Posts by Morely Dotes

NASA: no fix needed for shuttle

@ Rob & Kurt

"At the end of the day if they make a mess they can point the shuttle into deep space and send it off."

Well, actually, no. The orbiter doesn't carry enough fuel to leave low orbit, other than a deorbit retrograde burn. It could be tethered to the ISS, I suppose, but if it's rated unsafe for reentry, it becomes a permanent fixture in that general neighborhood.

"There's enough riding on this decision that I think we can count on the big brains at NASA to make the best decision possible."

Yes, we've seen what trusting those "big brains" leads to. This is not the era of Apollo 13; this is the era of Challenger and Columbia.

Designer breaks up trad PC design

All bling, no brains

USB, eh? And how long, after you've moved it and reconnected everything, until all the units recognize one another again? It takes too bloody long now with wired USB - I hate to think of the minutes wasted waiting to "see if the keyboard will work this time."

Novell won't pull a SCO

More to the point...

Will those businesses which paid SCO "licensing fees" based on SCO's claims of copyright be getting refunds? Or will they have to sue SCO, or file criminal complaints for fraud and extortion?

'Law and Order' cop accused of child porn possession

Re: Computer forensics

"For any law enforcement agency to press charges they would need more evidence"

In the USA? Where the plods don't even need a warrant to wiretap your communications any more?

Yeah, right.

Any fool who trusts his government these days deserves a Darwin award.

Chinese firm claims World of Warcraft stole its fonts

So tell us...

Founder Electronics, where did *you* steal the fonts? Can you prove they were independently developed?

And do they contain melamine, lead, or other poisons, like so amny other Chinese products?

No sympathy here. As long as China is essentially the private property of the Communist Party, and as long as Chinese industry continues to knowingly and maliciously flout Western consumer safety, they can sing for their supper - but they won't be getting it from me.

Who'll win the webcasting war?

Let's demand the planet Jupiter, too!

The only possible method to prevent streamripping is to stop broadcasting.

Which is probably what Sound Exchange really wants.

Google gags Facebook code leaker

@ Dillon Pyron

"I don't see any copyright notice in the posted code. One of two things happened. Either the poster removed the copyright notice, which is illegal. Or there was none. In the later case, the Berne Convention applies. Which applies a copyright to the code. So the poster is screwed, either way."

In the latter case, proof of authorship is required to assert copyright; I didn't look at the code (my own code is boring enough, I don't need to read Wankbook's), but if there's no copyright statement, and the code exists on two or more Web sites, ownership of the code is open to question.

An inconvenient update

@ Ryan Nix

We'll stop the use of fossil fuels, certainly. The only question is, will we stop because we've burned all the fossil fuels, because we've gotten some sense and started using renewable resources, or because we've become extinct?

Personally, I prefer the second option, because fossil "fuels" are also wonderful raw materials for lots of other things, like aspirin, and plastics. More than a half-century of experience with humans and politicians, however, leads me to believe that the third option is most likely, with the first option a close second.

Foxy Brown cuffed on Blackberry assault rap

At first glance...

I thought the cartoon character from "Drawn Together" had been arrested.

...

Behavior seems to indicate I was right the first time.

Xandros celebrates Microsoft union with patents

Why ActiveSync?

From my experience with ActiveSync in my $DAYJOB's IT shop, I'd have to say it's a nightmare for system administrators; the version that came with our CEO's "smart"phone (and I use the term "smart" in the Marketing sense - it's certainly an idiotic design) required the user to have local administrative rights before it would allow him to sync. It also frequently disabled itself, requiring a reinstall.

Xandros may well find this puts them in a more competitive position vis-a-vis Microsoft shops, but they won't be getting in here. It's bad enough having the "real" MS wares; we don't need a knockoff of that crap as a replacement.

Webmail-creating Trojan targets Gmail

@toby

"I don't understand why ISPs cannot, from a centralised authority list, block access to the server that is providing the decryption of the captchas."

Such servers are usually located in Romania, China, Turkey, or another country that doesn't give a rat's red patoot about what crimes are committed with the complicity of their ISPs, so long as plenty of dollars are generated by them. As a result, the ISPs are hotbeds of malicious activity.

My solution is to firewall off all IP space assigned to such nations. Most ISPs would not be so draconian - which is why the malicious ISPs remain unquarantined.

Sony threatens to evict naughty gamers from Home

Good luck!

I despise Sony, and I want to see them fail in this and every other venture, until the company is finally dissolved due to insolvency. Hey, a man can dream! They richly deserve failure for their malicious and just plain evil distribution of rootkit Trojans on their Sony-BMG audio CDs.

However, in the short term I would like to see their online service working as advertised - I hope their net.police succeed. Why? Because then Microsoft's Xbox Live service will have something that threatens them; I quit Xbox Live and sold both my Xbox consoles and all 75 of my Xbox games shortly after the Xbox 360 was released, because the Xbox Live service was overrun with "griefers" during the 3 weeks' runup to the 360 release, and it became obvious that Microsoft had no intention of doing anything about it.

So, good luck to Sony in this one venture - until Microsoft starts feeling the pain of competition and improves their own online service.

After that, Sony can rot in Hell.

Droid pilots beat humans at air-to-air refuelling

An AARDman is good to find.

I'll get me coat. It's the one with the extra-long sleeves and the leather straps...

MySQL defends paid tarball decision

Learn to read, people!

They aren't keeping source back. They're keeping the *TARBALL* of the source back.

If you can't make your own tarball, what in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster do you think you're doing with an SQL database server?

Or, short version: RTFM!

Symantec releases new NetBackup

The only reason to buy network backup software...

...is to have a vendor whom you can blame when you screw up.

rsync for windows and for linux is freely available. So pissing money away just to have someone you can blame is, to me, a strong indicator of incompetence.

Student reprimands Facebook for bad manners and exposed code

Of course it's vulnerable!

It's javascript, which is about as secure as a cellophane privacy fence.

Any site that was seriously concerned about security wouldn't be using javascript. Period.

World's oldest person pops clogs at 114

Re: Re; 99 and 2 days

"is there a particular reason you would like to die on your wedding anniversary?"

Karma. I've been telling her for years that she's working me into an early grave. That would be proof.

Free software campaigners stonewalled at BBC

False assumptions

"The BBC says its content partners will not allow it to distribute shows over the internet without Microsoft DRM."

Firstly, I believe that is either an outright lie, or El Reg's reporter made the assumption that the Beeb's partners demanded *Microsoft* DRM.

Secondly, if the content providers refuse to let the Beeb stream their content without DRM, then the correct answer is to refuse to stream the content. It's not as if the Beeb doesn't own the copyrights for some very *good* older content, which I for one as a non-UK resident would be happy to pay to have access to - as long as it's not DRMed. I'm already renting DVDs of BBC content - and I might add that the so-called DRM on those is so trivial to bypass that I often forget that I need to do so.

UFO lover 'lost three ton asteroid in office move'

Freeman Dyson took it!

" It is widely believed that the recent acceleration is due to human activities, since it coincides in time with the rapid increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But the rise from 1800 to 1900 was probably not due to human activities. The scale of industrial activities in the nineteenth century was not large enough to have had measurable global effects."

And since the aliens who caused the global warming effects during the 19th Century can be tracked only through the 6,000 pounds of rocky iron they so stupidly left behind, Dyson has stolen the meteorite to prevent the UFOlogists from finding their home planet and starting an interstellar incident.

Or maybe Dyson is wrong for once, and the soot from early Industrial Age forges and whatnot, much of which settled on Arctic ice floes, increased global temperatures through solar absorption - and thus there never was any meteorite.

Is that possible?

US wiretap plan will leave door open for spooks and hackers

@ Dillon Pyron

You'll need two computers, Dillon, but you can have stream-encrypted VOIP right now. The remote end is going to need an extra computer two.

The spare PC at each end is configured as a VPN endpoint, and to accept packets only from the other endpoint; then crank up the encryption level as high as you like (within the CPU and RAM constraints) and away you go.

NASA comp fails to produce flying cars

Find the plans for the Dean Drive

Then we can talk about flying cars.

But considering that your average groundcar driver knows bugger all about piloting even when he can't leave the ground (barring Dukes of Hazard-style jumps, which I can tell you from personal experience play Hobb with the car's suspension and tires), I have to agree with the other commentators here - flying cars for everyone are simply a very, very bad idea.

On the other hand, I'm betting that private space ventures will be making ground-to-orbit-and-return flights within a decade. It's the only way the billionaires can be sure to get a slice of the wealth available in the Solar system that's above the Earth's atmosphere.

How to watch TV on your PC

Pity the poor Windows users

Using Vista (or any other Microsoft product, for that matter) to watch TV is like using a Rube Goldberg machine comprised of a 20kg gold brick, a lever-and-fulcrum arrangement, and a shotgun, to kill flies. Certainly it can be done, but it's difficult to operate, unstable, unreliable, and tends to be messy to an extreme degree.

Let MS operating systems stick to what they do reasonably well - play games, and sell Microsoft Office to idiots.

Malware miscreants target parked domains

There's a right way and a wrong way...

...to "park" a domain.

The right way is to direct all access to a page that says something to the effect of "this domain has been parked at $REGISTRAR. Please visit us again when the site is finished!"

The wrong way is to redirect all access to an ad farm, which, of course, encourages malicious individuals to register domains with the (incompetent or malicious - pick one) registrar, and place ads on the registrar's ad farm which then direct visitors to the malware distribution sites.

Guess which method NameDrive chose? Guess why I would never trust NameDrive with any of my dozens of domain names!

VAT fraudsters 'laughing all the way to their offshore tax haven'

It's incompetence on the part of the Inland Revenue

And apparently a Byzantine tax code.

Tax the items at the point of retail sale, at a fixed percentage of the retail price. Period. How hard is that? Shopkeepers can't simply up stakes and move to the Maldives; they either pay the VAT( aka "Sales Tax" in civilised nations), or go to jail.

Tell wholesalers to collect VAT every time they sell on to another wholesaler is what *created* the concept of carousel fraud; it's incredibly stupid. Only a career bureaucrat could consider it to be a good plan.

SCO 'disappointed' as shares plunge 70 per cent

Overvalued

43 cents per share is roughly 42 cents too high.

Sell now, or lose everything!

Germany enacts 'anti-hacker' law

Obviosuly, this is a law funded by Microsoft

Since Windows is useless for anything other than playing games and running Microsoft Office; this law effectively eliminates all other operating systems, which *do* have security tools built-in or readily available.

NASA inks deal for Shuttle replacements

That's one giant leap backward for Mankind...

In 1993, at Huntsville, Alabama, USA, at the Space Programs and Technologies Conference and Exhibit, a few Boeing engineers presented a fairly old concept; a two stage reusable spacecraft. Page one of the paper can be seen at http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/1993/PV1993_4161.pdf

Safety issues with the Shuttle orbiter have *always* involved damage caused by the archaic solid rocket boosters, or foam shedding from the external fuel tank. The concept of discarding half your space vehicle at every launch has led directly to the loss of Challenger and Columbia, along with 14 astronauts.

And now NASA wants to discard the *entire* launch vehicle again.

It's time for a total replacement of the NASA administration. These people are without vision.

Deceased Malayan hit with $218 trillion mobile bill

"Slow" news day, indeed

"msnbc published this news on April 10, 2006. Why did it take exactly around close to somewhat of approximately one year to reach you, finally, in some place called SF"

Burke's admitted to being a Verizon customer. Obviously, he gets his news via Verizon's service, as well.

(As a very angry Verizon customer, I can tell you that there are no two people in the entire corporation who speak to each other, nor a single one of them outside the Tech Support office who can pull his head out of his arse long enough to find out *why* the customer is enraged.)

Novell owns Unix copyrights after all

Justice still lives!

Rot in Hell, SCO, you scummy whores of Microsoft.

China to map 'every inch' of the moon

Beijing, get your brollies up!

I just talked to Mike, and he said that anyone trying to steal the wealth of the Lunies will be on the receiving end of a bunch of thrown rocks.

US Navy seeks hydrogen-powered forklifts

Fossil, non-fossil - I'm the guy with the lungs

Propane is a fossil fuel. We're going to run out. Full stop.

Hydrogen can be produced from sea water. Granted, even the supply of sea water isn't infinite, but we're not going to run out within several millenia.

Production of hydrogen from sea water can be accomplished using wave-powered generator buoys, solar power plants, nuclear plants, or even coal-fired plants (although, obviously, the latter is least-favored).

For forklifts, direct conversion of propane-fueled to H2-fueled would be the ideal. However, as a consumer, I would rather be able to buy a kit originally designed for a forklift that will allow me to adapt my gasoline-fueled car to a hydrogen/battery-powered hybrid. So, carry on, US Navy!

Google starts charging for storage

Microsoft is overcharging

Even at "free," who in their right mind would trust a Microsoft service to keep files safe? They even admit that it's Windows!

'Portable' CD player puts MP3 into a spin

To echo what others have said...

As a ripper, it's a great idea. As a CD player, it's rubbish.

And be fair to poor old First Posting Anonymous Coward up there - I believe he's trying to say that the thinks the RPMs vary according to the position of the read head (although he's got the concept totally backward, and so far as I know it's not correct anyway), not that the inner portion of the CD spins at a different RPM from the outer portion. So he's confused, but not totally thick.

Doctor Who signs up thinking man's crumpet

Let's be logical

Firstly, I won't be watching any Doctor Who that isn't available on DVD, because I don't own a Tivo, and BBC America won't adjsut their schedule to accomodate me, for some silly reason.

Secondly, I'd like to express a preference for curvy women (preferably with acting talent, if they're going to be on one of my favorite shows), and an abhorrence of the "Twiggy types" I see all too much of. The first "Avengers" was marvelous for that (yes, I really am that old).

'Wild West' internet needs a sheriff

Eliminate half of all Internet scams in one simple step

Outlaw Microsoft products. Seriously; half the scams perpetrated today depend on the vulnerabilities built into MS products in order to propagate, and to collect users' data.

Once you've eliminated Microsoft, you can let the the bobbies loose on the less-lazy criminals.

Harry Potter and the Virus of Doom

Harry Potter and the Wankers at El Reg

"And what about spam? Is there any sign that conventional Muggle techniques are coping? Yes, if you believe Sophos wizard Graham Cluley, but not if you check my inbox."

Want to end spam? Kill a spammer. Nothing else seems to stop them. Not prison, not bankruptcy, not even ridicule nor hacking of their systems.

Make it legal to kill spammers, and the problem will be solved before 2010.

Dell Ex-CEO Rollins to get $48 million cash

And they told me that hard work would pay off!

Well, I suppose that's true. They just never told me that it would be the incompetent boob of an MBA that would get paid, when I was working hard.

US$54.5 million for severely damaging the company. Damn! I should have been sabotaging the software development process, instead of trying to find the bugs!

Pentagon chief: no more oil for blood, man

@ Register Reader

"Biofuel is people!!"

Good. There are way too many people already.

Free software darling SugarCRM blasts OSI

@ Russell Nelson

If you are, in fact, the Russell Nelson involved with OSI, you have just convinced this writer that OSI is a bunch of self-appointed fatheads, and anything announced by OSI shall henceforth be met with derision and contempt.

Good job.

NZ parents may lose battle to keep baby '4real'

Re: Do these parents ever think..

In a word, no.

They clearly are unfit to even attempt it.

Is AV product testing corrupt?

Re: What the AV industry needs...

"is an AV product that un-installs when it's told to. I'm fed up with cleaning the file system and the registry when I want to change product. Most of the time the best way is to re-install the OS."

If you'd refrain from installing crapware such as Norton/Symantec/McAfee you'd find the problem doesn't really exist. The only ones that are difficult to uninstall are the ones that also demand an annual "protection" fee. The free AV products are both more effective, and perfectly willing to uninstall if told to do so in the proper way. I'm currently fond of AVG, but have used ClamWIN and Avast Home in the past, with good results.

And, contrary to Bloor's unsupported allegations, I find that VB100 is a perfectly valid standard, using scientifically-sound and reproducible methods detailed by Virus Bulletin. I question who paid him to publish this press release, thinly disguised as an "informative" article.

Sacked PlusNet boss blasts BT sale 'stitch up'

@ Mark T

"So how long have Plusnet been employing barely literate 13 year olds?"

Judging from their response (or total lack of it) to reports of spam coming from their networks - with complete headers giving them IP address, time/date stamps, and everything else necessary for even a half-way competent chimp to stop the spam - at least 2 years.

PlusNet's entire IP space is in the DENY list at the ISP I run because of that behavior. Oh, wait - I did make a single IP exception for one of *my* customers who couldn't get another local (to him - I'm in the USA) ISP. Otherwise, however, there's no one at PlusNet worth communicating with.

And the ex-whatever-the-f*ck deserves whatever buggering he got/gets from BT for running such a shoddy operation.

In my opinion, of course. Although, in the USA (which is where he'd have to sue me), truth is an absolute defense against claims of libel and slander, so he'd be right out of luck.

USAF seeks control of aerial kill-bots

"They called for the AC-130 gunships from Air Force Spec Ops Command."

How many of those are still in commission, Scottie? Five? Six?

I have had some very good friends in the USAF. None of them were doing anything they couldn't have done in the Army, the Navy, or the Marines, however. The age of the strategic bomber has been over since Gary Powers proved that you can't fly high enough to avoid missiles without a ship at least as fast as those missiles - and the Blackbird makes a lousy weapons platform.

Microsoft defends vendor standards lead

Let's examine some of Microsoft's "Standards", shalle we?

ActiveX - the easiest way to get server-side script to infect your PC with malicious software.

FrontPage - used to build Web pages that can be properly viewed only on a specific version of a specific OS, if the client is using a specific version of a specific Office package. Confused? OK, here: one of my users build a Web site using FrontPage that can be hosted *only* on a Windows 2000 server, and can be properly viewed *only* on IE 6 or later and *only* if the client has MS Office 2000 installed. Won't work on Office 97, nor on Office 2003, nor on Office 2007.

WMA and WMV - yeah, those are real "standards," aren't they?

NTFS - which varies according to which version of Windows was used to format the drive.

Anyone else want to play?

XenSource calls VMware a cash-hogging automobile

The biggest problem with VMWare

Not enough code review. There's not enough code review because the source code is *not* free and open.

VMWare is more open that Microsoft Windows - and chlorine is less toxic than fluorine. That doesn't make either VMWare or chlorine a good choice for my nutrition.

A totally-closed-source system is subject to "secret" vulnerabilities and exploits. That's why it's unacceptable to intelligent sysadmins.

Free download empowers black hat hackers

Prohibition doesn't work. Remember?

"A nuclear bomb for example isn't general, it exists solely to kill millions of people, there's no other reason to have one. That's why there are so many people who object to nuclear bombs."

Certainly the original intent was to kill (thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, but not millions - not with the original 20 KT nukes). However, there *are* peaceful uses for nuclear bombs - so far as I know, they've never been used for peaceful purposes, but it is possible to level a mountain with a subterranean nuke, for example.

Thus we see that the *use* of any tool is dependent on the *intent* of the wielder.

And as for "hacking" tools - I need them to find the holes in my network, and hopefully fix them, before a black hat cracker finds them. It is no more possible to keep black hats from getting these tools, than it is to keep Americans from getting alcohol, and the very attempt to do so will certainly spawn a burgeoning underground economy - and probably it will seriously inconvenience the people who have a legitimate need for the tool, thus ensuring that those who are willing to flout the law will benefit most from whatever you try to keep from them.

Fake e-cards signal massive DDoS attack

Re: Ignorance.. or farsight?

"If these "newbies" jump on the Linux bandwagon then the virus writers will simply swap their target platforms, and don't be so naive to think Linux and MACOS don't have as many problems, they do, they're just not aswell researched yet."

So what you're saying is that you have no idea how Linux and Mac OSX (which is BSD-based) work.

In Windows, by default, everyone runs as "root" and anything one user does affects the entire system - and can change system files which should be protected. This can be locked down, but I've never seen a home user who wasn't also an IT guy do so.

In Linux, BSD, and other real operating systems (Lindows/Linspire is specifically exempted, as it is meant to be Windows for... Well, I have no idea for whom, as no one sane would use it), each user runs in a "sandbox", and the user must have special rights granted to do anything outside that sandbox that would change the system files; thus, if you received a well-crafted malicious email from a stanger, or from an anonymous "greeting card company," and attempted to do something incredibly stupid (e.g., you opened the email and launched an attachment), you would be asked for the root password before the attachment could execute. That would alert a user with an IQ higher than room temperature to be suspicious.

DOS, of course, is as bad as Windows, but not as pretty.

Google to rescue Linux from Microsoft lawyers

Why wait?

"Sooner, rather than later, the rest of the world's IT industry is going to tell the US exactly where they can shove their stupid patent system."

Seriously. Anyone who's really serious about this should contact their legal representatives (MPs in the UK, I don't know who in the EU, and so on) and point out that the US Patent system is incompatible with innovation, and further that it is designed to stifle foreign competition, rather than to protect inventors. The solution is for non-US nations to reject US patents and refuse patent protection for US inventions until such time as the USA cleans up their act at the USPTO.

And as an American citizen, I am deeply ashamed of my governmnet.

FaceTime exposes prospect contact info

Re: Re: incompetence

When security is ignored, the balance sheet suffers MBA holders just don't seem to understand that.

That's why IT people are hired - because MBAs can't understand simple concepts like "if this data is accessed from outside the company, we may be sued out of existence, or our competitors may use it to gain a very large edge in the marketplace."

If you don't have IT and security in mind when designing a commercial Web site, you're a dangerous idiot.

Websites could be required to retain visitor info

Here's an intereating situation

The FBI, NSA, Department of Justice, etc. all use commercial telephone and data services, in addtion to their own "black" networks; sometimes the data is encrypted, sometimes not.

Under the premise of this article, the telephone companies should be required to maintain the total sum of data for several years. This will have two obvious knock-on effects:

1. The cost of telephone and data communications will skyrocket, due to the additional costs of storing terabytes of data.

2 .The data becomes vulnerable to espionage because it is outside the direct control of the government, thus posing a serious threat of grave damage to the nation.

From the second point above, it follows that any judge who orders such storage of transitory data is, whether consciously or not, a threat to national security, and as such, should be arrested and tried for treason.