Posts by Ben Tasker

Twitter bomb joker found guilty

Re: Jury Trial

IANAL but the offence he was charged with is an "either way" offence.

He (and the magistrate) could have elected to have the case tried in Crown Court (i.e. with a Jury), though the Crown Court is able to give stiffer punishment. It's quite possible he was advised against going to Crown Court in order to avoid stiffer penalties.

In case anyone is under the mis-apprehension you ALWAYS get a choice, you don't. In fact even with an "either way" offence, they don't necessarily have to give you the choice.

HTH

Sadly

Probably the investigation itself.

If you think about it;

The Investigating Officer needs to be trained in the area

Better training usually = better pay (though not always)

And that's before you consider that he was ordered to pay the £600 costs of the CPS. I still think they'd have been better doing him for wasting police time, but the reality remains that the guy did a stupid thing and he's had to pay for it.

If you're wondering why I believe the costs of the court case are less than the Investigation. Keep in mind most of the preparation will have been done by a civil servant of grade E1/E2 earning less than £10 an hour (trust me, I know this is true no matter what the DM may claim!). Obviously it'll have been a solicitor on the day, which will mount costs up.

In comparison, most Terror Investigation Officers are Grade C2 (there may be some D's) which is 2 Grades above the E1 (3 above E2). So knowing that, which do you think cost more?

Whether you think his joke was funny or not, you can't deny there's a large element of paranoia about terrorism in this country. Do you think it's smart to put your neck on the line by pretending to be one (whether in a humourous one line or otherwise).

Nothing Unusual About That

Given that it's a well know fact that terrorists speak in code, it's hardly surprising it was passed to a competent agency to investigate (Competent obviously referring to their area of expertise - no judgement on how they discharge their duties).

The comment could be a joke, or it could be a true terrorist stating that he's going to hit the airport next week (not necessarily Robin Hood Airport either). If you argue that the code is likely to be more complex, I'd agree with you in general. But keep in mind, not all will have been probably trained/be that smart and may consider it cryptic enough.

Hell the blatantness of it could even be a double bluff (i.e. no-one's going to suspect it because it's hidden in plain view)

I'm shocked

I'm truly shocked at the number of comments supporting this guy!

Don't get me wrong, there's too many people too paranoid about pedos/terrorists/bogeymen but WTF did he expect? Prosecution may seem a bit too far, but think about it;

Step 1) You post a message on the net (in jest or otherwise) saying you're going to blow up an airport

Step 2) It gets noticed

Whether you posted in jest or not, there's going to be an investigation to see if it could be a real threat. So a simple joke is now costing the tax payer money.

If anything the tw*t should have been done for wasting police time.

On the plus side, at least he had to pay costs so it hasn't cost the taxpayer as much as it could have done.

Ridiculous as this case may seem, it would be pretty f*cking ridiculous if true terrorists were able to avoid detection/investigation by posting in a sarcastic tone. It's shite but the guy should consider actually thinking before he goes anywhere near his keyboard.

Let the flames begin, but I don't care I have an asbestos coat!

NFC will help you find your car - if you're next to it

Remind Me.....

What the fuck is the point in NFC? You talk about this not being the killer application (not that I'm disagreeing) but I can't say I've yet seen a useful application of it that could not have been handled by something else.

Oyster cards come close, but could probably have been done without NFC. Barclaycard Wave (or Whatever it's called) is just a complete and utter jizzspurt of an idea.

NFC price labels? Added cost (passed onto the consumer) for very little benefit.

OK so I'm no expert on NFC, but it does seem that the only semi-useful application is security tags to stop you walking out of a shop with something!!!

Just think of the money wasted on R&D in this pathetically useless area!!

Microsoft defends death of free video in IE 9

In fairness

Whilst the Patents are meaningless over here, it does still affect those of us in Blighty to some extent.

Think about it;

If your favourite browser comes from the US (i.e. the servers are hosted there) then they cannot implement H.264, even for us. OK, they could relocate the server but I'd imagine there's going to be some loophole in patent law that they could still fall foul of.

It's quite possible that they'd have to exclude all US contributors to avoid being at risk of the patents.

That's a lot of effort, the beauty of Open Source being that hopefully a non US browser may popup.

As for making one version of the browser for the US, and one for here, I believe that would fall foul of the GPL. It'd be very difficult to give you the right to redistribute if you couldn't distribute it in a specific country because of the patent threat.

That said, I grow tired of the articles written by yanks about things that don't affect us at all.

Nokia announces Facetwittery-enabled phones

It's time for every mobile phone to get social

Except mine hopefully. I've no need or desire for MyFaceTwat on my phone.

As long as you can turn the functionality off

Facebook rejects CEOP 'panic button' demands (again)

Facebook Should Include it in their Privacy Settings

As a compromise, Facebook should display the button, but only if you have specified that you want to see it in your 'privacy' settings.

I'm betting it'd be the first setting facebook have ever defaulted to OFF!!!

FWIW, Gamble comes across as a bully time and time again, hardly likely to be appealing to a child that's worried about what might happen if they tell.

Overzealous Orange cuts off customer, still bills

That really annoys me

I hate when companies think they can bill you whilst not providing a service. I'm thinking of you BT (Sorry we accidentally cancelled your Home Move request, so it'll be another two weeks but you'll still be charged for the month that you've been without any F*ckin service!)

Personally I'd have gone to the bank and disputed the Direct Debit. Could Orange have justified their end in court?

Windows mobile Trojan poses as war game

Serves the fuckers right

Shouldn't have been downloading it illicitly in the first place

Troll, cos thats the point of this post

eBay trumps Tiffany in trade mark ruling

I agree about the advert

It's bloody irritating when you google for something, and the first Ad/Organic Link is

'Buy $YOURQUERY from E-bay!'

Half the time clicking on that link will take you to an e-bay page showing - Your search returned no results.

Not as annoying as the search engines which pretend not to be in search results though!

Murdoch hacks grumble over outsourced IT failures

Or in other words

"He believes all IT departments from banks to supermarkets to newspapers can be run in the same way: ie just using off-the-shelf software administered by low-skill employees,"

He's a fuckwit!

UKIP suspends Scouse candidate over sado smut movies

Half the UK Population

I assume she means men?

Apple patent shows iPhone ruling the home

Glad I wasn't the only one

I had the very same thought!!!!

It also reflects my feelings on the matter as well.

Murdoch tells old media to 'stand up' to Google, Bing

Robots.txt

The article said they made changes to the protocol.

Do you mean that they updated their robots.txt file, or do you mean they actually had something new added to the robots.txt protocols?

Pedantic, inquiring minds want to know

Child abuse frame-up backfires on stalker

Except.....

In the case given, where you are the unfortunate victim of some child porn weilding stalker, you wouldn't know the child porn had been planted.

So you'd feel perfectly safe handing over the encryption key (assuming no other wrong doings, or standing on principle etc.)

Already Happens

It's far from widespread, but this does already happen.

IIRC the story was on El Reg, a guy was acquitted because the defence were able to show that the images were put there by malicious software.

Associated Newspapers, GMG to pool newsrooms

May I be the first

To call April Fool!

MPs criticise government's climate of fear

a457nvf

IIRC the options relate to how much you can download in a month, and have f*ck all effect on speed.

I'd also point out that there are a number of factors under the home owners control that could lead to a lower speed.

Either way, can't quite see how you equate this to fraud?

Register.com argues it can't be sued for negligence

No Civil Action for oridinary negligence?

It's quite a common term, am I the only person who won't do businesses with companies that use their terms and conditions to allow themselves to slack off? Why would you want to pay and trust someone who seems keen to protect their 'right' to be negligent?

Pirates of the Caribbean say 'narrr' to Bulgarian airbags

You owe me a keyboard!

Sticky Orange lucozade came spurting out of my nose when I read that!

Facebook stands up to UK.gov's cyberbullying

A title is required

The next generation of parents won't have this ignorance problem

I hope you're right, but I'm really not that optimistic!

VirnetX flings second patent infringement sueball at Microsoft

Ah Software Patents

Clearly they foster innovation and help encourage companies to invest in R&D.

What a pity that the innovation and investment never makes it to the technology the consumer buys, instead it goes into the legal department of companies who (quite often) hold patents but don't manufacture anything!!!!

Yet Europe seems to want to go that way as well? It's a strange, strange world

Tiger Woods' alleged mistress publishes X-rated texts

I agree!

Most NSFW's on El Reg are quite tame, this one was a definite NSFW. Could we have some form of warning? Like DNSFW or even have the article description as

WARNING: BOOBIES INCLUDED!!!

Something to differentiate between articles that seem to have been marked as NSFW purely to increase the number of views, and those that are marked as NSFW because they are NSFW.

Virgin Media to demo 200Mb/s broadband tomorrow

Just Stop It!

We've already seen ISP's competing on who has the lowest price with a race to the bottom. Result? We pay less, but the service suffers. Whether it's the contention ratio, the customer service, service availablility (or more often all three) those of us that actually care lose out.

Now Virgin are trying to start a race on speed, yes more speed is nice and it'd be nice to see the market move forwards, but let's not have another arms race eh? Focus on rolling out the current gen to a wide percentage of the population (Sorry country folk, you get peace and quiet, we get speed!), make the service reliable and then look at speeding up.

The last thing the intelligent consumer wants is a race to deliver faster speeds resulting in a poorer service overall because you've cut corners. Because you know what? Once they are all offering 200Mb the arms race on prices will start again and the service will suffer again!

Password reset questions dead easy to guess

Problem Being

Whilst sending the rest to a mobile may be more secure, who wants to have to give thier mobile number to yet more companies? Sensible people put absolute garbage in as the answer, make no attempt to memorise it, and simply don't forget the flaming password!

I hate services that insist on you setting a hint, even more so if they give you a drop down of questions to use rather than let you set your own question!

Why do people have such problems remembering their passwords, I have 8 different alphanumeric-specialcharacter passwords of at least 8 characters on the go, but don't feel the need to write them down. OK some may struggle with this, but it's really not that hard!!!!

Forgot your ThinkPad password? Get new hardware

And your point is?

Personally I think Lenovo are right to do this. Some of us actually need devices that are secure if some scroat nicks them.

What next, complaints that you have to re-install Windows if you forget your password and haven't made a recovery disk?

I've very little sympathy for anyone who gets hit by this, and it's not exactly clear how a webbased reset could work on a supervisor password, much less how you could avoid knackering your security reputation.

Anyone who gets hit by this will certainly remember to keep a backup of their password next time!

Bulgarian airbag absorbs semi-automatic rifle round

Kevlar

Dude,

Kevlar isn't bullet proof.

It's knife proof but not bullet proof.

Implants could potentially slow a bullet enough, I've wasted several pages of paper doing the math!

Microscope-wielding boffins crack cordless phone crypto

Really?

Mine can upgrade, whether or not an update will actually be released is something else!

Top Gear's Stig prowls Loch Ness

Obviously not...

Clearly you've not watched enough. The 'revelation' was a publicity stunt, and even Clarkson later said he didn't believe Schumacher was the stig.

Either way WTF has that got to do with the article????

Cisco trials 'internet in space'

I'd pay for it.....

I bet the bandwidth is out of this world!!!!

I'll get my own coat thanks

Ghost of Gates' tablet haunts Microsoft's future

In Answer to your questions

Yes, I have done both without issues., So what's your point, that you don't understand how to do it?

That said, Win 7 is a vast improvement over previous releases.

Based on your comment I'd say that you are misunderstaning something - Linux != Windows

Simple

The Googlephone - there's more where that came from

Re: So I can pay for it

Hmmm... Google keeping tabs and sending the odd ad versus using the hunk of junk that is an iPhone?

I'm not going to use either, but if that was the choice the Nexus would probably win. Ok so they may well send adverts, but as long as they don't plan on interrupting your calls with adverts I think I can live with ignoring the ads.

Keeping tabs on me is a bit more of an issue, but then nowadays it's inavoidable, you can take all the steps you want to protect your privacy, but it only takes 1 'friend' to start using MyFace and they'll leak half your info for you. Not that it makes it any better!

The main point of this post is simple, the iPhone sucks.

Paris, because she sucks in a different way to Crapple's product

Record-fine Napsterer wants retrial with RIAA

Slightly Different

Slightly different scenario don't you think? In the example you give, the person spreading your code has broken into your system..... Crime, Copied your software illicitly ....... Civil Offence (possibly criminal in some cases)

You chose not to make the source available, that's not quite the same as making a track available, but only so it can be played on an iPod, with the only other alternative being to buy a full album.

Having said all that, whilst I'm no fan of the Record companies, I'm not sure that the courts reasoning is entirely correct. That said, it does protect consumers to some extent (in the US at least). As an example, it's technically illegal to watch DVDs on a Linux PC because you have to circumvent the CSS. But if we had the equivalent of this judgement, you could perhaps argue that the Media Companies have no right to dictate what OS you use, and that there was no other way you could watch a DVD on your PC.

IANAL, and I'm on some pretty strong painkillers, so perhaps this doesn't make as much sense to you as it does to me!

Bono accuses ISPs of 'reverse Robin Hooding' over piracy

One Word......

C*ck

Today is not New Year's Eve - or the end of the decade

Makes sense but

I'm not entirely sure why I read the whole article??

As tempting as it might be to explain that later, I doubt I'll be able to recall it accurately!

Privacy group sues DoJ over 'digital strip search' data

As pointed out in Enemy of the State

Who will watch the watchers of the watchers?

Old film, I know

Paris, because we all love to watch!

Germans devise attacks on Windows BitLocker

Hardware Phishing

Nice concept, very imaginative but not really news?

I've got a degree in stating the bleeding obvious, here's my lecture;

If someone can get physical access to your machine, you've had it!

If someone is able to physically swap your machine for an almost identical one that sends your passwords to them, guess what you've had it!

Paris, because every Dev would love to get local physical access!

BlackBerrys get stuck on NFC

On the other hand

As soon as we stick a NFC chip inside a handset, and integrate it so that you can 'manage' it from the phone, we'll probably see a sharp jump in malware attacking this platform.

Personally, I think I can live without having my Credit/Debit card attached to a device which is (by design) always on the network.

I'd also like to stick with actually having to insert my card into a reader before it can be charged!

McKinnon family 'devastated' by Home Sec's latest knock-back

Yes it is

In answer to the house question, yes it is. If your house gets robbed as a result of you opening the door to some lowlife, neither the insurance company or the old bill will help you (unless they assualt you etc.) you opened the door (or left it open) and are deemed to have given that lowlife permission to enter.

Now I'm not saying that it's right, but that is how it is. Why is this that different?

What ever happened to storing pics with electron cannons?

Call me crazy

but I'd quite happily run one of these in the cellar, just for the fun of it!

That said, I guess it's probably worth a lot more money than I could justify spending on any level of nostalgia!

Microsoft enlists faceless girl band as face of Windows 7

I'm lazy

I rated one comment, got taken to a seperate page and just haven't bothered any more. Every other site just registers the vote, rather than taking you to a seperate page.

Apple voids warranties over cigarette smoke, users say

Split Society

We're slowly becoming a split society where smokers are being viewed with more and more disapproval.

Nicotine probably is on the OSHA's list as it's a powerful pesticide, but I wouldn't have thought a computer owned by even the heaviest smoker would contain it at hazardous levels (though it does seem to build up quite a lot!)

Does beg the question, why do people smoke inside? I go outside even at home, stale smoke is not a nice smell, even to a smoker!

Potty-mouths charged for Comcast hijack

Title

Good f*ckin Scroates

Lawyers pursue banned Xbox Live gamers

@ James O'Shea

I agree, I'm exactly the same, original copies remain where they can't be damaged.

I've not yet come across much that can't be copied, but have a 100% return rate for those few items.

Hell I even created a disc image of my TomToms SD card just in case.

Sony demos monster 3D TV

Title? What title

well, provided we carry polarising spectacles with us at all times.

And there's why 3DTV is gonna struggle. The 3D glasses are inconvenient, and I assume even worse if you wear glasses.

Stalker video peepholed ESPN bombshell

Re: Riscyrich

Ta much

Well worth a peek at the video when I get home!

AC because the missus likes El Reg as well!

Egyptian telecom counts cost of football riot

@Craig 28

You missed a very important extra ingredient. My icon should lend a clue as to what that might be

Queen's Speech slammed by small biz

Re: Peter2

What's a Megabite? I've heard of most units, but this one seems to have evaded me thus far. Is it the same as a Megabyte?

Presumably, which will be a great improvement considering that I currently have an 8megaBIT link.

It's one of my pet hates, people confusing bits and bytes, but when the ISP's do it in their adverts it's ten times worse!

Orange touts free tweets

Re: Taking a Hit

I think T-Mobile are the only UK network now who don't play nice with Twitter.#

That's not a bad thing. Although they say free, they will recoup the costs elsewhere, given that Twitter is a waste of time and bandwidth, it's nice to have at least one operator who isn't charging slightly more for Voice, Data or text in order to recoup the cost of supporting the latest fad.

Asbestos jacket, because insulting twitter comes under Fire regs