Posts by John PM Chappell

US demands right to snoop the world

Indeed it is... so why make it yourself?

Recent US governments have been nothing but deceptive and self-serving, if not outright immoral and illegal. This affects the US people, too, of course.

The American people, however, did elect them, remember.

EU sues UK.gov over Phorm trials

"Loyal Commenter" FAILs at politics...

Sorry to burst your bubble but you were likely "down voted" because of your ignorance of the way the British system (such as it is) works.

Specifically, we do not vote for parties, even if a lot of the populace are pretty ignorant and just look for their favourite colour, we vote for individuals (in a rather flawed 'first past the post' style local election) who may or may not be a member of a political party.

Furthermore, once elected, these people are not "the government" they are members of our parliament which is collectively the source of our laws; "the government" is that group of politicians within parliament that band together so as to form a permanent majority. The leader of this group is the person "invited to form a government" by the reigning monarch in a nod to tradition and the essentially mythical idea that the UK is 'ruled' by a monarch, over time this person has come to be given the title 'Prime Minister' and reside in the same house in London whilst in this role.

Ironically...

I am going the other way, albeit not because I think the EU is a bad thing. Perhaps we can persuade the respective governments to do a swap? ;¬)

ToryDems nearly swallow Labour blueprint of equality for all

High costs? Really?

The only people who stand to incurr a lot of costs are those who are not in compliance with the legislation coming in, most of which is pretty obviously wrong as it stand but which they have been able to get away with thus far because they could marshall a reasonable legal defence. That defence is going. My heart bleeds.

MoD labels Facebook Places a 'targeting pack' for terrorists

Nitpicking again, but...

"circuled" means what, exactly? ;¬)

More seriously, I have actively avoided Facebook and all similar applications precisely because the whole idea is pointless, for the most part. As pointed out above, anyone you really care about and who really cares about you, is already aware of pertinent information, like where you are, unless you don't want them to be. In either case, I fail to see how FaceBook and its ilk could help you there; it's transparently about gathering large amounts of information to sell, anonymized or otherwise, to businesses.

Bloke threatens BT with giant plywood cheque

Ah, but remember that legal tender...

... is not as simple as "cash please!" either. It's a specific term and doesn't even touch paper money (banknotes, etc); it details the amounts upto which someone is obliged to accept payment in certain coin denominations. For example, I do NOT have to accept your payment of twenty quid in pennies.

Hacker pledges to re-enable Linux on PS3

No tech stuff required, this is a simple and clear cut legal issue in the UK

The bad news, for Sony, is that they are ending the original sales contracts with anyone who bought their device in the UK and such customers are entitled to a full refund. No questions, no quibbles.

Alternatively, they can leave the device alone in the UK, without restricting or removing any current functionality (this would be problematic, to say the least but it's a legal option) but should they later roll out new features which they did not extend to UK customers, a fresh legal challenge would likely succeed in forcing Sony to extend such features to the UK customer base (that one would need to be fought as it is not a simple breach of contract, unless they wrote the T&C badly).

This situation is almost certainly similar to much of the rest of the EU, too, but I don't have the knowledge to address that at all. In short, they're fuct. It only takes someone to actually bother to follow it up (the more who do, the better) and it looks like a couple in this thread are. :¬)

I never bothered with the overpriced shite myself but I feel for those who did.

TechniSat Freesat set-top gets BBC iPlayer support

Let's not punt the god-awful and illegal Ethernet-over-powerline kit, eh?

Seriously. None of it, to my knowledge is legitimate it's simply that Ofcom are doing a pathetic job of enforcement so kit sellers are knocking as much of it out of the door as they can, while they can. There is a legal challenge proceeding to force Ofcom to actually do their job.

Apple voids warranties over cigarette smoke, users say

What a load of shit...

... mostly from non-smokers and the ever zealous ‘reformed’ smokers channeling their guilt and self-loathing into hatred of others. First of all, nicotine is not tar and to all intents and purposes isn't even present in the tar (we wouldn't bother smoking otherwise as the point is to breathe the smoke, extract the nicotine and exhale most of the rest). Secondly, the ash is a much bigger issue for computers and you have to smoke very heavily, very close to it and over extended periods to deposit significant amounts of it in the machine or else the machine has to be practically wind-tunnel like in its draw strength with a very cluttered interior or crap exhausting. Thirdly, the ash and assorted other rubbish is just the same as dust (more toxic, maybe even mildly radioactive if you have sensitive enough equipment but otherwise...) and the problems that occur with dust also occur with dust that is partly or mostly tobacco ash, I.E. this is absolutely routine.

I get that smoking smells horrible (it does to me, too and I smoke - hence I smoke outside and very occasionally in my car / van but always with the window full down and the fans on high to blow it clear of the interior) but you idiots are vastly overstating your case and aye, I have serviced many, many PCs including one belonging to an old mentor of mine who use to smoke unfiltered ‘Senior Service’ cigarettes at the rate of forty to sixty a day, and spent most of his day coding at the machine; the exterior was badly stained, there was about half an inch of ash and dust on surfaces that were horizontal when the PC was used and the fans were badly worn from pushing the extra weight around when spinning but there was no ‘gooey tar build up’ (get real folks, that doesn't come from cigarette smoke, it'll be vapourized fat or sugar) and some gentle directed air took it all off the board while a simple vaccum cleaner (remember those?) cleaned the case out. I didn't clean the exterior up, though, why bother?

Apple are probably stuffed on this, to be honest; it's not a biological hazard, it's not even a chemical hazard, really, and the warranty doesn't specifically exclude it, so I'd think it unlikely they succeed in court with an argument that smoking near the computer was the cause of the failure or that doing so was somehow an unusual or extreme environment. I also think the employee is on a hiding to nothing with the exposure claim.

As for mister “Smokers take death for granted” anyone who doesn't is in a for large, final and fatal surprise; death comes for you, too (barring some currently speculative medicine advances).

Fanbois Apple buyers howl over crocked iMacs

Overpriced shite shocker!

It's really not news to anyone with their eyes open, to be honest; contrary to the hype, Apple kit is nothing special and often sub-par but with a very distinctive styling (which I have never liked and therefore won't buy). Apple are taking this level of flak because Apple customers are often either naïve or zealous brand followers and tend to believe their own propaganda on behalf of Apple, about everything being better and higher quality, backed by excellent customer service, with better software, etc, etc.

In fairness to Apple, every company drops the ball now and then and the numbers are not huge but it's worth remembering that they built their entire business on the back of the ideas that their zealots spout and the claim that Apple kit ‘just works’, so when it doesn't...

Combat games disrespect war laws, report claims

LOL

I'm with another poster on here; Total War. Anyone who opposes me in any way, indeed anyone who doesn't unconditionally support me, is clearly my enemy and thus an ‘enemy combatant’ who's not covered by the Geneva Convention; ergo I can do what I like to them.

How can I make an old CPU SSE 2 compliant?

Well...

Custom interrupt handler is perfectly possible if the only way to run a piece of software is with SSE2 available and that software must be run on that CPU. In reality though, unless you fancy the challenge yourself or are prepared to pay someone to write it, you're looking at a much more sensible option of replacing the hardware or using other software.

Coin-sized nuclear isotope battery minted

Umm, Steve?

You've lost the plot a bit there, mate. The potential danger here is pretty minimal, the potential gain quite large and radioactivity really does work the way Jason and others have pointed out.

One in three kids believe Google measures truthiness

I.E. not E.G. ;¬)

In the spirit of joining the fray, The Other Steve? You're doing it wrong. You want I.E. not E.G. whether you realize your error or not. HtH.

PC tune-up software: does it really work?

A few myths still floating around amongst the tech literate...

Disabling the page file can be done simply, safely and is worthwhile for many people. I've read Russonovic and he's wrong, it'd be tedious to go into explicit detail of why but basically he incorrectly analyses the information, rather than being incorrect about the overall technical detail (which is his real field of expertise, in fairness). In practice, most users with enough memory to be disabling the pagefile (it doesn't actually disable paging, by the way), which is just about any system made this century and many older, should probably just set a fixed and very small one, in order to avoid problems with some software that blindly checks for it instead of trusting the OS to do its job as configured by the admin. The specific gain is hugely increased response time, especially from applications you have minimized or where the machine was left idle for any significant period, as well better caching (it's now always in RAM and not occasionally paged out to HDD). The danger is that you manage to put together a working set which really does exceed your available memory and applications begin to get failure responses when making allocation requests. I've never seen this happen without actually deliberately coding it, for test purposes (but I run with 4 GB on my systems).

That brings us to the next myth... Windows XP, yes even 32 bit XP, can see 4 or more GB just fine. In fact it can see whatever physical memory is installed as long your BIOS can see it properly, you do NOT need a 64 bit OS to take advantage of a lot of memory but a 64 bit OS will make more efficient use of it in many ways (at the cost of some significant overhead, but you have a lot of RAM now, right?). The limitation is the number of unique addresses possible and Windows lies about actual address anyway (to put it simply) so that applications can be writing to the same location (if you believe the raw address) but are in fact not. There is also the 2 GB limit on continuous addressable memory, PER APPLICATION, which can be increased to as much as 3 GB with a boot switch (but there are side effects) and can be circumvented cleverly anyway.

Truly, if you guys are what passes for the tech elite or even the tech monkeys, these days it is no wonder products like these sell to your customers and friends.

CA auto-immune update trashes systems

This would be why ...

... I always retain user oversight of actions by such tools, when I even bother to use them; honestly, I run XP daily and I think the last time I was infected with anything was about three years ago when I foolishly attached an acquaintance's external hard drive to my own machine under Windows rather than scanning it from secure environment first. I've found that using Firefox with NoScript and only permitting scripting to run on sites that absolutely need it (and even then marking all ad domains and similar as globally untrusted) has kept my machine clean. I periodically run a full scan from a standalone AV tool with recent signatures to be sure but I found that permanently installed products, especially those using on-access scanning and auto-action were more trouble than they were worth.

Man gets 3 years in prison for stealing IDs over LimeWire

Come again?

@ babz - Some people don't lock their house up when they go out for the day, it doesn't mean we should let the burglars off to ‘teach them a lesson’, a crime is a crime and fraud is a relatively serious one, as is large-scale theft. I'm quite happy with treating offences where insufficient precautions were taken as less serious than those where criminals bypassed considerable security measures, indeed this a legal principle in Scottish Law but he's still a scumbag thief who thought he was being very clever.

All that said, using LimeWire ≡ FAIL.

Security elite pwned on Black Hat eve

Did we just get spammed?

(AC "Samantha” @ 5:26)

Anyway, Mitnick never impressed me but he's spot on about not putting important stuff online if it doesn't need to be immediately publicly accessible. There's a reason that I use encryption for stuff I really care about and keep anything that's not trivial on offline storage. *eye roll*

Sex Offenders returns to iTunes

Nevermind ‘people close to them’

The fact is that most child abuse and paedophilia involves the PARENTS of the unfortunate children, not simply people who know the children. Idiotic and frankly dangerous (as well as possibly illegal) campaigns, dissemination of information and commercial products like the ones mentioned here should be very harshly dealt with, in my opinion.

SEC: Magical stock brokering software was a fraud

Heavy Metal Trader?

"He allegedly mislead his clients to invest their money in EIMT by claiming he had proprietary trade brokerage software which generated returns of about 3.5 per cent per month with little risk of loss." should be 'misled' with no ay, unless you're suggesting the involvement of heavy metals.

'Vista Capable' plaintiffs seek class action revival

@ James O'Brien

With a name like that, have you considered that you might be elligible for an Irish passport? ;¬)

IIRC Irish grandparents is sufficient (I am likely to claim my own passport on the same grounds, UK is not the shining beacon of hope some yanks imagine).

Windows 7 fast track alarms technical testers

Wasn't impressed

I wasn't impressed by the build I was invited to test, so I can't say I am surprised. In my opinion it's doomed because of underlying decisions that go all the way back to the introduction of Win95 (e.g. workarounds to permit buggy applications and broken drivers and hardware to function).

Unisys threatens Itanium with death

Victim of its own success?

In many ways Itanium peaked too early; it's arguably a superior 64 bit architecture to AMD64 but the way that AMD was able to match or even better the performance of comparable 80x86 processors running 32 bit code and also run 64 code pretty much killed a lot of Itanium's potential (since its emulation was significantly slower than native code and usually far slower than an 80x86 processor at a similar price point or even native performance point).

Satellite-hacking boffin sees the unseeable

@jake & others

I see Jake has backed down now but I'm going to observe that this is fuel on the fire of "teachers are pretty crap today" as I appear to have a better grasp of the maths and technical details and I *don't* attempt to teach others about the topic.

As for the NSA, they can trivially crack some of the piss poor 'encryption' systems but they are stuck, like everyone else, when it comes to brute-force attacks on truly secure systems.

The GCHQ bloke was making a (quite old) joke, they don't monitor every phone line, etc, to do so is unfeasible anyway. GCHQ really does monitor the entire RF spectrum, however and I have one of the pieces of kit they used to use, sitting in the room where the rest of my radio equipment is. Needless to say they haven't stopped listening, just updated the kit.

This 'white hat' crap gets up my nose, though, it has to be said and playing with satellite dishes is really, really old hat.

Intel to put internet in your pants

Umm... didn't we already try this?

I mean, it's potentially impressive, what with transistor counts always climbing and better power management but a small screen and impossible to use input devices are why we don't rely on very small devices for more than a diversion or a very rudimentary piece of work.

My Pocket PC can do quite a lot but most of the time it just runs TomTom or a scientific calculator - I have a laptop for real 'mobile' work and a fully kitted out tower for a 'workstation' when I don't need to carry the work around. If someone needs to do serious work, they have the time to sit down and at least use a laptop, the idea that we're all going to be 'doing work' on the bus or something is just plain stupid.

Dear Obama: Please consider open-source a waste of your time

Agreed...

myxiplx has it right, still I wasn't being productive anyway, just drinking my tea before the day starts. Oh, for the MS zealots who always seem to turn up; I use predominantly MS software (that's just how it is in Windows development) so don't bore me with some pseudo-religious strawman about how we all hate MS because they are successful or something.

IWF confirms Wayback Machine porn blacklisting

@Andrew Crystall

Kindly stop talking out of your arse; your lack of expertise in and understanding of the technical, legal and philosophical aspects of this issue is showing and your repeated trolling is getting boring.

In practical terms, you can tell your ISP that you do not wish to be subjected to filtering, especially not the IWF list and that if they are not prepared to remove it you will change providers (there are ISPs who don't use it at all).

The wider issues ought to be obvious; some people genuinely want to have some filtering in place so that they are very unlikely to ever see anything 'offensive' but there are products (even free ones, I recall) for precisely that purpose and nothing to stop ISPs from offering an opt-in filtering of certain categories of website (I don't like this but customers are customers and businesses make money meeting their needs and desires). Everyone else wants to be able to access any computer with a routable IP address on any protocol they choose, without interference, the ISPs could do with being reminded of that fact, alongside the well established principle of they not being accountable for the use of their infrastructure in an illegal manner, especially wrt content.

Aussie air zealot savages prêt-à-porter stealth fighter

I err 'second' Sekundra

I, too, am aware of that incident and some other stuff, besides. Suffice to say, F-117 is not 'stealthy' to first world nations, at all, in the sense commonly understood and sold to the general public and gullible customers.

As regards smaller RADAR returns; if the weapon system can still achieve a guidance lock, it doesn't matter that you're 'different looking' and 'half as large as the real outline'. :-)

Black Helo for similar reasons, of course...

P.S. JonB - It was a reasonably capable system when sold, the fact that it was a bit 'dated' by the time the UK used that variant is hardly the fault of the system (well, not in that sense) or the manufacturer as it was never sold with assurances against those opponents (IIRC).

US only kidding about 'clear to fly' January deadline?

And this would be why...

... I have no intention of returning to the USA until they've swept the bulk of this crap away again. Their tourism is taking a heavy hit, in spite of people being prepared to actually wade through it all, so that's probably just a waiting game.

@AC Your 11th September incident was small fry and you'd had it coming for a long time; proper terrorism was the kind meted out by the professionals in the PIRA, who were well-funded by you cunts. You might want to get a brain and an education before shooting your mouth off, in future, but until then we'll just try and remember that most yanks are not as stupid as you.

Windows 7 early promise: Passes the Vista test

Yes, Neil, you probably are.

Rock soild? Doing what exactly? Try something challenging. Also, it's not Logitech's fault at all; if the hardware predates Vista (likely) it really ought to have drivers provided by MS already, since they are the one who changed the underpinning of the "Windows" spec. I'm pretty sure it has XP drivers, aye? Media Centre goes right back to XP (and I hate it for the most part but horses for courses) and I've never had any trouble installing drivers for USB devices, in fact I have a USB TV Tuner of my own, it worked when I plugged it in and the supplied software was ~okay~ but I all I really want is for it to work, not eye-candy.

Bash Vista to join in? No... we just have experience stripping it from machines beacuse relatively old, well supported, best-selling hardware is not supported on Vista and short of writing our own drivers, won't be, probably. When you cannot use a 'rock solid' printer/scanner combo because Vista doesn't know what to do with it, the eye-candy starts to look... well, tacky and the crap functionality comes to the fore.

Home Office acts to kick out Iceland's hate preachers

Let her knock herself out...

...it can only hasten the long overdue death of this administration and probably put this bunch of retards masquerading as a political party out of office for another thirty years. John Smith'd top himself were he not already dead.

Peaches Geldof cops a severe shoeing

Fear the wrath of the moderatrix...

...for she has been roused! ;¬)

So, talentless drone offspring of Geldoff write a vapid article... I have to admit, it's not exactly news is it? The response of the rag concerned is probably newsworthy though, if only so we can all have a giggle and it *is* in Bootnotes, n'est-ce pas?

Microsoft faces second 'black screen' lawsuit

Confused, methinks, NukEvil

NukEvil - Guess again. It is, and will remain, Microsoft's software and property, in its entirety, until such time as they choose to sell it on (unlikely, ever). You didn't buy it, you bought a licence to use it and implicitly and explicitly agreed to the licence terms. Some of those terms may not be enforcable in a given jurisdiction but rest assured that no jurisdiction tries to claim the contract never existed nor that you own the software. :¬)

El Reg launches Bletchley fundraising t-shirt

I second Nick L

I'd surely pay for that T shirt :¬)

Dawkins' atheist ad campaign hits fundraising target

If it brings the morons who think 'Atheism' is a religion out of the woodwork...

... so that I can ridicule their stupidity along with all the other irrational and superstitious fools, it gets my vote (and fiver).

:¬)

BBC clarifies location of England

Yay!

Yay for the moderatrix! That is all. :¬)

Google says sorry as Gmail plummets out of the cloud

Google reliability

Actually, Google's pretty damn reliable and unless you have an SLA contract that guarantees the mythical 'five nines' quit whingeing. Good luck building your own alternative, too (not because it's especially hard but rather because anyone stupid enough to use a Beta as mission critical and then complain about a *day* of downtime, is not going to be up to it).

MS hit with Red Ring of Death lawsuit

What could be better than legally bashing MS?

"Seriously"

Microsoft shipped a fatally defective product, in full knowledge of its defects, at a considerable market price. Damn right they ought to suck it up now they're being called on it. Many of us knew back then what we can prove now, the XBox 360 is a pile of shite, hastily cobbled together and very poorly designed, even down to the level of cooling provided in the chassis. FAIL.

Daily Mail cites video game as proof of terrorist doomsday plot

The real story here is..

... Fallout 3 looks cool :¬)

Can't wait, myself, in fact I think I'll dig out the two previous titles and get in the mood...

VMware dollars swarm into B-hive Networks

@Austin

Presumably you meant "its flagship appliance"; there's no apostrophe in the possessive.

I Was A Teenage Bot Master

@ Matthew Anderson (again)

They were not 'kids', one was a teenager the other an adult, when sentenced both were adults. Cowardice (hiding behind their screens, doing things they would never do in person) doesn't work as an excuse or a legal defence, either.

We've all experienced 'these kids' by the bucket-load, what on earth makes you think you're somehow more qualified than the rest of us? Mostly they are fairly average boys (very few girls) with a disturbed personality and an over-inflated ego. They tend to rely on tools made by others but claim all manner of 'mad skills' and typically have a very shaky grasp of even such basics as networking protocols.

The author mostly did what was required to keep a dialogue going, but in any case, sympathy is not the same as excusing the behaviour.

Hmm, I'm not convinced..

..but I'm not going to trawl for precedent either. I think this one's a dead duck either way. What topic shall we do to death next? <grin>

Crossed wires...

.. I was assuming we were both talking about the UK :¬)

In the UK what I stated stands, in the USA it seems it depends how good your lawyers are and how well informed other parties are.

Assumptions are silly, I know, however I made it clear a few times in other parts of my posts that I am from the UK and was referencing UK laws and mores, so I felt safe in assuming and thought you were from the UK too, actually.

As for your ABS example, in the UK, I am liable. I have a separate but related claim against you for criminal damage or possibly murder, attempted murder, manslaugher, etc, depending on the actual outcome.

All that said, IANAL so I might have missed some other subtle implications, though I am certain about immediate liability.

Sorry, JonB

My last comment, on this aspect at least, but you're wrong about liability. If your car has a fault, even if you could reasonably not know, you are liable. Specifically, the driver is always liable for ensuring that a vehicle is safe and legal and is always liable to penalties for any offences committed by driving it in a condition that is not so. It doesn't matter, in terms of liability or whether an offence has been committed, if you were misled, could reasonably assume all was well, etc. If you did not realize that, you do now. This is precisely why I like it so much as an analogy for the compromised PCs; I think similar issues of responsibility and liability should apply, legally.

@ Chris Adkins: if you don't like them, don't read them. If you don't understand the difference between an exchange of views and discussion of points raised and a useless black vs white 'internet argument' you might want to stay off the Reg comments too ;¬) P.S. Hope you find your shift and caps lock keys soon.

Hmm...

Matthew Anderson: You're talking out of your arse, mate and it's been pointed out quite a few times. Even 16 is not a child; here in the UK, a first world nation, that is old enough to consent to sexual activity, marry, work full time and without restricted shift lengths, etc, etc. At 18 he is demonstrably an adult and US law agrees wholeheartedly, at least wrt criminal acts. The 'pwnage' scale is significant, easily enough to get him headlines in IT press, as it did. As for the criminal penalties, fraud and criminal damage on a large scale, without remorse and over a long period, warrant custodial sentences; he got quite a light one, all considered.

JonB: Not quite; tackling the car situation first - aye, negligent fitter, but you remain liable for the state of the car, in terms of working features. You have a case against them but you're not absolved of your own offence. Moral: be vigilant, it's your car and your responsibility. Do I even need to draw the analogy wrt the PCs? ;¬)

Life a mess? The Moderatrix can help

Lust-hound for an educated girl..

.. yup! That's me. Why else would I be signed up to Guardian SoulMates, eh? LOL

;¬)

Something

I just wish to add my own comment to the general surge of admiration for Sarah ;¬)

This probably counts as "Me Too" in the nascent classification system.

IM represents 'new linguistic renaissance'

Well...

Kurt: You seem to be under the misapprehension that 'Standard English' is 'Queen's English' as well as ignorant of etymology. Shakespeare's language was progressive in the extreme, at the time it was written and until recently English monarchs could barely speak any form of English.

Ian Mills: Talk to you later.

Abbreviations are all well and good so long as they actually save time and retain clarity and meaning but some of the more irritating ones actually take longer to enter on a standard phone keypad as well as obscuring the meaning. When text messages (where most of the more recent ones originate) were quite severely size limited, cost more per message and phones could only handle a small number of stored messages at any one time, shortening as far as possible without loss of meaning made sense. Now, what really is the point? On IM clients I can't really see that there was ever any point, aside from those expressing emotional responses, since in an interactive environment that matters.

Hippies reclaim summer of code

...watching 'roaches climb the wall...

I have firsthand experience of the University policy - kept all my code on a zip disk, told them they could have a copy and use whatever they managed to get by decrypting it (everything else, like assignments, was totally derivative and of no real interest) ;¬)

Bah!

I meant "you'll" not "you've", teach me to skip the preview.