-
Information security = IE, AV and patching? Argh… /ht @guardian @secunia #bah #humbug
Vulnerabilities in information security (like that with Microsoft’s IE) need to be dealt with up front, says Secunia’s Maria Eriksen-Jensen. via Information security: are you leaving your company exposed? | Media Network | Guardian Professional. Oh, wait, it’s a glorified advert. The subtext is: “Security” == “Vulnerabilities for which we can sell mitigations”. That makes perfect…
-
Fascinating backplot of the Soil Association, they of the #Organic food mark; #strangebedfellows #fascists #occupy #occupythefarm #politics
via Soil Association – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to their website: “The Soil Association was founded in 1946 by a group of farmers, scientists and nutritionists who observed a direct connection between farming practice and plant, animal, human and environmental health.” “The catalyst was the publication of The Living Soil by Lady Eve Balfour, the…
-
Marriage will not protect your privacy…
…depending on from where and how you communicate: Communications between spouses are typically accorded a “marital communications privilege” because they are “regarded as so essential to the preservation of the marriage relationship as to outweigh the disadvantages to the administration of justice which the privilege entails.” But marital communications to or from a workplace computer…
-
So I wrote a Sudoku solver but … #firstworldprogrammerproblems
So I wanted something to do and wrote a Sudoku solver; I’ve never liked (or even done) Sudoku but ever since Nigel Ross told me of his travails of solving it in Prolog* I’ve wanted to have a go. So I went for a nice long walk, worked out the algorithm (approximately), worked out the data…
-
Hyperemesis gravidarum is from the Greek hyper, meaning excessive, and emesis, meaning vomiting…
One of the things I find most amusing about the medical profession is that once you’ve learned a bit of Greek and Latin it becomes not only transparent but even a bit pedestrian: Etymology Hyperemesis gravidarum is from the Greek hyper-, meaning excessive, and emesis, meaning vomiting, and the Latin gravidarum, the feminine genitive plural…
-
Court of Appeal allows Golden Eye appeal # 1) Get downloader details 2) Send demands 3) ??? 4) PROFIT!!!
This morning the Court of Appeal handed down their judgment in the appeal by the firm Golden Eye. The Court allowed the appeal. We have made a pdf of the judgment is available. Golden Eye were challenging the High Court’s refusal to grant them a “Norwich Pharmacal Order” that would require Telefonica UK to hand…
-
Does anyone buy iPods any more? #iTax
The escalators in Old Street tube station are wallpapered with iPod adverts, and I could not stop myself wondering why? And then I thought: why am I asking why? It used to be that iPods were a form of currency in the tech community – the default desirable prize for any geek competition – but now…
-
How to ‘close comments’ on old WordPress posts without manual intervention for each posting
If you have a huge old WordPress blog with thousands of postings – especially if you have migrated it from a non-Wordpress platform – the older postings may be an attractive nuisance for spammers. The simplest thing to do is to close comments on those postings. The problem with this is that WordPress provides a button to…
-
Where does ‘The North’ begin?
It’s one of those Pub debates which my colleagues are currently arguing about. Various semi-humourous suggestions like “The M4” or “Watford Gap” – but practically and culturally speaking? I’m not sure. I know that when you get to Leeds there’s still a whole lot more “North” above you. As a Midlander I’ve always mentally drawn…
-
On “Data Compression Using Long Common Strings”, McIlroy & Bentley
Am just reading up on BMDiff: [BigTable] compression looks for similar values along the rows, columns, and times. They use variations of BMDiff and Zippy. BMDiff gives them high write speeds (~100MB/s) and even faster read speeds (~1000MB/s). …which led to reading the paper: We propose a data compression scheme that recognizes the second occurrence…
-
“The DeWitt Clause” – #Oracle, really? Is this latter bit true?
Several commercial database vendor’s end-user license agreement includes a provision, known as the DeWitt Clause that prohibts researchers and scientists from explictly using their systems’ names in academic papers. In essence, DeWitt Clauses forbid the publication of database benchmarks that the database vendor has not sanctioned. The original DeWitt clause was established by Oracle at…