Posts by Jim Morrow

Ofcom: The Office of Screwing Over Murdoch?

Orlowski gets it wrong

The Milly Dowler revelations did not "turn out to be false". One aspect of the original Gruaniad story was wrong: that Murdoch's hacks deleted messages from the dead girl's phone to make way for more incoming messages. It later emerged these messages had expired automatically from her voicemail.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/21/phone-hacking-dowlers

The fundamental facts of the story are correct. The News of the Screws DID hack into the dead girl's phone and listen to her voicemail. News International (proprietor R. Murdoch) paid £2m+ compensation to the girl's family and the Dirty Digger himself made a personal donation of £1m to charity. This would not have happened if the Milly Dowler revelations were as false as the line Orlowski is trying to spin.

In addition News International has not disputed that the News of the Screws hacked Milly Dowler's phone. Which they would have done if the story was untrue. ISTR the latest, proper police investigation into phone hacking confirmed that the News of the Screws had hacked Milly Dowler's phone.

The News of the Screws also interfered with the police investigation into Milly Dowler's abduction and murder. They left fake voicemail messages suggesting the dead girl was trying to find work via an employment agency. (IIRC the phone number on left on those voicemail messages was actually a contact for a Murdoch hack.) This resulted in police chasing up bogus leads in the wrong part of the country.

ICANN flubs new domain deadline after site snafu

who are these clowns?

> Applicants speaking to El Reg today reported that the system was running more slowly than usual after it returned from scheduled maintenance last night.

WTF?!?!

Nobody ever does scheduled maintenance on a critical system while it's live. Or the day before a major deadline. Unless you're ICANN and fundamentals of system operations don't apply to you. Why did these fuckwits do that? Is there anyone working there who has a clue about how to run important systems or services?

Matt Groening reveals location of Simpsons' Springfield

Re: Indeed

You have a remarkable taste in porn.

UK.gov to unveil reborn, renamed net-snoop plans in Queen's Speech

Re: Ship of Fools

> A few years from now, when the Stalinists take over, we're all screwed

I think you'll find the Stalinists have been running things here since at least the late 1970s.

IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz

Re: A total waste of time and money

> I'm not quite as sanguine that "v4 space ... can last forever with a modest market in address blocks" but if it doesn't the problem can largely be solved by hybrid hacks involving v4/v6 NAT and DNS. And the hacks will emerge when they're needed.

There's no need for hacks or NAT. Just deploy IPv6. This will be cheaper and simpler. Bodging workarounds will create needless complexity and extra costs in network design and operations. In some cases, these hacks will not work. [Good luck getting two or more simultaneous audio/video streams to run via your NAT box.] And who's to say if the Next Big Thing on the interweb will not work with NAT at all? If you stick to this IPv4/NAT bodging, you will go the way of DECnet and X.25.

Re: crazy academic led BS as usual?

You lack IPv6 clue. If/when the consumer world gets IPv6, they will have no need for NAT AT ALL.

Mrs Jones in her council flat will just plug and play: devices will just automatically get IPv6 addresses when they get plugged in. It will all just work.

However she might have some stuff that's only IPv4 capable and this will need NAT or proxies, just as at present. She might well be surprised at how much stuff at home is already capable of speaking IPv6 if it was given the chance: printers, cameras, TVs, tablets, smartphones, etc.

Anyone who talks of NAT in the context of IPv6 is like someone who expects mp3 players to stop and turn over an album half way through, just like was done in the days of vinyl LPs. Kids, ask your grandparents about 33rpm long-playing records.

IPv6 is a game-changer. It doesn't need or use the assumptions that sadly seem to be held by some blinkered IPv4 users who are clinging on to horrors like NAT that belong in the same 1980s graveyard as dot matrix printers, X.25 and rotary phones.

Re: Lets pay for toaster ip too eh?

> Call a consumer grade isp and ask how much they charge for "fixed ip", nothing else.

> Now imagine having to pay for every single internet connected device.

FFS! If someone is stupid enough to pay money to an ISP with a stupid business model, that's their problem. Both for the user and the ISP.

You also appear to have no understanding of how IP addressing works.

IPv4 addresses are almost exhausted, so ISPs are forced to suppress demand. That's why there's this abortion of private address space and NAT hard-coded into most CPE and also embedded in the mindset of ISPs serving the DSL and cable markets. Another aspect of this brain-damage is charging extra for customers who want fixed IP addresses. Or no NAT. These mean the ISP has less address space to make available for general use on demand. So they charge extra for something that should be already included in their base offering. But because they don't and customers value these things, the ISPs charge for them. Marketroids even have a term for this sort of evil: functional pricing.

With IPv6, the *minimum* address space a customer will get is a /64. This gives each customer 2**64 addresses to play with: 4 billion times the size of the entire IPv4 Internet's address space. Almost none of that customer-specific address space will ever need to be "managed" and everything on the local network will have a fixed IPv6 address. There's no need for NAT or IPv4 style renumbering if you move providers either. A device on the home network will almost certainly use SLAAC, so the bottom 48 bits of the IPv6 address come from the MAC address of its wi-fi or ethernet interface. This will just work automatically. There's no need or reason to "ration" fixed IPv6 addressess or charge for them. The high end bits of the IPv4 address come from the /64 prefix given to you by the ISP, which leaves you with 16 bits to use for your own subnets.

No ISP - not even the fuckwits at BT or TalkTalk - is going to build systems and procedures so they can provision the IPv6 addresses of every domestic appliance, beer can or mains socket that each one of their customers has allowed to connect to their domestic IPv6 net.

Yes, Prime Minister to return after 24 years

> Mandarins didn't dream up public-private partnerships.

Yes they fucking did.

Ministers are intellectually incapable of thinking deeply about how to finance and operate public services. Only the mandarins have the numbers and knowledge to do that. Or understand how the machinery of government actually works. Ministers don't have the time or inclination to invent things like public-private partnerships and (more importantly) don't have the capacity to do that sort of work while in charge of their departments. It takes years for ideas like public-private partnerships and PFI to be developed: by which time the minister will have moved on. Ministers rarely get involved in the running of their departments, let alone anything concerned with long-term strategic restructuring or reform which takes 10-20 years to achieve.

NDS says Beeb's Panorama emails were 'manipulated'

Media company advertises in outlet read by media luvvies - shock! horror!

Correlation does not imply causation.

The Grauniad used to have a very good media section. This attracted lots of job adverts from employers in that sector because that bit of the paper was read by almost all media luvvies. (They'd read that bit of the Grauniad for professional reasons, not because they were aligned with the paper's risible champagne socialist and sandals politics.) So you'd expect media companies to advertise in the (best?) outlet for attracting candidates whenever they were recruiting.

I think this still explains why the Grauniad gets lots of job adverts for teachers and social workers: the paper's cornered those markets. Just like how El Reg makes a lot of dosh from IT job adverts.

FWIW I read those adverts in spite of Andrew Orlowski's articles, not because of them.

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

Re: Swordfish

Why? Halle Berry gets her tits out. And very nice they are too. For that reason alone, this is nowhere close to being the worst fim ever.

Virgin Media snags London Underground Wi-Fi monopoly

An Olympic record-sized epic fail

Beardie the insufferable. Virgin Media. London Underground. Putting together three of the most shambolic of Blighty's institutions is a sure-fire winner. Doing this during the Olympics is just the cherry on top. What could possibly go wrong?

The underground stations are already far, far too overcrowded and congested. What they REALLY need are swarms of dunderheads blocking every platform, escalator and passageway as they try to get their fondleslabs on to BeardieNet or gawp at kittens on YouTube. And then whining to the clueless LU goons when it doesn't work. This is going to have a very happy ending.

Sun hacks cuffed after being DOBBED IN by News Corp

> you will have news that consists solely of recycled press releases

that already accounts for the overwhelming amount of what's called "news" these days.

very few reporters actually gather news or break stories any more. they don't have the time and their employers don't have the budget. what ends up in our mass media are rewritten press releases, recycled wire copy and pr agent supplied showbiz gossip. read "flat earth news" by nick davies.

the dawn raids have a purpose. first, it assures the public that the cops are at long last mounting a proper investigation into the conduct of murdoch's shit-sheets. [hopefully the rest of the tabloids will get the same treatment in due course.] second, it's telling those who have been arrested so far (and those who have still to be arrested) that they will be treated as criminal suspects. they're not going to get invited for nice chat down the local nick at a time that suits them. the cosy days of handing over brown envelopes and nice dinners are definitely over.

if, as seems likely, those arrested have been acting in concert (ie a conspiracy), it makes sense for the cops to arrest all the suspects at the same time: less opportunity to destroy evidence or collude to get their stories straight.

btw, ask the people who have been monstered by the tabloids about "innocent unless proven guilty". it seems only fair that the cops return some of the treatment tabloid hacks have dished out to others.

Mac OS X ARM port by Apple work experience kid revealed

yawn

Is there a story here beyond what some kid did on this summer holidays, even though porting the kernel in a few weeks is an impressive feat?

MacOSX is inherently portable. It used to run on PPC until His Steveness killed that. The kernel is mostly BSD which runs on just about anything. So an ARM port would largely be about removing any x86-specific cruft that has accumulated in the 3 years or so since Snow Leopard was released and PPC support got dropped.

An ARM port for MacOSX kinda makes sense for two reasons. It'll keep Intel & AMD awake.It also gives Apple the option of having to suppory just one OS (kernel) across all its hardware.

x86 uber alles

> It is clear that no company of that size will rely on x86 only operating system.

Dell do. Microsoft do. So do Sony, Lenovo and the rest of the PeeCee cloners. Though you might quibble about their size in comparison to Apple. Apart from the high-end server and mainframe markets, pretty much everything relies on x86 only architectures and OSes. CPE, phones and tablets don't of couse but they really aren't general purpose computers. Even Cray have been assimilated by the x86.

American search team fails to find women's G-spot

nice work if you can get it

what would I need to do to get a job on this vital research project?

paris icon because the existence of her g-spot should have been widely published by now.

ICANN snubs critics, opens domain extension floodgates

> London buys .london, you own a business in London? best pay Boris what ever he asks for business.london or someone else may get there first.

only the very stupid will buy this snake oil. the contents of a domain name don't matter any more. people use this thing called google to find web sites. they rarely see and even more rarely type those domain names.

it simply won't matter to the public whether the web site or whatever lives behind shitname.com or shitname.london or goodname.shitname or... they're just not going to know or care what the domain name string is. domainers and marketing twerps will care, but they are worthless scum. they are bottom feeders who hype this froth to make money because they can't get proper jobs.

as far as the internet is concerned, all that matters is the domain name string resolves and there's a working web/mail/whatever server at the end of it.

Ofcom's Local TV dream: No smut, an hour of news, endless ads

> So what we're going to get is a channel or two playing 23 hours of adverts for the local curry emporium and then a jobseeker reading bits from the local paper?

... which is pretty much what's provided by all the shit on sky, virgin and freeview already.

local tv might as well broadcast the test card. it would get an audience, serve a useful purpose and the content would have a lot more thought behind it than the rest of the channels put together.

Bah, humbug! Virgin Media censors Charles D**kens

not unreasonable. people are usually fucked if they travel on beardie's planes or trains.

Jimbo Wales ponders Wikipedia blackout

copyright violation is NOT theft

> The copyright label tells you who claims to own the right, so a thief has no excuse.

wrong! totally wrong. copyright violation is not theft, despite what satan's little helpers in hollywood say at the start of their dvds. the copyright holder still has their property (the copyright) after someone makes an unauthorised distribution of the copyrighted work. this is usually illegal - it depends on the local laws - and/or a matter for the civil courts.

theft means removal or denial of access to property that someone else owns without their consent.

a copyright label tells you who owns that right and who might sue or prosecute you if you violate their copyright. so you have no excuse if you do distribute or copy that material without the permission of the rights holder.

paris icon because she knows how to protect her assets when she makes them available.

Senators: Globo-domains could mean consumer chaos

> Is it me, or is this just a clever way to get big companies to cough of money for no reason under the pretense of 'protecting their brand'.

no. though it's being pitched to large companies in that way. some are bound be dumb enough and rich enough to fall for this crap. the cost of toyota (say) getting a tld and running it won't even be noticed in their marketing budget. suppose .toyota costs $1m to set up and the same each year to run. what's that compared to what they spend on tv advertising in a day? how many new cars will .toyota sell? fuck all.

new tlds are a scam for the scumbags and other assorted pond life who buy and sell domain names. it might just be a coincidence that these happen to be the carbon-based life forms who bankroll icann.

btw, nobody ever types domain names these days. they click on the links google finds and don't give a shit what the domain name is. this is of course lost on the spivs and bullshit artists who are flogging the new tld snake oil. fuck the lot of 'em.

New account of Flight 447 disaster published

the airbus's avionics had as much to do with the successful outcome of us1549 as the undoubted skill of the pilots. the avionics "flew" the plane -- keeping the optimal angle of attack until the last few seconds -- while the pilots figured out where and how they'd get the plane down as well as run through the emergency ditch and shutdown procedures in much less time than these procedures need. if the pilots had to control the plane all that time as well, there was a good chance something would have been overlooked in the tiny amount of time they had to do anything. so we'd have been talking about pilot error being a contributing factor in the loss of life from that one-in-a-million freak event.

> I suspect that a packed airliner has a gliding profile similar to a brick

wrong. the typical jet performs remarkably well as a glider considering it has 2 or 4 big engines dangling from its wings. which mean the aerodynamics can't be anywhere near as good as they'd be on something that was actually designed to be a glider. despite this, jets of today tend to have glide ratios of 18:1 or theresabouts. ie for each foot of altitude lost, the plane goes forward 18 feet. even a shitty 50 year old one-prop cessna has a glide ratio of 12 or 14 to one.

the idea that any plane immediately falls from the sky when the power is taken off is just silly. remember the airbus that ditched in the hudson after it lost both engines at take off?

btw take a wild guess what the engines of a jet are doing in the last 20 minutes or so of a flight when the plane's descending to land.

2011's Best... Cars

What the fuck does anyone on Top Gear really know about cars or driving? Relying on that as a source of automotive expertise or insight is about as wise as studying paleantology and prehistoric civilisation by watching The Flintstones.

Hint: anyone who quotes 0-60 or standing quarter mile times is actually telling you they have no clue about anything to do with cars.

Bankrupt Borders flogs 65,536 IP addresses at $12 a pop

i'm on planet earth: which one do you inhabit?

> 1 per shop would be reasonable, 2 acceptable.

only to you. as has already been pointed out, the internet was very different when borders got its address space 15-20 years ago. there was almost no nat and hardly any use of proxies. [squid and socks were the new big thing back in the mid 1990's.] private networks were just that: private. they had no connectivity to the public internet *at all*. so things that could get access to the internet in those days pretty much had to use public address space. they had no choice.

bookshops were one of the first retailers to go on-line and provide internet cafe-type things for their customers. the typical branch of $bookchain could quite easily have had 10-20 computers for people to browse this new-fangled interweb thing, around 10 point of sale terminals -- how do barcode readers find the info for itemised bills? -- a handful of back-office computers and servers, a firewall or two, a couple of links to the internet and corporate network, etc. soon adds up, eh?almost none of these would or could have been on private addresses.

> No wonder we ran out of addresses so quick

yeah, right. it's borders' fault the world ran out of ipv4. it's got fuck all to do with hundreds of millions of people getting internet access at home. or the hundreds of millions who have smart phones. or the milions of companies who switched their networks to tcp/ip and then plugged in every employee's peecee. oh no. they had absolutely nothing to do with v4 exhaustion.

fact: the world has been guzzling a /8 of ipv4 space just about every month for the last 10 years or so. there are only 256 /8s and not all of these are available for allocation. this means the world is running out of ipv4 space more or less when it was expected to: around 30 years since it started.

ripe ncc, arin and all the other rirs follow the same policy wrt unused space they issued: it comes back to them for reallocation to somebody else.

legacy space is not covered by these policies. however arin (the first rir) has to maintain database entries for them since they got stuck with that responsibility when they took over management of ip address space from the network information center that was funded by the arpanet people. some people might get the wrong idea that since borders had space that was known to arin, the space was subject to arin's policies.

btw ripe and ripe ncc are very different things. try not to confuse them. ripe does not issue ip addresses. ripe ncc does.

> all that Borders can do is give them back to ARIN for re-allocation. Has something changed?

no. all 5 rirs follow the same policy. their members have to return unused or unwanted space for reallocation by the rir that issued it. borders got their address space before the rir system was created. the big hint here was getting a /16. so they are not bound by rir policy for that space. borders were probably never members of arin either.

it seems strange that companies are buying up legacy address space when they could get the same space (or even more) from their rir for a nominal fee. except in asia-pacific because apnic has run out of ipv4.

btw, nobody owns ip addresses, including the rirs and iana. you have a right to use the address space you've been given. ip addresses are not property. domain names aren't either. the fact they get traded and money might change hands does not alter these facts.

who gives a shit? both companies are dead.

> They don't own them - ARIN do.

nope. *nobody* owns *any* ip addresses. anyone who says otherwise is either lying or doesn't know what they're talking about. just because something has a monetary value and can be traded doesn't mean it is property in the legal sense of that word.

ip addresses are just numbers. saying you own a bunch of them is as ridiculous as saying you own the number 42 or all prime numbers,

> Why on earth would a bookshop require a class B address block?!

why wouldn't it?

borders' ip space was allocated a long time ago. they got it before the current systems and policies for handing out address space were invented. back then, the usual unit of allocation was a /16 (class b to you) because /24s tended to be too small. presumably borders said "we need a few thousand ip addresses" and the guy behind the counter said ok then, here's your class b".

borders had several hundred bookshops, if not thousands. having 20-50 addresses per shop would be reasonable. allow a few thousands for headquarters and regional offices, warehouses, distribution centres, etc. this'll add up to a good chunk of a /16.

> I've worked in telecoms companies who have a subset of a class C block, and don't come anywhere close to using even that!

ah yes. that must have been the telecoms companies that use phone numbers and x.25 or flog handsets and can't even spell ip. giving them an allocation smaller than a /24 seems sensible.

fyi, unless an organisation got ip addresses in the early days of the internet, they get address space by showing they have a real need for it. because that's how the system has worked for the last 15+ years. so if these telecoms companies you worked for - did they sell phones? - only got a /26 (say), that must have been because that was all they could use. or they were too stupid/lazy/feckless to figure out how to ask for more.

private address space isn't always the answer either. imagine renumbering a large network that's to be merged with another network already using the same private address space: for example as a result of a corporate acquisition.

Schneier: Teens and treaties - our cyber-war saviors

Bruce Schneier is not a Director of BT plc. Ian Livingston is.

Although Schneier works for that wretched company, it's unlikely his day job had any involvement in the Phorm fiasco.

If you think BT should be prosecuted for Phorm, go to your local nick and file a complaint. Then escalate matters if they tell you to fuck off. Start with the Chief Constable. Then go to the Director of Public Prosecutions. Then try the Ministry of Justice. Then start a private prosecution. Over to you.....

Spillover from 400lb man squeezed fellow flier into galley

> I'm sick of fat people sitting next to me on trains.

you lucky bastard! how the fuck did you manage to get a seat on a train?

or are you standing next to the lardarses who are sitting?

BIND security update protects against serious server crash

> Personally, I look forward to the day when djbdns runs on all the root servers.

Kingzongo, this will never happen. You might as well look forward to the flying spaghetti monster winning the 100m at the Olympics next year.

djbdns is a steaming pile of shit. If djbdns was anywhere near as good as its clueless fanbois claim, it would have been deployed for important zones like the root or a major TLD. None of these things use it. Which speaks volumes. In fact nobody who truly understands the DNS protocol or operations uses djbdns for anything significant. Aside from the long list of fundamental flaws in djbdns, it's almost impossible to make it play nice with other DNS implementations so that a zone can have more than code base for its DNS servers.

Many of the things needed for the root zone or a major TLD today, like Secure DNS, IDN, IPv6, EDNS0, TCP queries, IXFR, TSIG, etc are not implemented in djbdns AT ALL. Some of these might be do-able in djbdns by applying unsupported, informal patches and hoping for the best. Which is no way to run important internet infrastructure.

djbdns has not supported any DNS protocol work that's been done in the last 10-15 years. wikipedia says djbdns has effectively been abandonware since 1991. So what was it you were saying about the 1990s calling?

BIND9 (another pile of shit but not as smelly as djbdns) is a complete rewrite that was done in 2000 or theresabouts. It shares no code or software design with BIND4 or BIND8 which started in the 1980s. The same can't be said for most of the other long standing pillars of open source which will still contain code that was written well over a decade ago: emacs, x windows, BSD and Linux kernels, sendmail, apache, gcc, postfix, tex, mysql, perl, etc.

Mail Online is broken

WTF?

was it welfare scrounging illegal immigrants and asylum seekers who took down the site? or can we blame the evil eu? or both?

did the outage cause cancer?

what was the impact on house prices of the daily heil's web site failing?

paris icon because there has to be a paris angle to this story.

BT Tower falls over, crushes X Factor hopefuls

> I was fortunate to eat at the top of the BT tower

is that some sort of euphemism?

Best Buy to shutter all UK megastores

calling a place where you buy stuff a "store" is an even more ludicrous americanism. the english word is "shop".

Privacy warning as cops lean on domain registrars

the law enforcement and gac people are not as stupid as you seem to think they are.

you've completely missed the point too. it's not about getting visible contact details for serving legal notices. that's just a symptom. it's not the actual disease.

the point is the authorities have been asking for *years* to get this info published and have got nowhere. some registrars have co-operated. others told them to fuck off. another lot manipulated icann's snails-on-modagon-paced policy development process to make sure nothing got done.

this was too stupid for words. telling the cops and governments that their opinions don't matter tends not to have a happy ending. it's a million times worse when you do that and then rub their noses in it.

> Ban ICANN

next time, think before you say something this stupid.

icann is of course a deeply flawed institution which needs radical reform. banning it is not the answer. look at what the alternatives would be. governments would step in and take complete control if there was a vacuum in internet governance.

Nokia's Brave New World is (almost) Finn-free

> Windows Mobile IS NOT Windows Phone!

so fucking what.

it doesn't matter if a steaming pile of shit was produced by a fresian cow or a jersey cow. it's still a pile of shit.

Larry Ellison takes a bath on San Fran mansion

kyoto, japan

thank fuck for explaining that. for a moment i thought larry had bought a house in the kyoto near middlesborough and wondered why he'd do that.

Dennis Ritchie: The C man who booted Unix

what did dennis ritchie do

> What did he do for the next 40 years though?

mage, you are showing your ignorance. after inventing unix and c, dennis ritchie co-wrote one of the major computing textbooks. he developed unix v8 which sadly wasn't allowed to leave bell labs because it was a threat to at&t's commercial but shit unix offering. he invented streams. which at&t turned into a train wreck for system v. he spent years getting the c language standardised. i think he was involved in the posix standards work too. he then went on to develop plan9 and inferno. if that wasn't enough, dennis ritchie lead the computer science research team at bell labs, one of the world's most prestigious research institutions.

btw, that michaelangelo bloke did fuck all after painting the sistine chapel. what more did he need to contribute?

no myth

you couldn't be more wrong charles. dennis ritchie was a hero inventor twice over and you disgrace his memory.

yes, if it wasn't for the lawyers, unix and c might not have made it into academia just as cs departments were buying computers for themselves. however dennis's inventions -- as well as ken thompson's and the others at bell labs -- just would not have caught on if they weren't any good. unix and c prevailed because they were (and still are) light-years ahead of the alternatives.

those inventions are still going strong today ~40 years later. which is more than can be said for pascal and modula-2. c might not be as pure as those languages but when there's real work to do, c gets the job done time and time again. which is why it is so heavily used and the likes of modula-2 isn't.

most decent operating systems and programming languages in use today are a direct result of dennis ritchie's genius. many of those that aren't are heavily influenced by his work.

now maybe someone else might have invented unix. or c. but they didn't. dennis did. well, ken thompson shares the credit for unix. you would do well to remember that and be thankful for the wonderful platform they gave to the world.

iPhone 4S pre-orders obliterate sales records

re What do Microsoft & Nokia think?

simple. we're fucked. well and truly fucked.

London 2012 Olympics: 17000 athletes, 11000 computers

coulda saved several shitloads of money by not bidding for the games in the first place and letting paris host them. the olympics are another fucking waste of public money by bastard blair and his useless cronies.

paris icon because she's obviously much more accommodating.

'Hey, Tories, who knows what a nontrepreneur is?’

you are either a fool or a troll or a shill for big copyright. i'm not sure which.

if isps are to be penalised like this, so should everyone else who sells stuff that might be used for copright violation or distributing copyright material: the post office, photocopier manufacturers, companies that make tape/video recorders (remember them?), distribution/shipping companies, telcos, retailers, etc.

making isps liable for what other people send over their network is too silly for words. [you seem to ignore the reality that at least one party in these communications will have no contractual relationship with the isp.] the post office isn't criminally liable for delivering hate mail or libellous material. telephone companies are not criminally responsible for threatening phone calls. they're not exposed to copyright lawsuits whenever a kid sings happy birthday (it's copyright material) to their gran over the phone.

it is simply not true that every unauthorised download represents a lost sale for big copyright. [calling it "the creative industry" is a bit rich considering it's controlled by megacorporations who force-feed the world shite like michael bay movies and maria carey: not much sign of creativity or industry there.] sometimes the stuff that is downloaded cannot be bought. figuring out how much revenue is genuinely lost by unauthorised downloading is hard. many freetards actually spend money on content, gig tickets and merchandise that they wouldn't otherwise have done after being introduced to something from a "free" download.

you've also got to ask yourself how much of the money collected by "the creative industry" actually goes to the people who generated the creative work instead of the shareholders, executives and other assorted freeloaders at the likes of fox or emi.

copyright violation is *not* theft. the ipr holder isn't deprived of their asset(s) whenever an unauthorised copy is made. it's beyond stupid to make out that unauthorised downloading is equivalent to nicking a car or shoplifting. unauthorised downloading is wrong of course and effective measures need to be deployed to reduce or eliminate it. the drivel you've spouted cannot hope to do anything in that direction.

in short, your suggestions and mindset are part of the problem. anyone who claims ipr violation is theft simply does not know what they are talking about.

Smut domain scores big bucks for not handling smut

you obviously don't know how sunrise works.

the registry needs to hire trademark lawyers to check the paperwork and make sure the domain name goes to the true owner of the trademark. this is not always an easy thing to do. does kenwood.xxx go to a porn star called ken wood - nice name for a porn star! - or the company that makes car stereos or the one that makes kitchen appliances? a very expensive lawsuit could follow if you get this wrong.

Hunt blasts progress on BT infrastructure-share plans

why would mobile telcos want 4g to be cheap when they have a captive market for 3G who pay stupid amount of money for very little bandwidth?

paris icon because she's just not worth it either.

BT trying for fibre 'monopoly', claims TalkTalk chief

digging up the street

You'll just have one electrictiy and gas feed to your house. Why should it be any different for phone lines or fibre?

Digging up the street to pull fibre is cheap. The expensive thing is getting wayleaves from all the landowners where you want to run cables. Their permission is needed to allow packets to move across their land. BT's already got those rights. It has mostly inherited them from the time when the Post Office ran the nation's phone system. This means BT can fuck about and make life difficult for competitors unless Ofcom stop them.

Freeview HD will deliver new IPTV channels this month

too wrong for words

> I do get ITV1+1 and ITV2+1, which I don't need as I have a PVR...

shouldn't you have said "which i don't need because they're worthless mind-numbing shit"?

DNS hijack hits The Register: All well

need help here

how does switching my computer on and off - the answer of fuckwit it support to any question - help if it's an upstream dns server that's got the bad data?