Posts by Chronos

Stallman calls on EU to set MySQL free

Re: Preventing Forking?

You can't fork MySQL and *call* it MySQL. There is absolutely no barrier to creating a new GPL fork providing it doesn't infringe Sunacle's trademark. The other barrier to forking is those who, for commercial reasons, would want to change the licence as they will never own the copyright on the code and have no authority to change the terms under which the code is distributed. In other words, whatever your fork would be called would have to be pure GPL and any code changes must also be GPL as that is the only authorisation you have for distributing the original source. Stallman should be pleased since he keeps harping on about one licence to rule them all. See the Monty Program fork MariaDB for niggly little details.

What I suspect Stallman wants is what he can never have. He can have the entire codebase, mess with it, release half-arsed versions of it and add code from other sources then release the results under the existing terms of the GPL, a licence he himself considers the epitome of freedom. He just can't have the MySQL name. It's exactly the same situation as Mozilla's browser source: Change with the default build (even a custom mozconfig triggers this) and you cannot brand it "Firefox" as it's a trademark. Stallman should recognise this. One word: Iceweasel.

This is yet another "look at me! I'm St. Ignucius, saviour of free code!" moment and his hypocrisy is showing in the way he's not satisfied with the application of his own damned licence. You wrote it, Richard. If it's deficient in some way, you only have yourself to blame. Expect a GPLv3.x with anti-Tivo style trademark clauses shooting itself in the foot again. There is *no way* Sunacle will surrender that trademark, just as there is no legitimate way the EU can take it from them. In fact, that trademark is probably worth more to Sunacle than the entire codebase.

If you want to get clever with your fork's name, UnnameDB or SQLEWNN seems logical in that it conveys the loss of the right to use the MySQL name whilst keeping the codebase and upgrade path intact.

Beer. That's not free either.

UK telly in coke blizzard shock

"I unfortunately went to the toilet and took cocaine"

One has to draw the line somewhere...

Palm Pré arrives in Blighty

Oh, w00t!

I was looking forward to this thing appearing. However, Palm shot itself in the foot with snooping on usage and pissing about with other companies' software, trying to sell that as a feature and now I'm sick of hearing about the Pre. I doubt the Pixie is going to be any better as regards privacy and ethics. Well done, Palm, viral marketing at its best. As for provider exclusivity, what moron thought that was a good idea? Or are these things so expensive to produce that an exclusive contract with a heavy subsidy is the only way they can sell them?

Besides, I think I may be outgrowing the mobile voice service. A 'phone is just another way people have of asking me inane questions at times to suit them when I'm busy doing something else. I'm also one of these rare creatures that can a) walk somewhere without texting (indeed, I can send Morse faster than I can type on a numeric keypad and I'm so violently allergic to "TXT SPK" that I end up sending shit like "TNX FER MSG = WILL HELP YOU WITH THAT AROUND THE SAME TIME HELL'S BRIMSTONE BECOMES A SUPERCONDUCTOR = AR SK") or having the thing clamped to my ear and b) can actually ignore the thing when I'm driving if I've been foolish enough to take it with me or forgotten to switch it off for drive time. Gadget freakery is all well and good but, when the situation becomes me paying vast amounts for other people's ability to annoy the fuck out of me, I draw the line.

Michael Dell: Netbooks go sour after 36 hours

OT: Jesus wept!

Another fortnight of this grinning fool's mugshot on the front page :o(

Large Hadron boffin arrested on terrorism suspicion

Re: money on

Seconded. My first thought on seeing the headline.

Microsoft plays ads-funded Office 2010 Starter gambit

Hmm...

Click 'n' Run? Already been done for Linux.

http://www.cnr.com/

Remember, although Linspire is now owned by Xandros, these were the people MS sued over the name "Lindows." Perhaps revenge really is a dish best served cold.

'Stop NASA bombing the Moon!'

Dahak

Surely an Imperial Utu-class battle steel planetoid isn't going to be bothered by a little thing like a spent rocket...

OK, I read too much.

Ubuntu man finds metalove in Debian attacks

Re: Turn the other cheek et al.

"if you want Linux to succeed on the desktop"

Is that an assumption I see before me? My own OS of choice, which is not Linux, will never gain significant share on the desktop and you know what? I'm completely unconcerned about that. In fact, I'm quite contented, as evidenced by the icon. I use it (you'll note: No evangelism) on the desktop, but then I'm one of these stark-staring bat-shit crazy maniacs that actually matches the software to the tasks I wish to accomplish while leaving out all of the nasties I can really do without. Besides, Netcraft confirms *everyone* is doing quite nicely thank-you-very-much where it counts:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/performance/Hosters?tn=september_2009

"someone has to go and talk the talk to the Dells and HPs of this world"

For those of you obsessed with "beating Windows on the desktop" and "getting the OEMs to pre-install," worrying about "market share" and "desktop penetration, " I just have one simple question, as concise as it can be, asked from a position of seeing bugger all actual real advantage to the users of or the programmers that created this seething, chaotic mass of software that is GNU/Linux:

Why?

It's a genuine question that I haven't seen answered to my satisfaction yet (arrogant bastard, aren't I?). It usually comes down to fanboyism, an unhealthy obsession with and hatred of The Beast of Redmond and nothing of any real substance. Personally, I think the current development model works rather well. Security holes are getting patched as they filter down to the various repos, users aren't left searching for updates and the only people inconvenienced by it are those who want to treat it *like* Windows with a single dominant project directing all the others. Because no one GNU/Linux distribution "owns" all of its parts, this is never going to be feasible, even with all the "synergy," "leveraging" and "meta-cadence" in the world.

(PS: Sorry to pick on your post, goggyturk, but you were the one with the cojones to come straight out with it in plain English, so please take it as a mark of respect, just as "seething, chaotic mass" is intended as respect for the Linux development model for those that understand the strengths it brings.)

Cadence?

Meta cadence? Significant amount of evolution? Meta cycles? This guy sounds like the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. What the hell happened to "just shut up and code"?

Google lobs coder's Microsoft badge into rubbish bin

MVPs

Come on, guys, give it a rest. If folks want to give up their own time to help a certain community, more power to them. Have any of you seen the shit Sun put OOo contributors through? Copyright assignments, binding agreements, promises to surrender a testicle to McNealy and so on. The only thing that they get out of the deal is an OOo that sucks slightly less than it did in the last iteration, yet somehow these guys are teh smartz.

To put it bluntly, if you think MVPs are just fanbois, fine. You're entitled to your opinion. There is, however, no need for all this amateur psychoanalysis and vilification, which probably says more about you than them, and the results of this little exercise are starting to look a lot like slander. Ulterior motives my eye. It's not as if any of these people applied for the post; MS offer it out of the blue. Never attribute to malice...

Let's try this bit of amateur psychoanalysis in similar language as an example, just in case some of the slower critics haven't quite got it yet:

How many of you miserable bastards with an inferiority complex (OMG, this bloke has letters! It must be for something trivial or beneath me or I'd have them, too. Yeah, that sounds good) taking the piss have the Win 7 RC? How many of the same subset would like a year's free MSDN? To quote Mike Reid on having your own dick shoved firmly up your arse, "fucking hurts, doesn't it?" Then think how the genuine people with MVPs who only try to help and didn't ask for the award feel. Be nicer. That is all.

Disclaimer: I have the Win 7 RC. I would love a free year of MSDN - c'mon, MS, how about it? :o). I do not use MS operating systems as my primary interface to hardware - that's blown it :o(. I don't use Linux either, but I have about 20 different distros to hand and know how to use them all, just like the 7 RC. I have letters, some I worked for and some that just fell out of an envelope. M, V and P are not three of the consecutive ones. With experience comes the realisation that they're all bullshit anyway, but that's a reflection on the awards, not the person.

@Barney

"And while obviously it's embarrassing for Google to have an employee who still seeks merit awards from their rival and his former employers... 'Telling him not to' seems a bit... Unprofessional? Ungentlemanly? ...Over-stepping your jurisdiction?"

No, no, NO. Read TFA, please. MS has said that certain MVPs get information under NDA that non-MVPs don't, which would imply protected IP. It's that information that Google can't afford their peons to have, since it could compromise their code purity (clean room development) with regards to MS patents and copyright. In short, you don't want your employees wandering about coding stuff for you with competitors' IP in their noggin. It could lead to all sorts of nasty accusations that MS haven't been shy of making in the past. Worse, it could be construed as intentional if it came to court. Google are just practicing due diligence here, as much as I hate to admit it. I know it sounds daft, but that's the environment you're in if you're a coder or employer in jurisdictions that have software patents.

Why?

I would imagine you've touched on why in the article already: I doubt Google would appreciate their employees being under competitors' NDAs. A legal minefield is that, especially when technologies and products overlap. No NDA means no inside secrets from MS, thus no chance of MS saying Google's "clean room" environments are compromised by the presence of someone in possession of MS IP. Google are still nosy, information stealing, PII profiling bastards, but I can see their logic on this one. You know as well as I do how the Beast of Redmond finds any little technicality to crush opposition. Move along, nothing to foam about here.

Can we have a good/evil Sergey icon set, please? He's the one who decides what's evil according to Eric. It's also about time to retire BillyG and put the chair flinging monkey boy in there, or would that continue to confuse those who cannot, for the life of them, differentiate between Steve B and Steve J? Tip: Steve J stays in one place a little longer, tends not to prance around so much, generally has dry armpits, doesn't have to leave Cupertino to stomp on your iPhone and keeps office furniture as a minor expense as opposed to major capex. Steve J also tends not to resemble an ex used car salesman, the kind that makes you buy new even though you know half the value drops off of it when you first turn the key.

Yank slams El Reg 'zio-fruitcake' Playmobil 'crap'

Re: What the fuck

Probably one of those new substitute foods made of the same tasteless crap (soya) they've been putting into bread to make it taste like cardboard. No GM ingredients, natch. Soya raisins does sort of make you wonder if there's anything they can't make the crap into, though. Oh, wait, tasty food. Of course...

Edible grenade. It's made of soya protein. Follow the instructions in the alt tag.

Radio Society to Ofcom: Hear See you in court

@AC 15:43

They can't. Most of the amateur bands are allocated by the ITU, whose stick is a little bigger than Duffcom's, on a region by region basis. Duffcom can, at most, revoke amateur access to them but they cannot, under any circumstances without going to the ITU cap in hand, reassign them to anything else. 70cms may just be an exception, with the MOD being the primary user and amateur radio getting access on a secondary basis, but I've been expecting 70cms to get taken away for years now and it's still there in the schedule.

Ho hum, whatever. If there were anything left worth saving I might GAF.

73, as they say in certain parts of Italy. Or is that "HOOOOOOOOOLA" as the ALC kicks in?

@ Dave Murray

Almost, but not quite. They still haven't told us how much they paid for HRT, nor have they justified charging for a training scheme run by volunteers. One wonders whether they'd be pushing so hard if they hadn't cornered the market for advertising in amateur radio in this country.

Besides, all that's left is multi-band CB. They pushed for this devaluation of the service and now they've discovered that others see it as being worthless, yet they didn't listen to this argument when the members were warning of it eight years ago. Who is suprised that Ofcom now want their payback for virtually removing all regulation of entry into amateur radio at the RSCB's behest?

.- -- .- - . ..- .-. .-. .- -.. .. --- .-. .. .--. ...-.- It's dead, Jim.

EC probe costing Sun $100m a month

Competition Commission

They're starting to get a little bothersome now. All of this goes on behind closed doors, takes too long and costs, both in terms of money and time, companies it turns its steely gaze upon. Far from being good for consumers, if this carries on it's going to make trading in the EU a bind for any corporation, with the resulting expense passed on to us. If there were any sort of due process I wouldn't be quite as bothered, but this is rule by committee and is getting ridiculous.

By the way, where does that €1.n billion they're fining Intel go? AMD aren't going to see any of it and I very much doubt that we are, except for paying for it on the next upgrade. They need to realise that whatever they fine these people comes out of our pockets, not theirs. For the sake of the rest of us, please, PLEASE come up with a better mechanism than fines to control abusive monopolies, otherwise EU fines and the cost of justifying their practices to the commission are going to comprise the majority of a product's price in Europe.

Psion founder retires

Success?

Yes, perhaps it was, but I'm disappointed. Psion could have been so much more had they only stayed true to their roots. For example, had they continued with the Series 3/5 concept, taking it to its logical destination, they could have been ruling the netbook space by now. A waste, a sad waste of so many talented engineers, developers and designers. What have we got to show for Psion's innovations instead? Symbian and a lawsuit over the trademark "netBook." A pitiful legacy for a company that showed so much early potential.

Cyclists give TV chef a Wikikicking

James Martin...

...is now my hero (FSVO time < about 30 seconds, after which my attention will have turned to something more interesting than cyclists) replacing Jeremy Clarkson in the role of "how to deal with self-propelled, self-important twunts using public resources for free that we have to pay for." And there's Tesla, of course. Now you, too can be an inconsiderate prick on the roads and the greenies have no legitimate reason for complaint unless they realise that charging the bugger up probably used the same amount of fossil fuel as driving an ordinary car would have, not that I care much either way since the only feasible alternative for base load is nuclear fission and we all know who is the first to turn up in rusty, blue smoke belching Moggie 1000s (bumper stickers of an ecological bent mandatory, of course) with tofu butties, badly spelled placards and tambourines whenever anyone mentions those type of things. All for £90,000? Bargain!

As for fluorescent Spiderman outfits, could it be that both he and I would look like the Michelin man recovering from an explosion in a paint factory if we ever took it upon ourselves to wear such garments in public? Would we have to have yellow and black diagonals with "WIDE LOAD" on the arse of said Lycra pants? Would we need a police escort? Of course, both he and I are probably considerate enough not to subject the public at large to such sights, so that's a moot point.

However, cyclists that think undertaking me on the left when I'm turning left with my indicator on is a good idea take note: Unless there's a cycle lane (in which case I'll be using my nearside mirror well in advance of actually performing the manoeuvre, providing some undertaking arsehole without clue hasn't already knocked it off or smashed it with their metal scale model of a Highland Longhorn) I ain't stopping and you can take your chances with almost a tonne of turbocharged diesel propelled steel if you think you're that hard. I really don't care any more and you lot obviously don't give a shit for your own safety, despite being dressed in something which can only be described as being as dangerous as motorcycling in lingerie while at the same time being less entertaining, YouTube-worthy and infinitely more annoying.

One more little warning: I have also adjusted one of the nozzles on the nearside windscreen washer for the same situation to about eye level on the average mounted cyclist (arse in the air, head down drinking Robinson's Barley Water from what would seem to be an ideal pisspot complete with oversized catheter for the journey back) and I use screenwash with a little hint of isopropanol (may be better known to cyclists and other Quorn-eating, natural-fibre lovers as rubbing alcohol), which may also be deployed if I have to try to overtake you in heavy traffic more than three times because you think road regulations and traffic signals don't apply to you.

IT angle? Who gives a shit with entertainment and/or flamebait of this quality? :o)

Ubuntu's Koala food arrives on shelves

Koalas?

With all those references, now would seem to be the perfect time for Ubuntu to install DropBear as the default sshd.

Apple yanks C64 emulator from App Store

@Brian Millar

Every Napoleon needs his Snowball to keep the proles in line; in this case it's MS, upon whose BASIC implementation CBM's was based - licensed perpetually, natch.

Nice analogy, by the way.

T-Mobile picks Orange for merger

Doesn't this mean...

...that one company will control 1.8GHz in the UK in its entirety? Where does this leave the MVNOs such as Tesco and Virgin?

I also thought there were limits to how much spectrum one network could "own" or did Mandy change that a few days ago?

Most confusing.

Apple's iPhone loses carriers money, claims researcher

AT&T

Spare a thought for poor Ma Bell while you're at it. The evil rumour mill has it that their network was so utterly shite that they've had to spend mucho wonga to upgrade it to cope with the metrosexuals pounding it with their Jesus 'phones on the "unlimited" data service, so much so that this area of their service would have been about as reliable as O2's without some much needed attention. Thus, any profit they may have made (yeah, OK, but hypothetically) from the Jesus 'phone disappears into capex. Lovely.

Still, they only have themselves to blame ;o)

Hmm, troll, evil Steve or FAIL? Bugger it, none of 'em...

Boffins: Give up on CO₂ cuts, only geoengineering can work

But...

...it's so lucrative! How will we ever get all those lovely research grants without hype about the ecopocalypse? How are the councils going to justify fining folks for not washing out tin cans and religiously putting them in pointless categories of waste in a ritualistic manner every Thursday without some ecological bogeyman to spur them on?

@AC 12:23 (c) The late, great George Carlin, may he rest in peace.

Google blames Gfail on 'availability' upgrade

Re: FREE

<mumble> It's only free if your privacy, confidentiality, sanity and time have no value...</mumble>

/me walks away shaking head at the latest fad of cloud (nebulous and vapour-like) computing.

Web-based Office misses August appointment

Redundant parts

"Making the applications available online posed a challenge to the core-on site business of SAP in the same way Office Web apps will make customers question the need for a full version of Office 2010."

...or, indeed, the Windows client should it happen that, by some miracle, Web Office works with standards-based browsers. An obstacle removed for those low-TCO desktops people keep going on about? Perhaps not, but is that a gamble Millisoft are prepared to take?

"It ain't done until Firefox won't run."

UK media: 'Met Office computer will destroy the world'

Re: National Physical Laboratory - birthplace of the internet.?

It was, however, the birthplace of the atomic clock, so I suppose you could stretch that to NTP ;o)

Belgian boy's iPhone 'explodes'

That'll be right

Just send all the evidence to Apple and get forced to sign an NDA. What a good idea!

Fire at Google UK

Employees searched for fire extinguishers...

...and got several million results, none useful.

Virgin mail struggles to its feet

Virgin Media?

This is not the Virgin mail system of last year. If I'm not very much mistaken, it's more like Google Mail. The Cloud continues to succeed at disappointing...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/15/virgin_media_gmail/

FSF launches Windows 7 anti-upgrade letter campaign

@Chika

"May you live in interesting times!"

Um, thanks - I think. Considering I'm testing 8-BETA3* on my build box, I'm not yet sure "interesting times" are preferable to dull, boring and stable rel^H^H^H times ;o)

* http://wiki.freebsd.org/8.0TODO

@Lee

I think, if you re-read, you'll find the point is that no matter how much zealotry and smear-campaigning is going on, those of us who have to actually implement this stuff don't really care and we'll continue to build networks with whatever works. Also, that last metaphor hints that, instead of concentrating on getting their own shit in order, they're too busy sniping at the others' failings, a complete waste of time if you ask me, with the end result being that all-to-well-known mantra "all software sucks."

But yes, you have a point. It was a bit too aMfM, wasn't it? Coat obtained, taxi waiting.

As usual

The two main zealotry parties wage war on each other while the plodders keep plodding along, completely unconcerned about the clowns to the left of them or jokers to the right. That the plodders rarely gain any ground either really makes you wonder if everyone's missing the point somewhat.

Some of the FSF's statements are laughable, as are some of the MS fanbois' replies. As every reasonable, open-minded person knows, neither are getting any closer to the truth, preferring to throw stones rather than replace their own shattered panes of glass with polycarbonate.

OK, all these metaphors are starting to get a little aMfM-ish (but that last one works on so many levels), so I'll assume my point has been made.

Channel 4 to go 3D

So...

...the couple of hundred people who still watch C4 (only those who aren't sick unto DEATH of Big sodding Brother and the people who insist on enthusing about it, even when you have expressed your willingness to gouge your eyes out with a used, unwashed mustard spoon before watching dross like that and already stopped listening an æon ago) will be suffering from migraines all winter.

You know I'm right...

Trade body loses laptop full of driving conviction data

Yet again...

I'm also questioning what the fuck they were doing with it in the first place. It's bad enough various quangos wandering about with our details without private trade bodies getting hold of them as well. Conviction data is especially sensitive; handing it over to private persons who will probably retain copies of that data long after the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act kicks in (five years for most motoring offences) would seem to cause all sorts of problems and complications. A case for banning the distribution of motoring conviction data in this manner could probably be built from this point alone (IANAL, YMMV, SWW etc).

Those of us who worked for BT in any capacity (back when they were still British Telecommunications) will remember having to sign the OSA as a condition of employment since we had various duties and abilities that brought us into contact with sensitive data. The penalties for misusing this access were pretty severe, which was stressed quite clearly and repeatedly. This used to be the standard for dealing with private information. Now it seems all and sundry have access to unheard of amounts of government-sourced data, spread around on things like personal laptops, pen drives, CD-Rs and so on and all they'll get if they misuse or misplace that information is a stern look from the ICO, as toothless an organisation as the rest of the quangos.

It's about time the civil servants who steer this sort of policy (you're a little naive if you think it's that shower of cretins we "elect" from time to time) got a grip. The DVLA also need a swift kick up their collective arses as this is the umpteenth time I've heard about driver details being misused or misplaced.

Ubuntu man extends olive branch to irate Debian devs

Re: Taken To Extremes

A lot of F/L/OSS developers couldn't care less about market share or beating proprietary software down. The one thing they do seem to care about above all else is freedom. Both the GPL and the BSD licences uphold the idea of freedom (FSVO free) and this is the motivation in many projects (Debian being one of them - http://www.debian.org/intro/about - I don't see anything here about killing non-free software).

Away from the 1337 h4><0r5 that seem to congregate around forums for no good reason and who seem to think that bashing MS is a sign of maturity (Ubuntu forums, I'm looking at you), I think you'll find competing with Microsoft just for the fun of it is far less a priority than you think it is to the people that matter, which may just be why these little arguments about who leads whom appear from time to time. Not everyone working for the betterment of open source sees the "Beast of Redmond" as a threat, or even some benchmark to measure up to. RMS may not agree, but even he recognises the cult-like status of his ideals (Church of Emacs). Most of us are just a little more pragmatic in that we don't find the existence of commercial software a direct affront to our ideals.

In short, "success" in OSS terms is not a market share metric; it's more likely to be achieved by a completed release, well tested, rolled out to and used by those who value freedom (or even - shock, horror! - find OSS more compatible with their way of thinking) with a good feature set and solid performance and to hell with bums on seats.

A lot of people just don't seem to grasp this simple concept, so I'll distill it to its essence: Use or use not. Honestly, a lot of us really don't mind either way. Market share is for the economists, not the technologists.

Herding cats

Please also read Matthias Andree's reply to Mark's proposals (http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2009/08/msg00186.html). He nailed almost every thought I had from a package/port maintainer's point of view and the correct way to maintain a package/port maintainer to upstream developer relationship.

What I suspect Mark is trying to do amounts to herding cats. You may or may not be able to get Xorg to sync their releases with the "major" distros. You may or may not be able to get the GCC project managers to do the same thing. What you're not going to be able to do is get them all to agree, especially if it appears to *anyone* that the motivation is to solve financial or operational problems for some commercial entity, and that's where this idea falls flat.

The current model of "We release when we all agree it is ready" fits nicely into a mainly volunteer, non commercial organisation's resource structure. I really cannot see that changing within free/open source software projects anytime soon, and certainly not simply to please one distribution project leader. Granted, it is a fine Utopia he's created and it would certainly bring an edge of quality and consistency to the distros participating, but a Utopia is all it is in reality.

Perhaps if he scaled back his ambitions to a more achievable collaboration between distros to discuss and work towards rather than set in stone a synchronised release and package agreement from the get-go, he may have more success once the discussions reach critical mass of participants, especially if each participant's voice has equal weight. Right now, it seems he wants everyone else to fit into Ubuntu's release mould and that just isn't going to happen. Whether that is due to egos, operational constraints or resource shortages doesn't really matter at this point.

Herding cats indeed.

Top vendors flunk Vista anti-virus tests

Sad...

...to see ESET slipping down the rankings. At one time I wouldn't have hesitated to recommend their products. Now it's in the same class as One Care (that *has* to be pronounced in a French accent for best effect).

On a brighter note, Avira's detection engine just gets better and better. Now we just need them to bring out a product which doesn't expire and I may just start recommending their paid-for versions to people. This restricted subscription business model really needs to stop, especially for home users who are usually totally ignorant as to the status of any security software on their systems.

Come on, guys, realise that it's this subscription model that almost forces home users to use free versions that loses you sales. Sure, subscription-based licensing for business class AV, but let's stop leaving the n00bs, granny and the kids' machine under the stairs, connected directly to the Internet via a Voyager 105 and no firewall high and dry every year, since these are what end up being the spam-spewing zombies.

<rant>

Yeah, yeah, Loonix doesn't need anti-virus (got a mail server or Samba and Windows clients? Trust me, it does, otherwise you're a part of the problem), anti-virus is an unnecessary resource hog (so is reinstalling, even from an image or RIS and $DEITY help you if the malware exploits a CIFS - or anything else - hole on your local network), you're smarter than the n00bs and don't need AV (of course you don't until you realise that the software package you rolled out to 200+ machines is full of worms). Heard it all before and seen the results of this type of asshattery.

</rant>

Security researchers unpick botnet economics

Re: Baron Samedi?

The master of the dead in Haitian Vodou? Quite appropriate for the controllers of zombified machines, no?

The Matrix Loa were aspects or fragments of the resultant Neuromancer/Wintermute entity, if one reads between the lines, which leads to another thought provoked: Perhaps botnets could be the accidental route to autonomous artificial intelligence, not that we'll likely appreciate the results given their origins...

Hmm, joke alert or ROTM?

New attacks exploit vuln in (fully-patched) Adobe Flash

@ Bilgepipe

Yes, me too, and those going on about how stupid it is to ditch Flash may be well advised to re-evaluate just how important their little proprietary-tech-based sites are to the rest of us. News "Flash": Not very. The only time I rue blocking YouTube is when El Reg posts a video and, even then, the regret is transitory.

Badgers. Well, it's early web2.0rhea, no?

@ 1st AC

It potentially affects all current (v9 and 10) Flash players for all OSen according to Adobe's SIRT:

http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt

What is dropped will most likely be platform specific, but there's nothing to stop skiddies detecting the OS and dropping OSX or Linux code. Note that Solaris users are left dangling for now. An advisory has also been issued:

http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa09-03.html

Firefox 3.7 swivels glassy eye

@Steve Mason

Exactly. Some of us, a group of people which seems to include you and I, would prefer a release that doesn't immediately attract a Milw0rm post over just added eye candy and a version bump.

It's getting hard to know who to trust in the browser game these days. Perhaps the mantra should be "trust nobody."

Adobe peels off Flash layers for open source

Hmm...

"software components that plug into Flash players, in areas such as ads, user measurement, tracking" <snip>

Thanks for the confirmation, Adobe. Now I *know* I was right to link my ~/.macromedia and ~/.adobe to /dev/null. I shall create a simple little script tomorrow to do the self-same thing in every user /home directory and Samba profile on the network, cron it in case I miss any new users in the future and, since DOM storage is disabled network-wide, you can then stuff your and anyone else's supercookies where the sun don't shine.

You guys have a really nice day now, hear?

Oz cops turn to wardriving to fight Wi-Fi 'jackers

No clue

WEP'd? WEP is about as secure as a car with the keys in the ignition. One would think that if they're going to be dictating to people about security, they'd at least do enough research to make that "advice" useful.

Meh!

Forgot the tagline:

Jesus WEP'd!

Fancy dropping into Pitetsbkrrh?

QLF

The traditional response to this sort of brass-pounding. It was never an official Q code, but it has been accepted as meaning "please try sending with your LEFT foot on the next over."

--... ...-- -.. . -.-. .... .-. --- -. --- ... ...-.-

Google uncloaks Chrome OS hardware pals

Do Google realise...

...that "Chrome" in the IT world generally means "shiny, unnecessary eyecandy used to disguise the fact that the underlying code is poorly thought out, spyware-ridden crap"?

Time will tell, I suppose.

Robot land-steamers to consume all life on Earth as fuel

I like it.

At least there's now a fitting response to those who keep whining on about carbon dioxide and "the environment" as they line their own pockets. See? They can be useful - as fuel.

BT abandons Phorm

Two becomes one...

Looks like the Craphone Whorehouse, AKA TalkTalk, have lost interest too. I imagine the conversation went something like "Holy crap, we could get prosecuted without the 'BT do it as well' defence!"

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article6652692.ece

Of the major providers, this leaves Virgin Media standing on their own looking like a complete and total tunch of bossers.

@Tim Brown 1

Precisely why this battle seems to have been won but the war still rages on. Complacency is the enemy right now. Tim Greening-Jackson is right (although how one would persuade an ISP to install and maintain L7 DPI kit without a profit-sharing scheme is beyond me at this juncture) with his warning that Google especially are the ones to watch. NebuAd may be dead as an entity (the London spin-off, InsightReady has sworn off DPI, but we should keep an eye on it anyway) but AudienceScience, Kindsight, Adzilla et al still seem to be alive and kicking, with many other marketing houses watching with interest. Match point will be a clear statement on EU or UK privacy and communications integrity law, and that still seems a long way off.

The war may not be over but we can be forgiven for fist-pounds, air-punches, high fives and a little smugness right now; this is the first clear victory in the 2+ years we have been fighting this. Alex Hanff , Richard Clayton, Chris Williams and El Reg especially deserve credit for this milestone for their tireless efforts to educate people about this threat to our online rights.

YES!

We'll raise a glass later to the inevitable corpse of Phorm. This is not the result I really wanted; I wanted Phorm's DPI technology to be ruled illegal, unethical and BT *forced* to drop it, but this will do as an interim solution.

One down, two (VM and StalkStalk) yet to announce it has been a waste of time.