Posts by Matthew Poole
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He could work for the police with a conviction, but he'd be very unlikely to become a police officer. A non-sworn staff member - which would be a lot of the IT security people - he could have become, but they'd have to work around the conviction. Not difficult to do if the police really wanted him.
Good point. I didn't think about the distinction between sworn and non-sworn hiring requirements. His Asperger's would probably make him unsuitable to be sworn, anyway, even if he was inclined to try for a uniformed role.
I presume his crime wasn't eligible for the 'clean slate' legislation.
That's only of significance for private-sector employment. Police and NZSIS checks return everything, and everything is considered. It also doesn't apply for international travel.
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I certainly disagree with Russell that a discharge without conviction was appropriate. This should be used for extremely minor offences and I think the sad message sent by the Judge is cyber crime isn't real crime.
Is $10k worth of damage "real crime"? I'd be amazed if there aren't people out there who have done rather more and still been handed a DWC. He has to pay for the damage, and he has to pay costs with a minimum repayment rate. It's not like he "got away with it" in any sense of the phrase, because he's being punished financially. He'll also be a "person of interest" to the Police for a long time to come.
Assuming he stays on the straight-and-narrow, which I'd say is likely, he'll probably turn into a very valuable IT security asset. A conviction would make working for the Police an impossibility, and in any kind of national security role very, very difficult (though there's a bit more leeway to grant security clearances than the Police have to ignore convictions). He'd be unable to travel to security conferences, instead being pretty much limited to never leaving NZ. How does that benefit anyone? Sure it sends a message, but at what detriment to future IT security?
The judge had to make a call on balancing the message sent by a DWC against the potential for great loss to IT security. Punishments handed down by the courts for relatively insignificant crimes aren't meant to turn into a lifetime sentence that has detrimental effects on wider society, but that's what you appear to be demanding.
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That's about the time I'd expect/hope to see Vodafone rethink current data limits.
*laughs hysterically*
Like Telecom rethought their overage charges when people went to the media about getting umpteen-thousand-dollar ISP bills? Or Vodafone rethought their roaming charges after people went to the media about their umpteen-thousand-dollar roaming bills from going to Aus?
*wanders out the door giggling* :P -
Driving past the university down Symonds Street yesterday was interesting -- the boys were seeing no end of Wi-Fi networks coming up on the phone.
Yeah, this place radiates so much that one half expects long-term inmates to produce mutant kids. Most of the networks are protected, though, usually by WPA or WPA2, so it's not the best of places to go hunting for free connectivity. And of the few open ones, most of them still won't give you a useful connection since they require authentication back to the university's SSO system.
Symonds St and surrounds are veritable treasure troves of truly open AP's, however. Lots of clueless residential users of WiFi who have unsecured devices. I'd love to take an Eee out with network recording software installed and go walking around the area. -
Would personally be fascinated to know whether someone (tech savvy) like yourself gets close to that 250MB level over the month.
I'd more interested in whether someone not "tech savvy" gets close to it. The clueful, such as RB, will be painfully aware of their data usage, mentally cataloguing every byte in order to avoid paying $100/GB in overage. It's the neophytes who will think "Ohh, purty, new, shiny, toy. Must play!" without a thought for, or even understanding of, the consequences. They'll rush off and watch YouTube, play with Google Maps and the accelerometers, get some music off iTunes, etc. And then they'll get to the end of the month and faint at their enormous bill.
My very clueful boss got a 1.0 when they first came out, and his first month's bill was > $700. He hadn't even realised that he was using so much data, and as a person who's written traffic billing systems he's got a pretty good idea of how the game is played. -
There's at least one MMS app at the 1.0 stage
But not if you have a virgin phone. It only works with jailbroken iPhones, surprise, surprise.
That an MMS app can be written doesn't surprise me. Anything can be done if you're a sufficiently competent coder. But there's still the Apple SDK T&C to abide by if you want the app to be distributed through official channels, and having not included MMS for two generations of the phone it's pretty certain that Apple won't be signing off on an MMS application through the AppStore.
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I'm looking at the MMS spec. I thought it used TCP/IP to the server, but I might be wrong in that
It works through WAP, if this Wikipedia page is correct. WAP runs at layer four, rather than layer three as I'd originally thought. It's roughly analogous to UDP, and over an IP bearer it's treated the same. So MMS can be written with a sufficiently open SDK, but there's still the issue of installing code into the communications stack.
I think what Matthew's implying is that Apple and the telcos are not in a happy relationship (unlike say Nokia and the telcos). So Vodafone is selling the iPhone as a matter of obligation, but is disinclined to offer it at an attractive price point.
Certainly the gen-1 iPhone relationship with AT&T was a meeting of unwilling minds, and when Apple tried to sell the revenue-sharing model outside the US they got told to disappear and engage in sexual relations several times.
Apple is demanding a pretty hefty "subsidy" from the telcos for the "privilege" of being allowed to sell the iPhone, and that doesn't lead to happy telcos. Telcos like power, and telling people what to do. They are much less willing to dance to anyone else's tune. -
Yamis posted a link
Just to go horribly OT here, was anyone else utterly appalled at the quality (or, rather, blatant lack thereof) of the editing of that article? Grammaros, typos, it's abysmal.
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That's spooky. Two people posited roughly the same thing in the space of two minutes. And they're probably right.
Silly me, roger, thinking that the iJobs is building for the consumer. You're right, it's a phone designed around ensuring that Apple gets the most money, by way of its cut of telco revenues, as possible. Nobody outside Apple got a say in the design of 1.0, if the reports at the time are accurate, but that doesn't mean that iSteve wasn't looking ahead to the revenue stream that he was dragging from a reluctant AT&T's bent-over form.
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Is the SDK of the iPhone sufficently open to allow a third-party to write an MMS implementation? (Windows Mobile is!)
WM SDK actually allows you to write the full protocol handler, and install it into the communications stack? MMS isn't just the messages, it's the way they're sent. Roughly corresponds with layer 2 and 3 of the OSI model, if that helps you.
I could understand it letting you develop applications that leverage MMS, but writing a whole separate communications protocol is a pretty huge level of flexibility.
Assuming you're right, I'd be absolutely flabbergasted if the iPhone SDK allows such things.