Posts by Adam Williamson

Mandriva's Linux on a stick will wow all the ladies this Summer

Small corrections

Thanks a lot for the review, Scott. Just a couple of minor points. The support for reading and writing NTFS is not non-free; it uses a completely open source implementation called ntfs-3g.

And just to correct a possible implication of "While the non-free aspects of Mandriva might make purists hestitate" - it's worth pointing out that there is (and always has been) a completely free edition of Mandriva available, Mandriva Linux Free. There's no 100% open source version of the Flash available, but there *is* an edition of the mainstream distro that's acceptable to free software purists. :)

Teens use technology to party in strangers' pools

The Reg and the Mail?

So, what, the Reg is now in the business of uncritically reprinting barely-substantiated scare stories for the over-moneyed middle classes from the Daily Mail?

Congratulations - I see you've gone up in the world! ;)

Davis faces North Korean victory margin in civil liberty vote

Bit of factual accuracy (I know, I know, first time for everything)

BNP will not stand against Davis. Rather hilariously, they oppose 42-day detention. I wish someone in a prominent public media position would make the point that Labour is to the right of *the BNP* on this issue...

UKIP are standing, but in theory - if no-one did oppose Davis - it wouldn't be Davis vs. empty space, there'd be no election and he would be returned as MP automatically.

Red Hat cancels one-click world domination effort

Rising tide for the ecosystem?

"The mission of RHX from the start has been to create a rising tide for the broader open source ecosystem,"

Right. So - it's a *marine* ecosystem, then?

Honestly. The day I start writing that kind of guff can someone please get me moved to a job with the EU press department where I can't do any harm? Ta muchly.

Dissolving the plastic bag problem

max

"So, why is nobody whingeing about the hundreds of times more tons of plastic that is used as packaging?"

Er, people do. Frequently. It's a topic of concern to many environmental organizations. Some major suppliers and supermarkets have already made a few token gestures towards reducing unnecessary packaging.

The main problem is that there is a certain constituency of people who won't buy some products unless they're "securely" sealed - i.e. sealed in such a way that they couldn't be tampered with without it being evident. Hence tamper-proof seals and bottle tops that pop up when opened and so on. It's quite hard to do this without using lots of unnecessary material. So if supermarkets reduce excessive packaging, they get a few 'green' customers but lose a bunch of 'paranoid' customers. That's the deal they're weighing up.

New York talks net giants into child pornography crackdown

Rubbish story.

Terrible coverage of the story, which misses all the free speech and privacy implications (this move effectively gives the power of arbitrary censorship to a single unelected and unaccountable, non-governmental body) and the fact that it's a completely useless move in any case. There are plenty of third party NNTP servers around (mostly used by warez d00ds, but probably fine for kiddie porn enthusiasts as well). Blocking sites by domain name is futile for reasons so obvious they hardly need explaining. Come on - we all expect rather better than this from the Reg. Slashdot was a lot better on this story...

Police probe pirate-DVD detecting dog's demise

@Mark

Yeah...chow mein...that famous Malaysian dish.

Tosser.

Besuited cubicle monkey trashes office

@mewol

And just after the glitch, he's got a sledgehammer I'm sure he didn't have before.

Indian gov: Let us into BlackBerry or we'll shut you down

In practical terms...

In theoretical terms, obviously I'd be firmly against giving any government a backdoor to an entire company's email system. But in *practical* terms, let's face it, this doesn't make much of a difference. I'm amused by someone's comment above:

"in other words your secure email is .....not secure."

Come on...*please* tell me people haven't forget that email is inherently insecure by design. You should always work under the assumption that basically anyone at all can read anything you send unencrypted via email, it doesn't require shadowy government collusion with your service provider. If you're sending anything at all that you'd rather the whole world couldn't potentially see, you need to encrypt it, properly.

Deadly Oz snake bites tourist's todger

Red Dwarf

Surprised no-one's yet been reminded of the great Red Dwarf line...

"Why don't you try it, Sheriff? I hear you used to be faster than a toilet stop in rattlesnake country."

So how will the new US prez handle IT issues?

@NB

Tomorrow's Friday, you say? I think this calls for a celebration. meet you down the King's Arms.

After Debian's epic SSL blunder, a world of hurt for security pros

Philosophy

Note to all those clamouring for all distros to stop patching anything: if we actually did that, you'd all be running systems that were something between LFS and Slackware.

not that I have anything against those projects. They fill a need. But come on, that is not what most Linux users want out of their desktops.

Distro patching is, for most distros, an unfortunate necessity.

I'm sure all the developers posting in this thread about how terrible it is that distros ever patch anything will swear that they've never broken a tarball release, stuck the fix in SVN or on a mailing list, and told people to 'just use that'. I'm sure they've never screwed up their autotools scripts so that their app won't install properly on a system which uses /usr/lib64 rather than /usr/lib . I'm sure they've never ignored bug reports from downstream distributors for months at a time. No, they're all fine, upstanding citizens, I'm sure.

Unfortunately, such lowlife cads of software developers do exist. Upstream developers *do* make mistakes, and then they *do* ignore - or flat out reject, for their own reasons - fixes developed by distributors. In that situation, guess what? We have to patch it. And in umpteen other situations too, but you get the picture.

Distro patching is going to happen. Pushing for all distros to stop patching stuff is just tilting at windmills. It isn't going to happen. It would be better to focus on a calmer and more rational discussion over exactly when it needs to happen and when it doesn't, and it'd be even more productive to go to your mailing list and/or Bugzilla and make sure you don't have any requests from downstream sitting around unattended to.

In the current case, it's obvious that the Debian maintainer made a massive booboo. And it's certainly a good rule of thumb to say 'don't patch security-critical code'. But it's not a good reason to call for distros to stop patching everything, ever.

SANS sounds alarm on Debian OpenSSL flaw

Steven Hewitt

No, it wasn't 'raised internally' in 2006. The erroneous patch was made in 2006. The fact that it was bad was only discovered last week.

Neil

You have to regenerate any ssh or ssl keys or certificates generated on your system. Just updating doesn't do diddly squat.

The "news" is that for the last two years, every single person who generated a key of any given length on a Debian-derived system using OpenSSL got one out of a grand total of 32,768 possible keys. Which is a tiny pool, and stunningly easy to brute force. There are already lists of all the possible keys for 1,024 bit and 2,048 bit lengths floating around, and 4,096 will be done soon. So any server out there which granted any kind of privileged access to anyone using a key generated with a Debian-derived distro in the last two years has to be shut down and tested for vulnerable keys, all the vulnerable keys removed and their authors notified to replace them. That's probably thousands and thousands of servers. Is that enough news for you yet?

Motorola unplugs Cambridge TTPCom unit

Which?

It would really help when writing stories like this to specify whether you mean Cambridge, England or Cambridge, Mass. It's not at all obvious from the story, nor can you reliably guess - both cities are heavily involved in the technology industry.

Snort coke, shaft the environment, say boffins

Clearly what we need...

...is Tesco 'Finest' Organic Cocaine, hand grown by wizened ancient masters in a strictly controlled 'appellation' system, with single-forest premium varieties available. Certified Fairtrade and approved by Greenpeace.

carefully separated in marketing from Tesco Value Cocaine, for the proles...

Canadians go out clubbing

sigh.

Vegetarian, living in Canada. I have no time for the people who whine on about this kind of thing without the slightest consideration for philosophical consistency.

If you're going to complain about Canadian seal culling or Japanese whaling, you should also stop eating meat, wearing fur or leather or any other animal product, and (arguably) drinking or eating any animal byproduct unless you're damn sure about the welfare of the animal it came from. Otherwise, you are frankly just blowing smoke.

Personally I wouldn't go out and club a seal, nor would I go out and shoot a cow in the head, which is why I don't eat meat. But I'm perfectly well aware that this is a minority position, and thus I'm perfectly okay with accepting that there are people who don't consider it wrong to shoot cows in the head, eat the meat that comes from shooting cows in the head, hunt whales, or club seals to death. I don't agree with them, but hey, I don't agree with lots of people on lots of things, and we get along fine.

If seal culls make you uneasy, then by all means, consciously refrain from going out and beating a seal to death today or any *other* day. But if you're going to make a big fuss about it, please be aware that there's about a 99.9% chance you're a giant stinking hypocrite.

Want to snoop on your neighbors? Come and work in Wisconsin

RW / Eugene

"And why weren't individuals with access restricted as to what data they could retrieve and for which customers?"

How?

People working support in a call center obviously need access to the records of every customer, because they could potentially have to provide support to any customer. And in most cases you can't restrict what information they have access to see because they need to see it in order properly to support the customer.

Eugene, what he says is perfectly true.

Any time any agent accesses information on a customer he's not actively dealing with, that is basically misuse.

So, how do you detect it all?

You have to go through every instance of access to any customer's records. i.e., you have to audit *every single operation performed* by every customer service agent ever. That is *technically* possible but not practically possible.

It's trivial to, say, find out if anyone inappropriately accessed one given person's records. If Arnold Schwarzenegger thought someone at California Television had improperly accessed his record that'd be easy to check: you look at Arnie's account, note every instance of access to it, and check whether that access was made for a legitimate reason. For a single-customer scenario like that, of course it's easy to check.

But that's not what the guy said. He said it was difficult or impossible to uncover "all the instances" of abuse. This is perfectly true, because *any* customer's account could potentially be accessed improperly, and it is not practical to check every single access to every single account in the system.

Not uncommon

I worked for a local communication services provider (trying not to definitively identify the company in question here) for a while, and this was not uncommon there either. I didn't do it on purpose but I did actually have to access a prominent local politician's records at one point as part of my duties, and couldn't help but notice rather a lot of adult video on demand purchases...

given that quite a lot of 'Hollywood' film work goes on up here in Vancouver (it's cheaper), people would just search for film stars' names. Quite a lot of them have homes and accounts here.

I suspect this happens at just about *any* company of this kind - electric, gas, hydro, cable, internet, whatever. It's pretty hard to clamp down on basic human curiosity, though it would obviously be better if people didn't do it.

Google mounts Chewbacca defense in EU privacy debate

George

One can't, unless one wants all one's packets going elsewhere (which isn't very helpful). What one can do is use a proxy, or a series of anonymizing proxies - like TOR - so that no can trace back through the chain to the actual originating IP address.

Fraud guardian LifeLock accused of fraud

AC

Um, this story is about the U.S., not the U.K.

Microsoft opens APIs and protocols to all

Correction

Correction to my previous post: someone's pointed out that this does apply to GPL software, which is good. However, the commercial / non-commercial issue still applies, which is the larger one.

Notes:

"Open source". Not "free software". Microsoft has drawn this distinction before - allowing certain rights to projects under, say, BSD, but not projects under GPL.

"Non-commercial". i.e., they won't sue Andrew Tridgell, but they reserve the right to sue Red Hat.

This ultimately means nothing has changed much, because everyone always knew they would not sue the non-commercial projects which actually build components like Samba, but the commercial projects which use said components - like Red Hat. This is just common sense. Suing non-commercial projects is all downside (lawyers' bills, terrible press) and no upside (they don't have any money for you to win, and it doesn't take any competitors out of the market). Of course they would go after the commercial entities, not the non-commercial ones.

Ubuntu chief ushers in the age of Intrepid Ibex

He's been got to

Oh, dear. It seems the strategy boutiques have got to Mark.

I'm a bit worried, really. I mean I suppose we'll have to compete with this fearless goat, but I haven't got a clue how to go about "re-engineering the user interaction model". Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Alright, I kid. I know exactly what that means...

"Upgrade to GNOME 2.24".

Oz admits $85m p0rn filtering FAIL

Erm...

You appear to have missed a rather important point, which is that the government in Australia has changed in the last six months. The government that implemented the filter was the previous 'Liberal' (i.e. conservative) administration. The one that's killing it is the new Labour administration.

A newly elected government reversing some of the policies of its predecessor - not so much of a news story, really.

HP's Linux sub-notebook spied on web

Everything old is new again

Heystoopid, forget the Libretto, this is the Sony Picturebook, all over again.

Original Picturebook:

http://www.ultranote.com/index.php/content/view/11/38/

Final model:

http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/PCOM/PCG-C1MSX/

they started with a Pentium 166 (IIRC) model somewhere around 1999-2000, and finished with a 933MHz (again, IIRC) Transmeta Crusoe model somewhere around 2003-2004.

The similarly-dimensioned Libretto (and a few other competitors) were copies of the Sony design.

Of course, the Picturebooks tended to cost $2000+, new. I paid £600 for the C1XS model (P2/400) I used for several years, second hand from eBay.

Fantastic system, though. Wonderfully built, incredibly reliable. I wish they'd kept making them, but they now just have the U line of UMPCs and the T line of 10.4"-screened conventional laptops.

Major Linux security glitch lets hackers in at Claranet

Oh, the crap is flying here. Tim and others, re disclosure.

For the benefit of Tim and others:

yes, this case is slightly unusual - because there was public disclosure before the bug was fixed (albeit by a couple of days; most distributors had official updates available Tuesday).

Yes, Tim, we have a perfectly mature private disclosure system for Linux security issues. There is an established process whereby serious security issues are privately disclosed by security researchers to other security researchers, the developers of the affected component, and distributors.

The issue is then verified, fixed, the fix is tested, and the public disclosure is made at the same time as the patches are made available by the upstream developers and by distributors.

In this case, the issue leaked to the public slightly prematurely, no-one knows how yet, AFAIK. Usually, there would be zero window between the public disclosure of the vulnerability, and the availability of official updates.

Usually, security researchers only break this process when they don't believe the issue is being worked on sufficiently urgently, which isn't ever the case for kernel security issues, which are always handled as a very high priority by the kernel developers.

(Compare to Microsoft's "once a month, you get to be slightly secure!" policy).

And for the most recent AC, they *really* ought to be using separate virtual machines for each user in a hosting setup. Or at least chroot jails. As someone earlier pointed out. This is at least 60% the fault of bad setup on Claranet's part (as most compromises usually are, for any OS).

Jay:

except that the Ubuntu disc you installed comes with a complete set of applications for doing just about everything (all of which need patches), and Windows comes with...er...IE. And Paint.

US scientists puncture the ethanol biofuel bubble

Maria Helm

...if you're not in politics yet, you *ought* to be. :)

Rogers wraps 'unlimited' mobile browsing in small print

JeffyPooh

Yeah, that's definitely the best deal around for high usage at the moment. It's listed at $100 on their website, though, not $75 - http://www.telusmobility.ca/bc/business_solutions/connect_megabyte_rate_plan.shtml . Only available till March 31 - don't know if that means it stops being unlimited after that, or it's just not available to new buyers after that.

They do reserve the right to cancel service for 'abuse' - I'm sure if it got too expensive for them they'd just classify multi-GB use as 'abuse' and cut you off.

Still a much better option than Fido or Rogers, though.

Alastair

Ah, that's a point. Doesn't answer the modem point, though.

BTW, on the prices - call them up, threaten to cancel - make sure you get transferred to the cancellation people, as they're the ones with all the power - and tell them the other company will give you a better deal. If you complain enough they'll give you a fairly hefty discount and improve your plan (of course, the fact that they can afford to do this just shows how much money they're creaming off on the regular prices). After doing this, I pay Fido $38.45 before tax for 200 minutes daytime, unlimited evenings / weekends, unlimited calls to Fido or Rogers, unlimited incoming, 1000 text messages, caller ID and voicemail. Not bad really.

Data prices are, as outlined above, ridiculous, though. Telus' are somewhat better.

Surprised no-one's mentioned 3G, yet. Fido is only just getting limited 3G out here in Vancouver, and many places don't have it yet. Telus has had it for a while, though (they're on Rev A EVDO now).

Coward, I think they still piggyback off each other's towers in some areas. And you can still only get service at all on Telus' analog network in quite a substantial area of the country (are there any other 'developed' countries where you can still buy dual-mode analog / digital phones? heh.)

How?

Was discussing this with the significant other this morning. The "tethering" clause - not valid when using the phone as a modem - one is common on "unlimited" data offers up here (Telus and Bell have similar wording). The one about only being allowed on certain devices is new, however.

The burning question is - how the heck do they know?

Neither of us is aware of anything that would allow the phone company to reliably know whether the phone is being used as a modem, or exactly what phone you currently have your SIM card in.

Is there actually any way for them to know this? Or are they just going to assume that any usage beyond a given amount "must" be because you were using it as a modem, and charge you, as seems to be Telus' policy?

I've no idea what they can do about the device clause (besides only offering the price to people who buy one of those devices, obviously - but that does nothing about them just switching devices later). Send out plain clothes detectives?

Paris icon because I'm afraid the question's as dumb as she is.

When poor people pollute - the Tata Nano and eco-crime

@Kurt

"I am continuously amazed by the moral flexibility of the developed world, particularly the US, who whine about ecological catastrophes in the third world. Deforestation? Bad Thing. We know. We logged 98% of the forest in the US, and it's a bummer. Fossil fuels? Don't use 'em. We burned oil for 100 years and look what it did to the climate! Overfishing? Bad thing. Blah Blah Blah. Do what we say, not what we did. Yeah, it'll suck for your economy, but the alternative is us giving up our air conditioners and SUVs."

Well that's one way of looking at it; the other is 'learning from history'. When every country that has so far deforested itself to death is regretting it, and every 'developed' country that still has substantial forest cover is devoting substantial resources to keeping it, that might be a good hint that those countries fortunate enough still to have lots of trees should probably make some effort to hang onto them. Of course, there is always an odd silence on the best way to do this (kick out the multinationals who ultimately profit from the deforestation and slap a big tariff on the resulting exports) as it doesn't fit in with our economic ideals.

(A fairly common trope in science fiction is for wood, in the future, to be a really, really expensive luxury item due to its scarcity...)

But yes, it rather depends on tone. I don't have much time for the SUV drivers bemoaning Nano emissions, but I do think India could do with some strong government which might question this development direction. You'd think the current state of America would give some governments of rapidly developing economies some pause for thought about e.g. modern mass transit infrastructure, but it appears they're just going the way of all past governments in the same situation (spend all your money on big guns and let the rest rot). Someone above says the capacity of the road infrastructure will limit the amount of these cars it's practical to sell, but of course what will happen is you'll get a big bloc of new car owners pushing the government to build more roads, they'll do so, and before you know it half of India will look like your average U.S. suburban area; gigantic sprawling low-density development, not a bus or train in sight.

Well, doesn't that sound like a fun prospect. :\

Yes, there's an element of hypocrisy to it, but there's also a genuine hope that maybe the rest of the world can avoid the mistakes we made and wind up with much more livable environments, but alas, it doesn't seem to be happening.

Sun nabs innotek's 20MB of open source, virtualized goodness

Oh, come on.

Flipping hell, the Reg has really lost it. You honestly couldn't find someone who'd actually heard of VirtualBox to write this article?

It's a reasonably popular product as it's a fairly mature, low-end-VMware-alike virtualization app that's actually open source. It's fairly widely used, I'm sure you could stop ten random techies at any given conference and at least a few of them would have heard of it.

And I don't get the jibe at their website either. What, it's not overloaded with Flash and strewn with Strategy Boutique buzzwords, it's just a simple, well-laid out site that presents the product - what's the problem with that?

Obviously the intended tone of this article was "ha ha, look at the cute little software package" but it comes off as rather more of "ha ha, look at the Reg, we're completely clueless".

Brazilian cleaner spots security hole in Heathrow e-borders

Andy

The reason they print those apparently stupid questions on application forms, immigration landing cards etc is not because they ever expect anyone to answer "yes" (although I'm sure some joker has done, "for a laugh", at some point, and regretted it both bitterly and at length), but so that if you say "no" and they at some point later find out that you should've said "yes", they can do you for lying about it in a sworn official document. Authorities always like to have lots of different charges they can pin on someone, it reduces the chances of their wriggling out of all of them.

Yahoo! launches! flat!-!-rate! web! hosting!

And they're paying for this...

...by squeezing us poor sods who just use Yahoo for domain registration.

My domain's up for renewal this year. I have it registered via Yahoo(!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!) On Monday they mailed to let me know the price for this registration was increasing by 30%: from $9.95 per year to $12.95 per year.

I was scratching my head wondering how it suddenly got 30% more expensive for them to record in the Big Book Of Domain Names* that I own www.happyassassin.net; now I know. It didn't. They just need the lucre to subsidize the hosting service. Sigh.

* disclaimer: Big Book Of Domain Names may not actually exist.

EU investigates Microsoft's OOXML campaign

Paul Fleetwood, AC 16:03

Paul: ballet stuffing, eh? Is that what keeps ballet dancers' pants from falling down? :)

AC 16:03: You didn't realize Microsoft was into astroturfing? Wow. :)

Baylis Eco EP-MX71 hand-cranked media player

Chris, Neil

Chris: oh, they *do* concern you. *You* may not *be concerned* about them, but that's really neither here nor there - you'll drown just as well as anybody else...

Having said that, Neil, I'm with you. I'd not normally do an Ashlee Vance, but in this case, yes.

To wit - green? Oh, pull the other flipping one. It's got carbon-neutral bells on it.

As Neill pointed out, this thing has a battery. That means the only difference between it and a conventional media player is the mains electricity you use to charge those things up.

Let's face it, media players do not exactly use a lot of power. I don't feel like crunching the numbers this early in the morning, but I'm sure someone who did could come up with an entertaining stat on *exactly* what tiny fraction of the power consumed by a single light bulb you would save by using this thing for three years instead of a regular PMP.

Basically - it'd be tiny. Well-nigh immeasurable. Unless you're Swampy, you probably have at least fifty other things that consume a whole lot more power and produce a lot more carbon - and other, equally or more important - emissions than your PMP. If you've already sworn off driving, flying, artificial heat, artificial light, cooked food, computing, and generally just about everything else, then fine, you can eliminate the last milligram of your carbon emissions by getting this thing. Otherwise - if you really cared about 'green issues' there would be a hell of a lot more productive things to do than buy yet another electronic toy, only this one with a cute wind-up handle on it.

As Neil says, the "you can use it anywhere, even if the battery's dead and there's no mains electricity for 500 miles" is a neat selling point. "Green" is not.

Big Brother firm tech exec locked up in UAE

Cameron

You're quite right - I *hate* travelling to England.

And anywhere else, for that matter.

The second time I arrived here in Canada I was pulled out of the customs line by a lovely guy who body searched me (twice), pulled my luggage apart and went through it four times, and declared my wallet had tested positive for cocaine residues (where's that article saying that 90% of U.K. banknotes test positive for cocaine?) I was unwillingly detained for two hours, accused of being on drugs "because I looked nervous and my pupils were dilated" (no shit, you just pulled me off a thirteen hour plane flight with no sleep and accused me of being a drug smuggler, wouldn't *you* be a tad nervous?), and eventually let me go with the charming words "I think you're lying to me, but I can't prove anything so I have to let you go."

The third time I went to the States I was kept in an immigration barn in Atlanta airport for five hours with no information as to why I was there, before they questioned me for ten minutes and then let me go.

Moral of the story - travelling's a bitch and anyone in a position of authority at an airport is likely to be a power-tripping twat. *Any* airport. Any country.

More remote workers squatting next door's broadband

@Mark

Well, er, you're sort of missing the point. You're factoring in a contention ratio of 50:1. The contention ratio is the whole *point* of my post. That's what I mean when I say "No ISP has anywhere near enough backhaul for all the connections it provides to actually be 100% (or even 20%, really...) utilized at once." That's the whole reason contention ratios work - because not everyone uses their connection at full speed all the time.

The whole point of my post is that if lots of people share a smaller number of connections (rather than one person per connection, or only a single household per connection), those contention ratios just aren't going to work any more.

Robert Long

Ultimately it'd bankrupt all the ISPs.

Given current technology they can only provide people with a 10mbit connection for 25 quid a month or whatever on the basis that they don't actually use it all the time. No ISP has anywhere near enough backhaul for all the connections it provides to actually be 100% (or even 20%, really...) utilized at once.

If everyone was sharing everyone else's internet connection, the ISPs would see their revenues decrease and their usage increase, simultaneously and significantly. Result: massively degraded connections and ISPs with no money to upgrade the backhaul.

It's not that a system where there were far fewer points of connection direct to the ISP couldn't work out for all parties concerned - but it'd require a much more sensible transition strategy than "let's all buy a wifi card and cancel our DSL contract". In the same way as shared apartment buildings can get bulk deals for cable TV, it would certainly be possible to build a system on this model, but doing it on the basis of half a neighborhood sharing one 30 quid a month connection is just not going to work.

Given that, if too many people start sharing their connections intentionally, ISPs are going to start using draconian and annoying measures (MAC restrictions, black box routers and the like) to stop people doing it, which isn't ultimately in anyone's best interest. They will *have* to do this to stay in business. Of course, they'll do it earlier and far more drastically than they strictly need to, because all big businesses are fundamentally like that - see, I'm a good old socialist too.

Actually I'd quite like the idea of a system where you only need one connection back to the ISP per, say, 50 people, and the cost of that connection is shared out among the people. Cuts down a lot on infrastructure; it's as fundamentally wasteful to have 100 ADSL modems in one block of flats as it is to have 100 satellite dishes. But you'd have to really design the system that way for it to be viable.

Wireless security stories

I'm sure there'll be a lot, but here's mine.

I was making some tweaks to my wireless router configuration the other day. Half-way through, I was logging into the admin interface once more when suddenly my password stopped working. After a couple of attempts, I thought "well, maybe somehow the router got screwed up and reset itself to factory settings", so I tried the factory default username and password, and it worked.

It was only once I'd logged in and was about to start rejigging the settings that I realized I wasn't logged in to my router at all. Mine was working fine, but during the seconds it was down, my wireless card had automatically associated with the AP of someone else nearby. Yep, they're running without any encryption and using the factory username / password. Sigh.

Use of Paris icon ought to be obvious...

US Army struggles with Windows to Linux overhaul

So...

...in the end all actual communication will be done with walkie-talkies by grunts, as has been the case for decades? Check.

DHS official moots Real ID rules for buying cold medicine

@AC

"And wouldn't the bulk purchase (or repeat purchases) of said ingredients be rather obvious to the retailers anyway?"

Maybe it is. Why do you assume this means they will do anything about it, though?

Do something about it = costs money, takes time, liable to get your windows kicked in by miffed drug dealers.

Do nothing about it = costs nothing, doesn't take any time, keeps the profits rolling in.

Dallas man accidentally shoots self in head

"Homicide officer" (Vladimir)

In America, all unusual / suspicious deaths are followed up by the local police's homicide department.

Three Little Pigs book deemed offensive to Muslims

Magnus

Er...what?

Complainers: did you read it?

Note to everyone complaining: have you actually read it?

I'm betting not.

Then you're just as bad as Mary Whitehouse.

If you haven't read it, shut up, you don't have a clue what you're talking about. For all you know, it could be incredibly offensive. It's clearly not a traditional re-telling of the story (the title should be a somewhat obvious clue to that), so if you haven't read it, you have no idea what its contents are or how offensive they might be to anyone, and therefore are in no position to pass judgment on the stance of the judging panel...

Paris because the knee-jerk "political correctness" whiners are displaying exactly as much intelligence as she usually does.

Cops admit CCTV no use in deterring drunken violence

Mike

Frankly, if you drive in a bus lane, you deserve everything you get. Where do people get this odd idea that "motorist" should mean "person allowed to break whatever laws he likes and get away with it on the basis of half-assed 'everyone else is doing it' self-justification"?

Actually, enforcement of not-driving-in-bus-lanes (and high-occupancy lanes) is one of the few *sensible* uses of CCTV I can think of. Easily the most cost-efficient way to scupper those arseholes who think that owning a car gives them a God-given right to screw with the transportation needs of others (who are satisfying them in a far less selfish manner, too).

Mandriva and TurboLinux unveil 10-person strong Manbo

Not 'new', Del

Del, it's not a 'new' effort, we're just synchronising development on the base system components of our distributions (that's low level stuff like the kernel, glibc, gcc etc). This is not developing new software or a new distribution or anything like that, just sharing the burden of maintenance of some basic system components in order to improve the quality of the work for both distributions.

Adam Williamson

Mandriva

Junkie sues pusher over heart attack

@anonymous coward 05:59

one, that has to be prescribed. You don't buy it on a street corner. Hence you still can't fairly draw an analogy to GM, New Balance, Smith and Wesson or whoever.

two, crystal meth is a *substantially* nastier substance both in terms of physical effects and the likelihood and severity of addiction in comparison to regular illegal amphetamines, never mind the stuff that is sold on prescription.