Posts by Jason Croghan

Vodafone chief gripes at Google dominance in online ad market

Oh yeah?

"new biz models to deal more effectively with the demand for data services and phone apps"

I think he meant find slimier ways of overcharging the customers. Remember text messaging was free until they realised people would pay for it...

Slovakian police chief quits over Dublin explosives run

7 pieces?

Wasn't there a report since that there were two pieces and both were in the same bag... the handler supposedly took out one of the pieces and got called away and forgot the second piece... I'm fairly certain this is why the Slovaks were so angry with the Irish media!

Slovakian flies to Dublin with 90 grams of explosive

The Irish know sod all about terrorism?

Only the last 500 years or so - first 400 years of British tyranny and then another 100 years of violence, bombs and arson in the North. Yeah nothin at all chief.

Dubai cuts ribbon on world's tallest building

I call shenanigans!!

Where did a Palestinian businessman get $3m from?!?!

Twitter founder signs up to iPhone mag-stripe reader

Pin?

When he introduces Chip & Pin functionality, would you really be happy tapping your ping into someones iPhone? Now that is hillarious!

Web service automates WordPress password cracking

@SImon Hobson

I used to do that with Yahoo! email accounts in the mid 90's (distributed brute forcing) but it has huge drawbacks - especially seeing as they were smart and added multiple layers of security such as number of attempts per username coupled with number of attempts per I.P. That way even if you distribute an attack on one particular username it locks that account for an hour which hinders the attack tremendously. Sometimes the simplest of solutions is the better for all.

Limit???

Why don't they limit the amount of attempts per IP address like every other login page? It seems absurd that brute force attacks are still possible, what, 15 years after they first surfaced??

abigsmurf: Brute forcing tools can attampt anywhere between 50 and 1000 passwords per second depending on the speed of the site. It's called Socket Threading :)

You know when you open 20 tabs in Firefox, well imagine they were all to the same page and you've got your brute forcer.

Spanish Army builds ant-colony AI conquistador algorithm

...in this day and age?

When was the last time there was a 'battlefield' worth worrying about traversing? These days battles are fought with unmanned vehicles and aircraft, well, whatevers left after the bombs anyway...

Governator in acrostic 'f**k you' outrage

Viva Arnie

He was a hero to me in childhood and it looks like he just made it right back up there again :)

Student boffins take on iTunes' not-so-smart Genius

I'm with AC...

Pandora's been doing this for quite a while... wish they'd had the funds to open it with such a fanfare though!

Lily Allen exits Twitter, bins BlackBerry

Did anyone else notice the tumbleweed?

F*** her, the world moves on.

Torrent crackdown pushing pirates towards file hosting

"IRC and web forums only play a small role in counterfeit content distribution..."

This isn't true, RapidShare et al are not searchable repositories and the links for each file, which is generaly split into many rar files, must be posted somewhere for Joe Public to get his hands on. This, in the case of 99.99% of these links, is done by posting them to warez forums...

Blogger claims Twitter-served court order a success

Sad...

Sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad.

I've been around a while now and this is the sadest thing I've ever seen. I don't believe for one second that someone is going to pay a fine for 'impersonating' a 'monikor' on twitter. What is the world coming to.

CCTV website recruits video vigilantes

Wait a second...

You get 3 texts per month and then the person with the most points each month wins a prize, won't the total always be 3?? Or are the crimes rated on depravity/savageness? 1 point for a doggy poop, 2 points for a mugging, 3 points for a stabbing and the jackpot of 4 points for a murder? Either way the prize system can't be realistic if you've got a total of 3 texts per month unless....

a) Each valid text which was a crime is then added back as another text

b) I missed something?

Brute-force attacks target two-year hole in Yahoo! Mail

Sigh

These, and many, MANY more vulnerabilities very similar to it have always existed on Yahoo!

When I started programming 12 years ago it was simply as a means to utilise these ‘backdoors’. Yahoo have hundreds, even thousands of alternative login methods and front-ends that all a guy has to do to attempt a brute force attack is play around with their sub domains until you find one that doesn’t either a) produce a captcha after one wrong attempt, b) doesn’t lock the account for an hour after 5 attempts and also, and almost more importantly c) doesn’t ban your IP for an hour after 10 attempts (which the regular login page does).

Their Messenger program also has many different servers with which you can login, and finding one of those that doesn’t stop working after 5 attempts is as trivial as finding a whore in a whorehouse.

12 years and they still haven’t changed the basic foundation of their credential access and still leave it up to each front end developer to add their own security measures.

The Prisoner of Blogger

Yahoo hosting??

If you ask me I'd imagine all of your Blogger FTP problems are probably coming from that. I've used Yahoo! hosting in the past and found it one of the most unreliable services I've yet to encounter on the interwebs. Use a company whose sole business is hosting and hosting you shall receive. Pay a company who really don't know what they're doing or where they are at the moment and bullsh!t is what you get.

Hacktivist vuln still plagues UN.org

Looks like someone deleted the entire database already...

select * from sysobjects

...is returning nothing!

Airliner black-box 'real time data streaming' tech developed

A few years behind?

I watched a documentary on Discovery about 8 years ago which was all about how in Europe we use this 'Real Time Transmission' kit, the same as the US Airforce use, but in the US they refuse to upgrade the commercial airlines due to cost. How come it's taken 8 years for somebody to see that black boxes are stupid??

Faster broadband for free?

Old...

When I got my very first broadband connection in my parents home in lil ol' Roscommon, Ireland about 10 years ago this little contraption came with the modem in the post. How come BT are only now discovering it??

Opera Software reinvents complete irrelevance

Great stuff as usual.

Thanks again for the Monday morning chuckle again Ted - brilliant.

To all the _outraged_ commentards above, you really need to lighten up a bit. The funniest comments are the ones talking about the o and the other obvious misrepresentations in the piece, I'm laughing harder at them than I did while reading the article! The guy sweats satire for gods sake, he's a developer taking cheap shots at other developers and he does it in an easy-to-read-on-a-monday-morning kinda way.

As for this piece of dirt they're calling a revolution - have any of you knumbnutz actually considered leaving this stuff running on your parents/grandparents/daughters/sons machines constantly? IIS comes with Windows yet none of you are using it, the question begs why not if this Opera bullcrap is getting you so aroused? You turn off the computer for a week while you go on vacation and all of a sudden you're New Zealand relatives can't see your cute puppy doing summersaults.

Then there's the biggest reason your mom shouldn't be sharing files: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/19/copyright_victory_rich/

One fifth of humanity deprived of Milky Way

@Sarah Bee

Sarah, are you suggested taking LSD and smokine weed are going to reduce the amount of cancer? They both produce very high melatonin levels...

I've an idea - let's leave on the lights at night and make night workers smoke reefers to combat their breast cancer!

I'm with Leigh Smith actually - people throw the words 'cancer' and 'global warming' into anything they want to draw attention to these days - then the following day all the tabloids make their own version of the story with headlines such as "Street lamps cause breast cancer."

Google Squared - the Cuilest search app ever

Keep it up...

Keep it up Ted, your articles make my Monday mornings that little lighter than usual (",)

As for the idiots above, would you like some cheese with that whine?

And, Anon Coward, upgrading to IE 8?? Shhhhh! I did that a long time ago and had to wind back all of my windows machines to 7 because they crash and burn on simple things like Google Maps and js automation. When they bring out a real upgrade that doesn't cost half a gig in memory then it'll be worth upgrading to.

Ad watchdog gives thumbs up for female TV orgasms

@ Mr Brush

Here in the Emerald Isle it's 20 flippin yoyo's a bottle! Although I did get some a week ago - I was wondering aimlessly around the chemists waiting for a prescription and found myself staring at the big white box and had a read and couldn't resist.

The biggest shocker is when you open the big white box and find the tiny little bottle inside >.< And like all their other products, all the thing does is tingle warm and cool at the same time o.O

Championship Gaming Series runs out of quarters

FAIL

I think the fact it was such a big FAIL might have something to do with the choice of games. Their target audience, the real hard core gamers, don't play Fifa, Dead or Alive, or Project Gotham. Those games are PR games and nothing more, they look fantastic but play like an eighty year old granny.

FAIL FAIL FAIL.

New Google bugs empower phishermen

In all honesty...

...this bug is one of the less severe variety.

If you're idiotic enough to put your credentials into a page that has a "Below is the image in its original context on the page" banner at the top then you deserve to be scammed full stop. I really really wish El Reg would stop jumping onto the 'bug bandwagon' that's been going around lately and stop advertising these idiot "security researchers". They're bums!

Climate change blows out eco-boss's record bid

Unseasonably rainy weather...

Has been happening since records began, but there wasn't any 'vegan, former bus-dwelling New Age traveller, peace campaigner, hippies' around to blog about it back in the day.

Wake up, wait for a week and try again instead of complaining like a twat. Or try living in Ireland for a year and then complain about unseasonable rain.

Reg readers rage at comment icon outrage

Yay :)

Thanks Reg :)

Chinese lorry-crash bee swarm kills six

'...as pictures in the Telegraph show.'

Am I the only person who can't see anyone wearing any protective clothing??

I see one guy with a jacket over his head alright but I can't say I would class that as protective hahahaha.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/00873/bee-crash-460a_873158c.jpg

Paris; cause even she wouldn't go out in that with only a jacket over her head for protection!

Trend virus update freezes some PCs

Funny this...

I got an email about this during the week, the thing was, the images and links were all spam related! I didn't click the links but after reading the 'almost legitimate' looking email and the link location (trend.rsys1.net) I did a quick search for rsys1.net and found it flagged as a spamhaven. Wonder which one of the mails came out first, Trend or the Spammers?

Ice in fuel caused Heathrow 777 crash

Complete arse.

'Probably' cause it, in other words WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED BUT FROM OUR INVESTIGATION OF THE TINY PIECES OF DEBRI WE FOUND WE CONCLUDE THAT ICE MUST HAVE BEEN THE CAUSE.

I hate air accident investigators, they're just educated guessers.

Employee has no privacy on company computers, US court rules

...because he has AIDS...

Why the hell does that even come into it? If people don't want second rate handling of minority groups then they have to stop creating the minority groups...

Webcam hacker-ogler jailed for four years

When idiots catch up with technology....

Way back in the late 90's I created an application that could view private Yahoo! Messenger webcams without asking the users permission, the default setup requires each new viewer to be granted access via a popup question to the person on webcam. Using my application you could just view without that popup and they would be none the wiser. This worked for many, many moons because no one I gave it to was stupid enough to try and blackmail the webcammers.

What a douche he deserves everything he gets.

Beloved websites riddled with crimeware

Websense suck.

Much like the pro-global-climate-change scientists websense's future relies on how dark they can predict it.

Maybe the findings should read FINDINGS of malware are up X% instead of incidents. If anything the web has been getting safer for the last decade and then you have this pose of fools trying to make everyone think the opposite.

Paris; because at least everyone knows her game.

Quantum porn engine foiled by strawberries and muffins

HAHA @ Sarah Carey

The state of that woman, and the state of her blog which is now out of action with the inundation of hits no doubt served from the link in this article, thank you reg ;)

Let air passengers smoke dope, say Denver potheads

At last some common sense..

...from the American'ts and their ridiculous drug war.

Scareware package greets marks by name

OMG quick call everyone!

The Reg is starting to look like the American Government more and more so every day. Because a trojan shows 'information freely available on a machine' does not constitute an "OMGWTF?" moment. The last five or six pieces on malware on the reg have been completely out dated, scare mongering, loose reporting. I hope granny isn't reading the reg on her windows machine.

GTA IV PS3 fights off resolution woes in the UK

WTF?

That's low man, really low. It can't be for any reason other than either a tight budget, tight schedule or complete laziness.

Tool makes mincemeat of Windows passwords

Firewire? Who needs FireWire when all you need is a CD???

This has been possible on Windows Vista and XP for quite some time using a simple CD. You insert the CD in the drive at boot time and select the windows account you want to erase the password to, it just erases the password so after a reboot you can login with the account and no password.

I have verified this on both a Vista Home and XP Pro installation and both worked flawlessly.

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

Microsoft opens APIs and protocols to all

Don't mean to be a moaning Michael but...

.. does no one else see this as a Malware creators wet dream??

Jane Fonda c-word slip shocks US

Does anyone else think this is ridiculous?

What the FUCK?

To be honest, if someone had called someone else a cunt, that's straight up offensive. If they use it, as the title of a play or scene or act or anything else, it's fair use.

Do the people at this stupid "Parenting Company" go to art galleries and try and shut down the nude exhibits? Then again, it was in the U.S. after all and we all know they're complete fools....

Paris - because this article is as foolish as she.

'Facebook fatigue' kicks in as people tire of social networks

What do they do now?

I have a question...

What exactly do the people/person who created the FaceBook/Bebo/MySpace backend do now? I mean, the whole thing is about 10 pages of code, so how do they justify the wages now?? Maintaining websites isn't exactly a round the clock position either o.O

How to speed up Windows Vista: official and unofficial tips

Reduce start menu entries? What about registry entries?

I disagree completely with your statement about uninstalling programs being only for freeing up hard drive space.

Compare a relatively new machine with one that's been chugging for a while, now it doesn't matter how clean the chuggers' been kept, it's still going to run like a tractor after a while unless the registry is properly cleaned from time to time, and I don't mean with one of those general registry cleaners either, you actually need to look through the results of those, including some and removing others from the delete list. This my friend goes hand in hand with uninstalling crud :)

AdultFriendFinder rapped for X-rated pop-ups

The worlds biggest joke...

That site is the worlds biggest scam, read up about it. You sign up and start getting like 20 mails a day from women who want to do anything from suck you at the movies to just calling round and having wild passionate sex sessions. The minute you pay them some dollars to reply to these lovely ladies the emails stop and no replies come back. They also own about 50% of the other dating sites on the net, all the "spam bot" profiles are definitely in-house too by the look of things, can they not do them for false advertising too?

"The World's Largest Sex & Swingers Bot Community"

E-borders kills off UK-Ireland passport free travel

Utterly impractical to operate border checks on it?

'The land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is however so complex and frequently used that it would be utterly impractical to operate border checks on it, even if these were politically acceptable.'

Are you forgetting they used to do just this on every single entrance to the north during the troubles? Or does that not count as a border check?

Yahoo! Messenger! users! face! attack! by! video!

Not the first time.

I don't know why when a bug is found on Yahoo! and publicly announced people are still surprised. Only a few years ago we could run around yahoo chat rooms without a care in the world, viewing webcams without permission, logging in as anyone we wanted, flooding people with millions of IMs all from different people. Their development team are pathetic and doesn't look like it's ever going to change!

Paris Hilton says jail term has changed her

I agree about dropping this ****.....

Ya these Paris stories are going a little OTT lately. I mean even if the cause is that El Reg's editor happens to be a big "fan" of our little stropy heiress there is absolutely no need to report on what she had for breakfast every day!

Vyke moves VoIP battle to SMS

Mobile operators are a god damn joke.

SMS messages were free when I got my very first mobile phone about 8 years ago. It was only when the operators noticed they were on to something that they started charging for the service. Capitalisation is the enemy and the Mobile Operators sure know how to join that party.

A mobile operator whos motto is Free SMS's, I bet it would still make a hefty net profit.

RealNetworks bags Sony NetServices

Oh great.

One of the original malware companies strikes again. Real Media player has to be one of the single worst pieces of audio software available! Not just for the enormous amount of advertising or the popups every 2 minutes.

Orange becomes more like bank: launches overdraft facility

Vodafone anyone?

Vodafone Ireland has had this service in operation for a couple of months now, it's called 'Vodafone IOU'. The deal is it's €2 when your credit runs out, you need at least 0.01c in your a/c to send the text which is a pain in the behind.

Then, when you top up next, they charge you 0.15c for the service they provided.

It's still 0.15 for nothin, but at least it isn't as bad as this Orange deal!