Posts by Steve Liddle

Google auto-links YouTube, Google accounts

adblock ?

Got several gmail accounts in various names, likewise for youtube, where my name is already taken :(

Very rarely see the adverts that google sends me as adblock stops them and if new ones pop thru, they can get blocked as well :)

Virgin Media switches to Gmail

gmail and adblock works :)

Got a few gmail accounts, the only targeted adverts are one liners at the top of the email

eg

one recent email is about a castle that plan to visit with some friends near skegness, the advert is for Beit Hall Hotel in Kensingon, ie nowhere near the place I want to visit, buckingham palace is apparently very close and that must be the reason for the advert :)

Not worried that gmail stores the emails on it's servers, more worried if phorm and the govt gets it's hands on the data only to lose it or let anyone who wants to look at it, do so :(

BBC Trust moots new licence laws to cope with net

tempted to dump the tv

Got a tv off freecycle.org, tempted to give it away, it works ok, but terrestrial channels are losing signal most of the time, the freeview seems ok and apart from the odd movie, road wars seems to have the best signal, not that find it much fun.

Iplayer is installed, but not used it this year either

Computer tax is non workable, what happens if you buy the components off the net, are the vendors supposed to tell the BBC that you bought stuff to make one ?

YouTube blocks music videos in UK

publicity ?

Tend to get most music off legal sites like jamendo, bought loads of CD's years ago and still like the music, they do not wear out like the tapes used to.

Most of the music I like does not need videos as it is trance, but to stop giving bands free advertising on youtube might not be the best approach ?

Windows 7 fast track alarms technical testers

not beta testing the release

Got vista, it works rather well, win 7 looks good, but seems like it will be too rushed and with the problems listed above do not see a need to upgrade OS for a few years, might even get a new computer with vista or a dual boot with linux :)

Wrong kind of winter brings England to a halt

no problems

Woke up later than usual, walked to the main road and looked ok, visited a couple of local site, including a long hil, going down was fun as did not really want to brake and slide down the hill.

Far too many people tailgating me and other drivers

Tried to work on the laptop, but yet again no intranet or internet

Local hills being used to good effect. although some people found it wet in the ditch at the bottom of the hill

Google gives world net test lab

Not for Europe ?

Tried the sites, all for UsA, maybe several months for Europe and the rest of the world ?

Yelpian astroturfers invade Blighty

weird listings

looked at the local village and seems we have many more pubs, then it seems that the site has lumped all the pubs within 10 miles into one village, not much use if you want to see what is in one village or another

Don't shout at your disk drives, warns Sun engineer

foot work ?

I find kicking the case often makes the clicking noises go away, usually a lose cable catching on a fan, soon goes away, the last drives that failed got some large nails pushed thru with a sledgehammer as not want personal data to re-appear :)

Windows 7 beta washes up on Pirate Bay

Best way to get it tested :)

Would not surprise me if microsoft had a more direct hand in the leak, by getting it onto torrents, lots more people will install and test it for free than you would get from the fanboys :)

Got vista 64 bit after the first service pack was released, ie most of the major bugs had been fixed, now it works fine and seems more stable than XP

Microsoft eyes metered-PC boondoggle

April Fool ?

Maybe not, but anything is possible from Microsoft, guess if the PC was free to take from the shop and the only charge was to use it, then it might not be that bad,

but most games need a high end system and who wants to pay out for the pc and then pay to use it ?

In the ditch with DAB radio

DAB+

Seems to work all over Europe, excellent sound quality where ever you are, being Brits, we have to have the stiff upper lip and go with a cheaper, but much poorer version.

Can see me not even using the radio in the car after 2017

EA punts SecuROM-less games on Steam

Steam can be good

Stopped buying EA games after they pulled Earth and Beyond, then suggested I would have as much fun in the Sims as I would have had in a space game :(

Fallout3 apparently came with DRM, but not on steam, it used to be on another PC, transferred the account to the new PC and will consider it for future games.

Only went with the steam version of fallout3 due to drm issues with the original. Prices are such that I buy less games :(

iPlayer chief pushes tiered charging for ISPs

reviewing the tv licence

As it happens am reviewing my little use of TV viewing, watch it for a few times here and there, thought the lack of signal was my problem, but never suffer from drop out on the shopping channels, just the freeview ones that have films on.

If my ISP wants to offer an option to pay more, then fair enough, if it is compulsory, then will pay for it by dumping the TV licence and watching the little I do watch online :)

Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

Blizzard Bit torrent

Sucks to be a virgin customer and also play WoW, all their updates are via BT, as are most of the linux distros....

What is the point on advertising a 50 MB service and then stop the protocol that makes it worth spending the money on it ?

Grand Theft Auto IV PC debut gets SecuROM sideshow

guess not buying that game then ?

Not keen on securerom, if the program is only used until the game hits the shops, will securerom be removed prior to sale ?

not into the kiddy thumb controls of the consoles, prefer WASD and mouse look...

Guess it is a case of not listening to the customer and am not going to be a customer of theirs...

BNP list hunters bring down Wikileaks

plenty of places to find it

Grabbed my copy off some file sharing site, there are multiple torrents and the some of the comments on the torrents point to these sites.

No-one that I know is on the list, plenty of people locally are on it :)

Formatting is poor with the county sometimes being in the town, but it lists personal phone numbers and emails...

Suspect Nu Labour have had a great few days, probably published lots of stuff that they wanted to hide....

ISP boss pledges to undermine Great Aussie Firewall

What is Cleanfeed ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_system)

It is only used by BT, who although large are not the only ISP in the UK

Proxy servers are one way to bypass it, packing files into archives is another way..

What about usenet ?

Student charged after alerting principal to server hack

nothing changes

when was inn some low end contract job, got asked to copy some spreadsheet data, so selected all ctrl-c and then pasted ctrl-v

it included everyone's salaries that were "hidden" by the boss who was not good with computers, by the time had realised, lots of people had the file and the sole girl in the office found she got £16k when everyone else doing the same job was on £22k or higher..

Contract never got extended for some reason..

Guess the lesson is to never tell anyone that they messed up :)

Man threatens lawsuit after negative eBay feedback

Nice of the seller to let everyone know what happens when you have problems with his goods :(

Was looking at buying some stuff off ebay, actually from this seller, googled the seller after reading the negatives as you do and came up here. Need to thank the seller for making it so easy to avoid him, what if I had bought stuff off him and it was damaged, would I get sued as well ?

My name really is Ivan O'Toole, admits Ivan O'Toole

Imagine going to hospital with a name like...

Know some guy in the Sealed Knot, whose name is Dick Crack, seems he had to goto hospital a while back, not sure on the reason but liquid intake of some sort was involved....

After the nurses stopped laughing, he had to show them some id to get them to believe it :)

MS beefs up WinXP Pro's anti-piracy nagware

Love black on XP

Desktop is black on the xp box, running high res graphics slow it down, unlike the vista box, so although both are legit copies, might not notice it that much

Considering MS were wanting to dump XP, why get so fussy now ?

A third of Vista PCs downgraded to XP

not too bad for me

Got 2 PC's one that blue screens most of the time and one that has blue screened once or twice and that was mostly my fault. Former is the XP PC and vista seems pretty good.

MSN stopped working as I was not connected to the internet, but not worried about that all too much, rest of the net works fine. But then the PC was built for vista - 64 bit dual core, 4 GB ram, DX10 graphics card, 1 TB HDD etc...

So far am impressed :)

Yahoo! shoots DRM servers, swallows keys to tunes

So much for DRM

Never bothered with DRM music, since I play with winamp, but found some site called jamendo that allows people to download for free in mp3 or ogg and as it is released under Creative Commons licence, it does not expire :)

Judge grants Viacom 12TB of YouTube user records

Guess Youtube is not so appealing now

not aware that have viewed copyright disputed material on youtube, has been personal stuff I shot and a lot of parkour clips

12 TB over 4 4 TB drives is a lot of data to wade thru, just hope they not get lost in transit

not even in the same country as Viacom, but will just have to wait and see what happens I guess

Tory trash talk fails to halt bin bugging plans

just burn it

Bedfordshire council have some plot of land that is going to be used for incinerators, 10% used, so space for another 9 incinerator units.....

Guess they will be importing rubbish from london as per usual ?

Next door neighbours are poles, they have lots of rubbish, if it ends up in my bin, it will get dumped on the road

Daily Mail cites video game as proof of terrorist doomsday plot

no more comments on daily mail

Tried to add a witty comment about the game being so realistic and provided links to the game site, but alas nothing printed :)

Heaviest Virgin Media downloaders face new daytime go-slow

Cheap ISP's never good :(

Got an old and no longer advertised account with merula, not have any throttles that have noticed and p2p works fine - mostly use if for free music off jamendo

Costs £38 per month on upto 8 MB ADSL, speed is usually in the 6-7 mb speeds and upload a constant 370 kbps

There were a few guys who tried to d/l 1 TB, but they ended up on their own special central and then they moved to an LLU company.

Social networking site bans oldies over sex offender fears

lots of weird posts there

Found I used to have an account there, but on an old email address heavily spammed that ended up being wiped.

Checked back and found lots of crude comments about anal stuff, recall it was full of russian women telling me I had a nice structure and wanting my children

Undercover teachers to track gang members online

Teacher friend doing 3 hours overtime per night

All of it unpaid marking the kids books with nice comments, all they want is a tick, they have to give a detailed breakdown in case they are inspected at a later stage and can lose their jobs....

Suspect they will not get many volunteers :)

Microsoft pays people to use its search engine

not for me....

Friend sent me some document, had an extension *.docx, could not open it in open office or word, thought it might some mac or linux program, then it dawned on me it was office 2007 that is not compatible with most stuff around. Got him to save it in an older version that everyone could use :)

Getting companies to do what the customer wants would be something strange and not sure for many companies, will stick with firefox and google :)

BitTorrent tracker Mininova faces legal action

Google next ?

Goto any search engine and you can search for a item name +torrent and it will bring you a list of sites with said torrent. Mininova is simply a more specialized search engine, but all that is downloaded are torrent files and they are actually hosted on other sites. The content is on people's computers

As for music, given up on the commercial stuff and getting free music from www.jamendo.com, MPAA free music, no drm either and under a creative commons licence that lets you give it to friends, burn to CD to listen in the car and the ability to donate money directly to the artist :)

Windows XP SP3 sends PCs into endless reboot

glad I declined the offer of auto updates

Running vista 64 home premium on main pc, got XP SP2 on 2nd box, the SP3 has not updated yet and suspect that auto update will be disabled for the next few months

vista been pretty good, but there are a few things it fails on, so XP is backup, just like it to work

Never known a major upgrade to work 100%, which is why MS needs volunteers to test it's real world apps :)

Jacqui Smith un-downgrades cannabis

bottler brown loses the plot

So next time he needs to make a decision, he will rely on his church and his belief that skunk is lethal ?

Been plenty of cases of people trying to kill themselves by eating cannabis, only to be stoned for a few days

Heavy drug users who use lots of drugs are dangerous, but easier to grab headlines I guess ?

Canuck faces life sentence for nude girl webcam scheme

teen education

Friend put it to her kid to describe the kids friend on some chat room as if they were in front of them, she knew only 5-6 in real life and the other 5-10 were just chat friends.

Still it is a bit like getting asked for a dodgy photo in the playground, only the very slow of thought are likely to give it up, as for posing naked...

'Safe' mobile phone battery firm goes titsup

loudspeakers easier :)

Tend to use the loudspeaker option on personal and work phone, use it more or less like the star trek communicator - it's held in front of the face about a foot away, no more headaches by having it next to the ear :)

Prank callers crash Dublin Zoo phone system

long time ago...

Reminds me of the scout group that used to run, had a treasure search, one lot had to goto the abseiling tower for skyhooks the others went to the caving area for troll bait. All of them fell for it, the instructors kept them busy for a while searching for it :)

Nice to see the Irish are as gullible as the rest of us

BBC vs ISPs: Bandwidth row escalates as Tiscali wades in

BBC site has 502 (Service not available)

Tried to post a comment on their site, but seems they have run out of bandwidth for the day ?

BBC player seems an instant stream, often at peak times and no facility to upload later, only get to watch item for 7 days and only on BBC player.

Alternative clients and the like let me schedule when stuff downloads or uploads and can play films in videolan, ie full screen

Unfortunately a server error occured whilst trying to retrieve this page:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/mt/mt-comments.cgi

We are currently working to correct this

UK.gov will force paedophiles to register email addresses

up with the times ?

Got an ISP based email address for the odd forum that insists on ISP emails, otherwise I use several email addresses - some are for online games with the avatar name being the email, others for IM and the like.

Nothing wrong with keeping kids safe, but do not want the net dumbed down to the equivalent of the teletubbies...

Local councils dish out shoddy computer recycling advice

Mr Sledgehammer meets Mrs Stake

Tend to use the pair above after stripping to the platters.

DBAN and similair seem to work very well

Backup dvd and cd's go thru the shredder which cuts them into strips about 1 cm wide, the shredding effect rips up the silver from both sides

If want to go further, can buff the platters with a drill mounted wire brush

DAB: A very British failure

Waste of time

Tend to listen to the BBC radio in the car, it is a built in unit that can't replace with a DAB, especially as it is a company car

Internet radio for music is not an option in the car, as for mp3's 320 is most common, 192kbps minimum for offline stuff

If the BBC stop analogue radio, then will not bother with a new radio station costing £50+ to listen to a few hours per week

US government forces military secrets on Brit webmaster

kno3 site owners in trouble, someone reported them...

www.kno3.com details the extradition of the legal owners of the company running a legal registered specialist chemical company to the UsA on terrorism charges, makes for interesting reading.

The mildenhall site I did read a while back, might even have saved what was on the site to disk, but nothing fancy and nothing bad, just a bunch of yanks posing with some rather specialist kit...

Still on the Internet Archive

Owner is a friend of a friend, was amazed at the sort of information the yanks will share with everyone and not check that it going to the right place

Seems the guy wanted genuine mail address to him and some friends @sitename but did not want the whole us base to use his website, especially when they would never receive it :)

http://web.archive.org/web/20070328175245/http://www.mildenhall.com/

To read the whole site would have taken a good hour, but the site only partly archived it

Smut peddlers and spammers invade Google Groups

No-one uses hosts files then ?

Got myself an hosts file from

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Hardly ever see adverts and spammer sites get dropped in at the bottom, never see them either