sern's comments | WingNews

sern | 14 years ago | on: 3 years later, Facebook still can't delete photos correctly

No CDN caches content for that long, even if the origin tells them to. (Services like Akamai's NetStorage excluded, which Facebook most likely does not use.) It's quite obvious that Facebook is actually keeping the images on their origin servers long after they have been deleted.

sern | 14 years ago | on: 3 years later, Facebook still can't delete photos correctly

The purpose specification principle of the OECD Privacy Guidelines (which all substantial privacy laws are based on - EU, NZ, HK, etc.* ) says this:

"Finally, when data no longer serve a purpose, and if it is practicable, it may be necessary to have them destroyed (erased) or given an anonymous form. The reason is that control over data may be lost when data are no longer of interest; this may lead to risks of theft, unauthorised copying or the like."

Keeping an image URL online three years after it was requested to be deleted almost certainly counts as keeping personal data for longer than is necessary. When you upload a photo, it is usually for the purpose of sharing (as the case may be). When you decide to stop sharing, the data no longer serves that purpose and hence should be removed as soon as practicable.

* The US and Australia notably have not implemented the OECD guidelines.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Yahoo Lays Off Flickr Support Staff

I've never been able to take them seriously with Comic Sans in their logo.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Raspberry Pi's GPU double the performance of iPhone 4S

The BBC Micro was actually quite expensive compared to the other micros of the time. (I don't think the IBM PC was ever considered a "micro", and other micros were probably more capable anyway.) If I remember correctly, the goal was not to produce a design that would compete mostly on cost but rather one that was British and would do the flashy stuff the BBC wanted to show on their computing series.

I agree that the Raspberry Pi will be revolutionary, not because it will rejuvenate computer science teaching, but simply rather because it's a cheap computer.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Raspberry Pi's GPU double the performance of iPhone 4S

They absolutely don't need special hardware to start programming.

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that my first exposure to coding was when I typed "10 PRINT BUTT 20 GOTO 10" into BBC BASIC. I didn't need anything more than the computer I had at school. The modern-day equivalent - typing "python" into the terminal - isn't much different, and still a lot easier and cheaper than getting something to run on an external Linux board.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Raspberry Pi's GPU double the performance of iPhone 4S

The community can't maintain the patches, thanks to Broadcom's policy of not releasing documentation unless you commit to ordering a hundred trillion parts or are employed by them (as the Raspberry Pi folks are).

If the point of this thing is to promote computer science education, then it's already dead. Remember, not everything happens in userspace. For example, there are advanced operating systems courses out there that are focused very closely on the low-level side or are based on non-GPL-compatible operating systems where they can't simply lift stuff out of Linux.

It's nobody's loss but Broadcom's: the educators will go for platforms like BeagleBone instead (which, although more than double the price, is still cheap), the students will have the benefit of well-documented hardware, and TI will be happy that many of those students who grow up to work in the embedded space will be specifying TI (rather than Broadcom) SoCs.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Google, what were you thinking?

You can fetch web pages and you'll appear as coming from a Google IP, but your user agent header will contain "AppEngine-Google".

sern | 14 years ago | on: The Economist on Intel versus ARM

Not to mention that chips are already 3D with multiple metal layers.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

Nevertheless, it's still possible to jam (see LightSquared). I actually think this is how Iran did it.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

The key management system (SAASM) indeed uses RSA, but not the GPS itself.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

The GPS military signal is protected by virtue of being CDMA-modulated by a long, pseudorandom sequence (the output of a keyed, secret PRNG). Because of the spread-spectrum nature of CDMA, it would be impractical to record the signal without having the key in the first place. And if you did have the key, why go through the trouble of recording and replaying the signal when you could directly spoof it?

sern | 14 years ago | on: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

The encrypted GPS service doesn't use RSA.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Nokia Maps 3D (WebGL)

It's based on C3 Technologies' product, which was unfortunately acquired by Apple, so don't count on Nokia's contract being extended. It uses a custom aerial camera system and photogrammetry toolchain to create 3D data with minimal human intervention.

Australian company Nearmap started with exactly the same goals and have a similar product (custom aerial photography system with automated processing), but they don't seem to have figured the 3D photogrammetry part out yet.

sern | 14 years ago | on: NFC will tell you when a Rolex is fake

Barcodes can be copied visually, whereas chips can be made difficult to clone.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Pushing the Limits of Amazon S3 Upload Performance

http://www.asperasoft.com/en/misc_content/default_1/Aspera_S...

Pretty expensive though.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Pushing the Limits of Amazon S3 Upload Performance

I'm pretty sure UDT does congestion control.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Pushing the Limits of Amazon S3 Upload Performance

uTorrent's UDP congestion control algorithm (LEDBAT) goes further than playing nice with TCP. Unlike TCP, which only responds to packet loss, LEDBAT also responds to delay. This makes it yield remarkably quickly to anything else that might use the link.

sern | 14 years ago | on: Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief.

Not UK, but relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguire_v_SOCOG_2000

sern | 14 years ago | on: Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief.

This is a civil rights issue, as evidenced by existing case law in Australia: in 2000, the Sydney Olympics organisers were fined $20,000 for discrimination on the basis that their website was not accessible to the visually impaired.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguire_v_SOCOG_2000 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/31.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/49.html

sern | 15 years ago | on: Coming soon: make your phone your wallet

According to the FAQ, the card is being emulated on the device's secure element. My guess is that the Google Wallet program was preloaded only on the Sprint Nexus S's secure element.

I fully expect a future version to do the security-critical stuff on a remote server, which would allow the application to work without a secure element but with a slower transaction time.