Posts by Bill P. Godfrey

The Olympics mobile network clampdown that wasn't

Give them time...

Given the sponsor worship going on, I wouldn't be at surprised if any association with a non-sponsor within 50 miles of the stadium is made a criminal offense.

Sun rises over .xxx smut domain

http://192.168.1.xxx/

Must stop writing that when describing how to connect to web server on a LAN.

Census threatens spies' cover

Ethnic group.

I, like all humanity, descended from a family of African people. Which box should I tick?

Ofcom mulls popular number charge

"Dial 01 if you're outside London."

What happened if someone inside London dialled 01?

Apple in 873-page legal claim to word 'Pod'

Podcast?

Shirley people have been calling things "podcasts" for long enough for it to be a generic term.

UK supermarket starts contactless payments

Drive-by scanning?

What's to stop someone taking a scanner with a £14.99 purchase on it and going around pointing it at random people's pockets until they find someone with a contactless card?

Would I even know if the guy who just walked by me scanned the card in my pocket?

Prince Charles, Stephen Fry and IBM to save the planet

Prince Charles...

He's the one that thinks water has memory?

Blogger claims Twitter-served court order a success

I have a twitter account...

but I rarely use it. Am I now obliged to check regularly for any thing @-ed me?

All my email goes through an imperfect junk-mail filter before I get to see it. Am I now obliged to switch it off? If I'm not obliged, couldn't I just say that the message was probably eaten by the filter before I got to see it?

Do I now have to keep checking this comment page in case anyone wants to serve me legal papers in the form of a comment?

Microsoft purges AutoRun from older Windows

IniFileSettings

I've disabled autorun using the IniFileSettings registry patch, as the other ones seem to have too many gotchas, like device types not covered or the possibility of your setting being overriden by some other registry value that somehow takes precedence.

This one tells the OS, if you ever feel like loading AUTORUN.INF, look at this bit of the registry instead, where you'll find nothing. Nothing is what I want you to see when looking for AUTORUN.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\Autorun.inf]

@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"

You lose the benign icons and names, but I can live with that. I'd much rather that Windows treated all executables on removable devices (including CDs) like they were downloaded files, so you get the "are you sure" message and signature check.

Developers more 'satisfied' with PHP than other codes

PHP wins?

Clearly, I have lost all attachment with humanity. Time to leave this planet.

XSS bug crawls all over PayPal page

@Jeremy

Yep. If I'm giving a site my credit card number, I already trust them enough to let them run scripts.

I actually have three firefox profiles, each for different uses. Each one has its own set of add-ons and cookies.

1. Casual browsing. (With Noscript)

2. GMail.

3. Credit card.

I run the first two all the time. The third is only used when I want to buy anything and I know that noscript would get in the way.

I made a video showing how to do this. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5oubQ4kggs

Noscript

I keep a second firefox profile without noscript for when I want to buy anything.

Microsoft Silverlight: 10 reasons to love it, 10 reasons to hate it

8-bit-esque hobby programming?

With Silverlight 2, (I hope) I could download the free Visual Studio Express edition IDE, write code using an (IMO) excellent language (C#) and people could run my little application without worrying about viruses or malware as everything will be sand-boxed. I could also run my friend's code even if their computer is totally malwared.

I'd love to know how flash compares. (I know very little about it beyond my end-user experience.)

Is there a free/cheap IDE like VS-Express?

Is the language as high quality as C#? (Could I use C#?)

If the answer to both is yes, please tell me how.

Minister: Waste wood is 'huge potential resource'

"burn coal or wood... whats the difference?"

The CO2 from wood was taken out of the atmosphere years or decades ago. The CO2 of coal was taken out of the atmosphere millions of years ago.

By burning wood, you create demand for more wood. This stimulates supply resulting in planting more trees, which takes the CO2 you just produced back out of the atmosphere, to be burnt again a few years down the line.

There isn't any way to produce coal from CO2 in the atmosphere without waiting a few million years. Coal is finite, while wood, well, grows on trees.