Posts by Steven Freeman

Over half of US HD TV owners blurry on Blu-ray

@ BobVB (Viewing Distance)

Im sorry, but saying that they were blown away @ 7 inches from the screen is just mental (in a nice way, no the knife wielding psychopath way).

For a single guy or gal this might be ok, but Ive got a family and we have to be a certain distance away from the telly so we can all watch it at once.

Your best bet (and it has been mentioned before) is to project it. I have a 10ft display area for my projector and on this you can definitely see the difference over DVD. But then again, not everyone is gonna splash out on a projector and screen just so they can get the benefit of Blu-Ray.

For the families out there, keep yer DVD collections, get an upscaler if you really want, but until you have that projector there I simply wouldnt bother.

Reg readers split on Vista readiness

Vista sux boz: its official

Im sorry lads, but Vista is a fricken nightmare to people that have seen a windows computer in the past 10 years.

Ive used all major home and business OS types out there and Vista is the most difficult to work.

An example image shown somewhere above shows explorer in xp and the same in Vista... where the bloody hell have they hidden my file menu... every OS has this and it was MS damned vision that brought the File / Edit / Help menu (across the top) to the user and now they've decided 'bugger it, well do something else now', im sorry, but no thanks.

And where the hell is add/remove programs when you click on use the old interface for control panel? Its now only available in the new look vista control panel. If I have to stare at a screen for more than 30 seconds to find something I could have found, modified and applied in the same time, whats the bloody use.

And dont get me started with 'double click on app ... are you sure you want to run this app? microsoft isnt quite sure if you meant to click on it.... 'Im Sure', no, but really, are you definately sure you want this app to run? its called microsoft office, and we're simply not sure....' if microsoft isnt sure about skipping the are you sure for its own applications why the hell should the user be sure?

Look, heres the skinny.... never used a pc before, use vista, its a piece of piss if you havent used a GUI before.

If you've grown up on GUI ignore vista until MS brings out a patch where it works like XP... damned MS

End of Rant

How to destroy 60 hard drives an hour

Easy way.... decide on your target audience

I suppose it depends on who you think might try to read the data. If its another worker in the gvmt etc then simply doing a delete on all the files would work... hell, putting them into a new folder would confuse the sh*t outta them.

But, yeah, thermite gets my vote.... mmmm liquidy

Paris, coz she would be confused by the moving of files into a new folder

Apple update trick triples Safari share

Sheer Laziness

I think what that Mac company has done is actually funny as hell, and excellent opportunism. It serves everyone right that now has Safari on their machine. People should learn to read what they are installing, whether its through an update agent or through an full exe install. Its through sheer laziness that users will end up having safari on their machines. At least its not as bad as that other huge company, Miscrosoft I think their name is, actually forcing a browser on you when installing an operating system.

BT: 'We did not let anyone down over Phorm... it was not illegal'

@Email address of Ben Verwaayen - head of BT

Hi all,

I have attached the email I sent to Ben Verwaayen (thanks to anonymous bloke above). I suggest we flood this email address with something similar to what I have written to let them know that we are not going to put up with this spying/hacking game that they were running.

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Hi,

With regards to BT using PHORM

I would like to bring your attentions to the following website:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/03/bt_phorm_interview/comments/

I will also be sending this email to Virgin media expressing my disgust with the entire scenario.

And I am also sure that you will be receiving many more emails like this one.

You may not understand the technical side of what PHORM is doing, but that is simply not good enough as I'm sure you have Information Technology experts within your company. My [our] main problems are the apparent breach of privacy, the lack of solid details on what BT and Phorm did in this trial and the possible implications of Javascript injections that the PHORM application is able to do. If you have time to read the comments you will notice my message with regards to possible data leakage that would be possible using the PHORM app.

The javascript injections are readily available with a simple search on Google using the PHORM javscript variables as a search reference. Due to the way most blogs and boards work, javascript will not run on these sites from inside a users post, and so the post is appended with a cleat text version of the javascript code.

Sincerely,

Steven Freeman

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@ Ian

Taken from the Phorm website:

ISP Partners

Phorm enables ISPs to play a pivotal role in the online advertising market while offering a better and safer browsing experience for their customers and fully protecting their privacy.

Current partners include BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media - companies representing approximately 70% of the UK broadband ISP market.

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It doesnt mention however what encompasses 'BT' but it looks like you may be safe.

This also answers my question about Virgin Media... dammit

Big Brother has the ability to nick your details

The scariest of all the stories shown on the register regarding this 'invasion of privacy' has to be that the software they used injected Javascript code into the html of the pages that were being viewed by the users.

Now, if this actually happened, then it would be possible for users data (name/address etc. and even worse, their credit card details) to be sent to and from the PHORM software using Ajax, and the un-savy user would never know that it happened.

Now, imagine someone less than savoury is working at BT; they could decide to inject their own code into the pages to grab this information with very little effort and no-one would really know. A database created on the fly (or even something like a csv file) could then hold all this data. As as it has been created without anyone else's knowledge there's a real good chance that it would never be detected.

I think BT users have the right to be very worried about this possibility. And I'm now worried about Virgin's 'abilities' with regards to this matter.

I just hope that in 2 months I wont be reading an article about how some little b*stard has stolen users details using this scam, sorry I mean Trial :S