* Posts by LJ

8 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Feb 2008

Girls Aloud net obscenity case falls at first hurdle

LJ
FAIL

Ironic, really...

...because this case would've made the story more popular, and thus even easier to find, yet the prosecution *still* couldn't provide any evidence.

Why would anyone run their own base station?

LJ
FAIL

No thanks

That's all well and good, as long as you don't use your home network to transfer data between the various machines you have; 802.11g or n is so much faster than 3G that it simply wouldn't be worth it.

Anyway, who mucks around with settings or changes IP addresses when they want to wander off with their laptop? Where DHCP is the norm, it's just a case of a couple of clicks to select an alternate connection, and that's only if their machine doesn't automatically shoose an alternate connection type when the active one fails (eg Ubuntu). Not exactly back-breaking labour, is it?

To summarise: it's a lot of money and some extra hassle so that you can slow down your home network in order to solve a problem that doesn't really exist for the overwhelming majority of the population.

Why? The best most people could hope for is that they never notice a difference.

MS no-frills security scanner gets thumbs up in early tests

LJ
Thumb Up

I'm more interested in...

...performance. Or, more accurately, the performance hit relative to, say, AVG or Avast? After all, we already have free AV products. If it's no worse than anything else out there, then I'll be happy to recommend it.

BNP DDoS 'mega-assault' not actually mega in the least

LJ
Paris Hilton

Eh?

Just as a small point...the key part of all this is that they want £5k to buy enough servers to get them out of the crap. £5k would probably be just about enough to buy 1 or 2 mid-range servers and get them put into the rack. If that would insulate them from this attack, then it's probably the *smallest* DDoS in history, not the largest.

Paris, rack...need I say more?

Street View operatives object to being snapped

LJ
Paris Hilton

Not surprising

Google makes its living by scraping people's websites (and blames the website operator if their excessive botting kills the site), yet objects strenuously to people scraping theirs.

Why should taking photos of people be any different?

Paris, 'cos she loves a good scraping. I hear.

AMD Radeon HD 4850 and 4870

LJ
Paris Hilton

Pointless, for a different reason

Surely this review itself is pointless? The 4850 and 4870 aren't priced to compete against the GTX280 - they're aimed squarely at the GTX260, which you point out in the review. So where's the sense in reeling off masses of benchmark numbers which don't include the GTX260 at all?

Paris, because even she makes sense in some situations.

How Phorm plans to tap your internet connection

LJ
Flame

So, another way to cripple them...

Wait 6 months, until they've had plenty of time to accrue a veritable assload of data on every subscriber....then get 50% of the ISPs' customer base to send them a £10 cheque and a request for all of the personal data they hold relating to their IP address/tracking cookie/broadband account. They have no choice but to comply, yet I 100% guarantee that they won't have enough resource to do the job within the time allowed under the DPA. Either they quadruple their headcount (thus destroying their margins) and go under, or refuse and end up in a class action suit.

BT pimped customer web data to advertisers last summer

LJ
Stop

A simple solution?

Might be interesting to see if one of the affected people could set an entry in their hosts file to point dns.sysip.net (or *.sysip.net) to 0.0.0.0 - it's unlikely that BT are going to trust Phorm to handle all their DNS queries, so dns.sysip.net is probably named so to make people think it's something innocent (or too technical for them to understand).

Perhaps a public service announcement would be in order?