Posts by Ian Loveridge

Chain Reaction finds and plugs security hole that led to fraud

You don't get service unless you let them know.

I was phoned and reassured by CRC after letting them know, but how many of those forum posters didn't even think to inform CRC of their predicament?

Much easier to whinge I guess.

Good PR response from them.

Nice to see a company not only admit a flaw, but also go to such lengths to reassure affected customers. Far more honest and effective than a 'it wasn't anything to do with us' type response.

Although I was one of those affected, I have already purchased from them again.

theft in realtime

The card detail theft was stated as being 'in realtime', which would imply that the numbers were sniffed from the wire, rather than from storage as you suggest.

Stay-at-home PayPal crook used stolen funds to buy gold bullion

Paypal ignored this because...

the stuff was never delivered to the account holders address. Instead the guy had it all delivered to his mum's and therefore it wasn't covered by PayPal's processes.

Paypal effectively turned a blind eye because it was outside their T&C's and they weren't liable.

Nokia rides you hard for power

usb?

Bottle dynamo systems are a lot better than they used to be and drag should be barely noticeable tbh. However, I thought phone manufacturers were starting to standardise on micro usb...

ContactPoint rollout grinds to a halt, again

Is it not for ALL vulnerable children?

I understood that ContactPoint was to allow the authorities to more easily help all vulnerable children by showing which children had dealings with which areas of support, e.g. a hospital visit check could show that social services have concerns about the child's safety, potentially showing an incident of abuse@home. I didn't realise that 'vulnerable' children will be excluded from the records...prompting the question - what's the point? Or are only kids of famous people truely vulnerable...

Dogs and arson feature in top 10 data recovery disasters

Bottle of wine?

Did they extract it and re-bottle it from the keyboard? Bet it tasted of vinegar...

Red Hat scurries away from consumer desktop market

more @theBigYin

I installed Ubuntu 7.10 alongside XP and apart from having to edit a file to get my side mouse buttons to work, nothing could have been simpler. Everything just worked out of the box. My mobo needed 6 different downloads to get graphics, ethernet and sound working correctly for XP (3yr old Asrock board), not only that, I needed to know how to check out device manager to find what was wrong...XP 'just' works...WRONG!

The thing is we have made allowances because this is what we are all used to. As they say 'Linux is not Windows' and we are resistant to change. Quite rightly when we just want to 'do our job' or whatever. I tried Linux again because I wanted to learn something new...but was disapointed with what I actually needed to learn nowadays as very little needed to be learned.

From a fresh install;

Play an mp3 or Avi - a prompt told me to click a button to get the drivers and also why they weren't included. Windows on the other hand just fails until you understand about codecs and where to get them.

AntiVirus and Firewall - still haven't found them in Ubuntu, but then I am told I don't need them. There are a multitude of add on products for XP to do this and many are malware masquerading as functional software. Fact is, you need to know about this stuff for windows, but don't for Ubuntu.

I must admit to trying many Linux distro's over the last ten years but always took them off after getting frustrated. Ubuntu has stayed on and apart from gaming XP and VisualStudio it doesn't even get loaded anymore.

I tried Vista but put XP back after finding my logitech webcam wouldn't work (cheers for dropping driver support Logitech) and the fact that with 2Gb it felt like it was running through treacle after using XP, let alone Ubuntu.

The real thing is that once they are setup, everyone seems able to switch between them without much comment. Except to ask what the equivalent software is called. Messenger or Media Player are what they are used to, so Pidgin, Movie Player and Amarok are not what they look for. Quite happy once they are told though, with quite a few still looking for Amarok for windows <smug smile>.

The point is (and I have never installed OS X so can't comment) that EVERY OS needs quite a bit of setting up. Once it is done, they seem roughly equivalent and as long as they do the job... in my case I believe Ubuntu took a lot less setting up.

Beeb censors Fairytale of New York

Scumbag not offensice? They have lost the plot as usual.

I wonder how many complaints they received before they censored it?

My colleagues and are penning our complaints that to bleep/blank part of this classic song is far more offensive - that is 5 complaints right there.

I wonder how many more people will complain...go for it!

Red Hat, Novell sued for patent infringment

So thats all *nix's then.

So all *nix, Citrix and Terminal Servers need to licence this functionality? Pfft. sad.