.aspx
IWOOT
Oh man, that is *so* on my Chrimbo list.
"Only a master of Wiivil, Darth..."
+1 downloadability
I want to take these comics and go - not that I'm necessarily bothering the badger with downloadable super-hotties in lycra at all, no no. Honest.
It's the same old digital content / distribution / DRM argument in a new form (Ultimate DRM? Uncanny DRM?) I say let people share if they want, lock it to the player, and build a new generation fanbase for all that wonderful old classic stuff. Marvel's lawyers will probably say "lock it down" :(
What is the porn industry doing right?
The porn industry is printing its own money right now, and producing new, high quality product. Yet it has no DRM, doesn't exactly fight P2P distribution, and "fair use" teaser segments of their products are so ubiquitously available as to be barely worth mention.
Somehow, the porn industry is handling the internet correctly (I'd suggest it is accepting a revised model where it only receives payment for a small fraction of their market, but uses the internet's virulent distribution mechanisms to ensure that that market is absolutely vast. Smaller slice of a larger pie).
Perhaps the mainstream studios should take a leaf from their book?
Stop moaning about the UK
"Good thing is was Germany, if it had been the UK the blind guy would be up on assault charges,"
Rubbish. That only happens in cases of disproportionate violence (kicking someone repeatedly in the head, say, or shooting them in the back). A friend who was jumped by two thugs broke one's arm and got the other down; when they told police they wanted to press charges, they were told in no uncertain terms to "sod off and stop taking the p!ss". And that was Bristol.
David Beck seems to live in "Political Correctness Gone Mad!" land, not the UK.
Ship 'em home patent?
Sorry mate, I think the Crown has prior art.
Mind you, that won't stop a patent-thug IP extortion company from trying it...
+1 fanservice
Just for the word "steampunk" really. Good writeup on the arm too - I'd been wondering how it would get rid of that excess seepage.
Now all we need are some dirigibles and a monkey with a waistcoat...
Page: