Posts by Hugo

Facebook in Pirate Bay block Fail

"We've reached out..."

I've noticed a marked increase in "reaching out" lately, can't these people use normal, plain English?

Street View caught taking the piss - again

Windscreen reflection

And you can see Bill's unblurred face reflected in the widscreen.

BBC Click paid cybercrooks to buy botnet

Can watch this on iPlayer outside the UK too

" Those in the UK can catch up with the show through iPlayer, via the BBC Click site here."

Works outside the UK as well, probably because they also show it on the international BBC World channel (and had done before the UK broadcast).

BBC zombie caper slammed by security pros

I've already seen it

It was on the international BBC World News channel yesterday. You can probably watch it online now.

http://www.bbcworldnews.com/Pages/ProgrammeMultiFeature.aspx?id=18

IIRC they said they spent a few thousand dollars for the botnet which they bought over IM, and said they paid a bit over the odds. Without even considering the Computer Misuse Act that sounds well dodgy, licence payers' money going directly to cybercrooks.

And they said the demos were ok because they were only spamming their own accounts, but I bet they didn't have permission to hammer Hotmail or Gmail's servers.

It was interesting to see the botnet control panel, and how easy it was to take down a site, but not at licence fee payer's expense and criminals' gain.

Obama says his new chopper is 'procurement gone amuck'

Sikorsky S-76C+ crash

It was a Sikorsky S-76C+ (not the slightly newer S-76C++) that crashed into the sea when en route from Tallinn to Helsinki in 2005, killing all 14 onboard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Tallinn_Sikorsky_S-76_crash

Finland's flawed e-voting scheme - blame the voters?

A court case has been filed about it in Vihti:

YLE, the Finnish BBC, also reports that:

"A motion has been filed in the Helsinki Administrative Court by Social Democratic Party candidate Ilkka Tanner for the results of the election in Vihti to be invalidated and for the vote to be retaken. He received 8 votes in the elections. The SDP candidate with the lowest number of votes to get a council seat received 77. In Vihti, 122 of the votes cast electronically were not registered and disqualified."

And

"Tanner is basing his case on media reports that Chief Election Officer Arto Jääskelainen was aware as early as last spring that the electronic voting system on trial in the three municipalities was unreliable."

http://www.yle.fi/news/id106876.html

OMFG, what have you done?

Favicons hard to make out in Opera.

It's hard to make out the vulture favicon in Opera 9.52 (Windows XP). Perhaps some more outline is needed.

Where's the whalesong and josssticks?

Where's the whalesong and josssticks for the new masthead and logo? I will be expecting to read it this Friday afternoon.

Google restores Chrome's shine

So which products still help themselves to our copyright?

'Rebecca Ward, the Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome, wrote: “In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products..."'

So, if this was noneother than a good ol' copy/paste cockup, the new question is what are these other products that do grab “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services”?

Homeland Security backs deportation with Wikipedia

Even national libraries reference Wikipedia

The other week I saw a big fat stapled printout of a Wikipedia article (on bootleg booze around the world) sitting proudly in an exhibition in the National Library of Finland in Helsinki. Do they not have any better sources?

Brown's website is Web2.0tastic

Subheadline typo

I went to www.pants.gov but there's nothing there, the real address is www.pants.gov.UK

CERN: LHC to fire first proton-smash ray next month

Chris Morris, Kevin Eldon & Simon Munnery at CERN

Chris Morris recently popped down to CERN to have a look round.

As did Kevin Eldon and Simon Munnery.

Podcasts and articles here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/30/cern.particle.physics2

http://www.cernpodcast.com/?p=43

http://www.cernpodcast.com/?p=14

Net shoppers bullied into being Verified by Visa

Smile: "A really secure e-mail"

I'm not sure I like having to enter my Smile password on other shopping websites. How do I know they're not phishing for it? That compromises my normal Smile logon.

Here's the email I got from Smile on the 3rd June that I've only just bothered to read. That third paragraph says they've automatically registered your cards with VbV and "If you do not use the service, we may not authorise further internet transactions with participating retailers and suppliers." and they've already changed (or "varied" in newspeak) their terms and conditions for me.

=================

There are some shady types out there on the interweb, just dying to get their grubby little hands on your debit and credit card numbers. That's why we're introducing a service called Verified by Visa, which lets us work with Visa to make sure your online transactions are more secure than ever.

How? To take security up to the next level, the memorable name you've chosen for your internet banking access is now also your Verified by Visa password which you'll be asked to confirm every time you shop online at participating retailers. This adds a whole extra layer of security to your online shopping. And because you haven't written this down anywhere - you haven't, have you? - only you know it, so it's much harder for anyone else to use your card details without your knowledge.

Your smile card(s) and any personal cards you hold with The Co-operative Bank will be automatically registered for Verified by Visa in about 30 days. Then, if you pay for goods or services ordered on the internet using your card and the retailer or supplier participates in Verified by Visa you will need to use the service. If you do not use the service, we may not authorise further internet transactions with participating retailers and suppliers. If you have a current account with us, your terms and conditions have already been varied to include this condition, please refer to condition 9.8. Credit Card Accounts with an authorised card will not yet be registered for Verified by Visa.

Forgotten your password? Not to worry. Just choose another one and either call us on 0870 843 2265 to tell us or go online to register it. This way, your transactions will be safer - meaning there'll be one less thing in life to worry about (you're on your own with that decision to paint the bedroom lime green).

Thanks

smile

=================

Oh, and in other news they've also asked me to always login and send them a secure message whenever I go abroad so they know not to automatically bar it and then make me spend lots of time and money on my roaming mobile to re-activate it. I used to like Smile, but now they're turning into Frown.

Late-breaking April Fool prangs snoozing Guardianista

April Fools Day = Outright Lies Day

I just avoid reading anything topical on 1st April, it's just gets so boring: yes, well done, ha ha, very funny, I see what you're trying to do there...

Google gives GMail always-on encryption

Breaks both desktop Notifer and Gmail for mobile

Great...

You can set Gmail for mobile to always use a secure network, but it didn't work until I reset the first setting...

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en_GB&ctx=mail&answer=74765

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100210

The Guardian's excellent Web 2.0 blog-up

Re: Re: Graun

Quite a few "Guaridan" typos by "Guaridan" journos here. Screenshot away:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/06/liberty_in_peril.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/sep/19/marketforces

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2005/aug/26/newsstory.sport10

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/01/television

(Oh, and if you mispell the classic mispelling, Google helpfully suggests: "Did you mean: grauniad" :)

HP shatters excessive packaging world record

Dear The Register

Please could you contact HP for comment? I'd love to hear their excuse, and who knows, maybe it'll stop them from doing it again. Thanks!

iRiver Lplayer 8GB MP3 player

'Snot just the UK

Even here in metric Finland TVs and monitors, shirts and trousers are sold by the inch.

AVG chokes fake traffic spew

Re: It's real traffic now, isn't it?

> "That means a small portion of the rogue traffic will continue"

> How can it be considered "rogue" if it's actually a requested view?

My guess is you'll get one view for AVG doing the post-click/pre-view scan, and a second view for the real user.

A big improvement on getting an AVG view for something the user didn't even look at.

Google deigns to comply with a privacy law

28 my arse

"Ever since that night, this has been our discipline, and everyone who works on the homepage and its design knows the current number: 28. (That's the word count for the basic page if you are signed out, there's no promotional line running beneath the search box, you've set Google as your homepage and thus don't get the "Make Google Your Homepage!" link, and you count "©2008 Google" as two words.)"

Lots of ifs and buts in there.

Now if I got to google.com here in Finland (signed out, no promo line (even though it's not my homepage), count "©2008 Google" as two words), I get the English page and see 30 words, PLUS an extra four: "Go to Google Suomi": 34.

Which all goes to show this left leg in/right leg out mumbo is PRBS.

Boozers rejoice - it's the USB wine tap!

"The people of France have made a joke"

"France has been investing heavily in humour development since the 1970s and the government has today revealed the first fruits of the scheme - a joke about a USB Wine Dispenser.

"France will be having another go at doing a joke in 2012."

http://www.idiottoys.com/2007/12/people-of-france-have-made-joke.html

El Reg procures OGC mousemat

Another phallic logo

Another phallic logo I saw recently in Helsinki on the side of a very big, very long, very shiny tanker ----> http://www.monten.fi/

Spammers crack Gmail Captcha

Web 2.0 CrowdSpamming in action!

Re: Bot army now with human servants?

> So apparently Russians are paying people to correctly identify captcha strings for their bots?

That's also how I read the Websense article. When I first had a play with Amazon's Mechanical Turk I thought it would be perfect to farm out CAPTCHAs for real people to type in for a cent a pop, and that's what they're doing here.

Now that's Web 2.0!

http://creatr.cc/creatr/logo/CrowdSpamr.png?1204024057

(And whilst you're at it, why not, as these spammers appear to, have your own bot have a go and compare it with the correct human to help learn do it automatically and save those few cents and speed it up considerably.)

Polish teen derails tram after hacking train network

A photo of one of the tram crashes:

http://miasta.gazeta.pl/lodz/51,35136,4823174.html?i=0

Photos of his kit

Miroslaw Micor, spokesman for the Łódź police, contradicts himself:

"He ... built a device that looked like a TV remote control and used it to manoeuvre the trams and the tracks"

then

"He had converted the television control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line"

So did he build a device or convert a telly remote? The Torygraph story said he trespassed at depots to get info and equipment to build the IR device, the latter. There are also photos on the Torygraph story of some of his kit: a lot of keys, and what looks like a front bicycle light and a calculator, possibly connected.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/11/wschool111.xml

Radiohead top UK album chart

"The downloadable version of the album is no longer available."

"I wasn't aware that this could be downloaded as an ISO image for use in high-end CD players, or FLAC for people with decent soundcards."

It is. The inital free 160K MP3 download is no longer available to download for free, but you can buy downloads in lossless FLAC or 320K MP3 from http://www.7digital.com/in-rainbows

"Oddly, having checked a couple of torrent sites, it appears that not only is a downloadable version available, but at a significantly better sampling rate."

I expect that'll be the 7digital downloads doing the rounds.

"What seems to be no longer available is the option to pay money to Radiohead for downloading it..."

That'll be £7 for MP3, or £10 for FLAC+MP3 to you Sir.

N95 struggles to find itself

More free alternatives

aMaze - you need to register to use it, but otherwise free.

http://www.amazegps.com/

Nokia Sports Tracker - What Nokia gives, Nokia can take away, and can give for free again in another app. This is a beta app, very good, and there's also a website where you can upload your "workouts", and it can also automatically add any photos you took to the map.

http://sportstracker.nokia.com/