Posts by RW

Cuil confesses 'serious file corruption'

@ David D. Hagood

You forgot flavor.

Could this "mistake" have been Cuil's attempt to actualize the old truism of publicity, "any publicity is good publicity"?

Home Office minister gets tough, then gets stuck

@ Paul: What Roget's has to say about "tough"

1936 edition:

tough: coherent, tenacious, difficult

1962 edition:

tough: strong, violent creature, hard, tough, unsavoury, uncooked, difficult, thick-skinned, courageous, unkind, ruffian, pitiless.

toughen: be tough, make insensitive

toughness: obstinacy

Class exercise: use each of those synonyms in a sentence also using "NuLabour", "Liam Byrne", "Gordon Brown", "Harriet Harman", "David Milband", and/or "Jacqui Smith". Antonyms and other parts of speech permitted.

Example: That violent creature, Jacqui Smith, an unsavoury ruffian if ever there was one, obstinately made an insensititve and incoherent remark today.

Example: NuLabour announced another half-baked policy today. (uncooked=half-baked)

MPs report back from internet's dark side

It's the usual ideology

"We're socialists and therefore our thought processes are flawless. We the members of this committee, N in number, have more on the ball than the X millions of Youtube users. Our numbers may be small, but our motives are pure, unlike the porn viewing, kiddy-diddling, terrorizing masses on Youtube."

It's also (to coin a word) bullshit. As usual.

Where on earth did these dimwits in NuLabour come from? I know Canada's governments have been nothing to crow about, but at least they have to gumption to only _pretend_ to pander to the earthmother brigade instead of actually buying into the claptrap promulgated by said brigade.

It's frankly amazing that the plods haven't raided the Register's offices and carted off all the inmates to face charges of "socially irresponsible commentary on politics" and "fostering an attitude contrary to government agendas."

Spammers, Cuil, and the rescue from planet Google

Goooooooooogle

G. pisses me off because I can't (or won't) access many of the results it returns: pay-to-view articles in scholarly journals; limited access e-books; newspapers requiring registration; etc.

Non-html files are dubious: pdf, wurd, excel, etc.

Time for google to retrench and focus on returning *accessible* *web* *pages* in *html* as the default. All very well to index other types of information, but only when specifically asked to do so.

Further moan/groan/grumble/bitch/complain: returning Wikipedia articles is pointless: I am fully capable of searching wikipedia on my own, and if its built-in search doesn't work, I can always use Google to search the wikipedia domain.

Paris, because she has the questioning look and so do I: what is the answer to my question?

New Van Gogh pic discovered using German atom-smasher

The verdict of history

History will value this discovery of a hidden van Gogh far more highly than all the high energy physics ever done, now or in the future.

A good haiku is worth more than all the books ever written about quantum mechanics.

More synchrotrons, and be snappy about it!

Ballmer #1 'cause the halo has a funny synchrotronish look to it.

Comcast plays New York anti-porn game

Gopher finally died

Why not usenet?

It's a very old system and perhaps it's outlived its usefulness.

I used to be quite active on Usenet, but the level of discourse finally fell to such juvenile levels I totally stopped using it 5 years or so ago. For discussions, there are endless web-based fora, though these have had the effect of balkanizing many topics. Mailing lists are still a very viable means of distributing discussions, esp. if there's a firm hand on the moderation tiller.

For pr0n, it's a little trickier, but not an insuperable obstacle, to distribute it. I rather suspect that the hardcore lovers of kiddy pr0n do not use newsgroups.

Ex-Googlers reinvent web search

Ain't had so much fun since the hogs ate Grandma!

@ Daniel: ""lesbian" porn . . . as realistic as pro wrestling"

Hey, ya think gay porn is any better? As a sometime aficionado & connoisseur of said medium, I can assure you nothing is more ludicrous than a gentleman deploying his mating tackle in a half-limp state. To say nothing of the minor detail that Real Men (to steal a phrase from Our Sarah) are rarely so well hung. Let us be thankful for small favors. [pun intentional]

And then there's the anomaly that a great many of the models in Playgirl and suchlike pr0n for girlies (hi, Sarah!) later have careers in boy-on-boy lust fests.

Cuil: I cuiled "futhark". The hits all were reasonable, but two of the images weren't. One was a Nazi swastika (vaguely relevant), the other I know not what -- melted glass marbles, p'r'aps?

It's almost August and the silly season is definitely here!

Dr. Strangevote saves mankind with Luddite voting recipe

What happened to electromechanical voting machines?

These were fixtures at US elections since God knows when.

I've read that they were preferable to paper ballots because of the complexity of US elections where not only a single Representative (roughly equivalent to MP) is elected, but in some years a Senator, perhaps the Prez (& veep), plus the dogcatcher, judge, sheriff, assessor, and a host of other public offices. To say nothing of referenda, initiaitives, and recall ballots.

Or have optical scanners made the paper ballot feasible once again?

'Hacktivism' threatens world of nations

How to take the "inter" out of "internet"

Gateways at national boundaries (e.g. Estonia, Georgia) that block ddos attacks so the national network is largely self-contained. Gradually it becomes impossible to reach sites outside your own country. QED

Sovereign immunity blocks DMCA suit against Air Force

Military life

I suspect in the US it's like it is in Canada: members of the armed forces belong thereto, body and soul, 24/7/365 for the duration. Another comment has also pointed this out.

Friend in the navy here was found to have colon cancer. The navy organized the treatment outside the usual system of universal health coverage. He had very little say in the matter, but also had a successful recovery; all's well that ends well.

Moral: if you develop anything -- even a better mousetrap -- during military service, or while enslaved by one of the more demanding corporations, don't say a word to anyone about it until you are free of them.

Organizations with gumption that impose such conditions on their employees are very careful to make sure that if any such individual effort results in profit, the originator gets a slice of the pie. Not all organizations have that much gumption, however.

Plods say it's OK for them give out your DNA

Who's behind this?

Here in Canada, Customs has conducted a years-long program of harassing gay and lesbian businesses who want to import porn. Little Sister's in Vancouver, after years of fighting (and winning in court) finally threw in the towel, having reached a state of exhaustion.

The interesting thing is that the self-same publications condemned by Customs as inadmissable if imported by wicked fags sail right through the border when imported by mainstream bookstores.

I infer that somewhere in the bowels of government lurks a homophobe of great power and authority who must be placated at all costs.

Looking at the insanity of New Labour's constant striving to push national IDs, the DNA database, insane H&S regulations, over-reaction to minor crimes and disregard for major ones, and other Stasi-like systems, I can only conclude that there is someone in Britain with great power. Power such that logic, reason, and the desires of the citizenry, to say nothing of the historical dedication of Britain to the concept "a man's home is his castle" are overridden.

This someone seems to think that a totalitarian state is the thing to go for.

It can't be Tony. He's gone. It can't be Gordon. He's too thick. it can't be Jaqcqui; she's too thick, too. Is it Harriet? Who is it?

Sad prediction: that the New Totalitarian party will do something to ensconce itself in power. No matter who wins your next election, this mysterious person will still have their hands on the power to assert their totalitarian bias. Be prepared for laws against making anti-government statements any day now. I'm not kidding.

Anyone care to suggest who this person is that has the power to overrule logic, common sense, established practice, and history?

PS: I suspect this same person may be responsible for the decline of the British education system. After all, to be educated is to be an elitist, and that is inadmissible in the egalitarian world of NuBritain.

UK BOFHs face psychometric dissection

It's bullshit

To quote: "The project will adopt an approach using psychometric questionnaires and diaries . . . "

How about "We will use questionnaires and diaries . . ." and similar further simplifications in the language?

It's the usual lame, half-baked, redundant crap language that bad academics (and government flacks) use in lieu of saying what they mean in plain English. A sure sign that whoever is behind this is, as the saying goes, an idiot. Also an indication that whoever wrote this thinks in cliches and buzzwords instead using logic.

I think the underlying problem is simply that most academic psychological research is completely useless. I'd much prefer to build giant mazes with electrified floors and run naked psychologists through them, using a system of rewards and punishments in the classical style.

Russians probe depths of Lake Baikal

Deepest Dive

1960

Challenger Deep, Mariana Trench (deepest water on the planet, >10Km)

the "Trieste" (a bathyscaphe)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste

"Do not ask what Wikipedia can do for you; ask what you can do for Wikipedia."

In lieu of the Paris icon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Hilton

I s'pose she's been the object of some deep diving too.

Apple skewered over missing DNS patch

Omphaloskepsis?

It's pretty clear that Apple (the corp) actually believes what their fanbois believe, viz. Macs are Totally Wonderful, Defect Free, and Utterly Secure . You'd think that the powers that be at Apple would be privy to all the dirty secrets about deficiencies in their systems, but it seems like they've fallen for their own publicists' lies, misstatements, distortions, and obfuscations as well as the adulation of their users.

It's been known for years that Macs weren't targeted by the malware crowd because there weren't enough of them to make it worthwhile. But that is NOT security; that's just dumb luck. With the transition to OS X, plus Microsoft's pratfall called "Vista", suddenly the uptake of Macs is a lot greater, and guess what? Now Macs _are_ worthy targets for malware.

Surely Apple management is fully aware that they had a house of cards on their hands? Yes, being based on Unix, OS X has a lot of inherent security lacking in Windows, but modern OSes are so complex that it's impossible to render them watertight.

The gradual revelation that OS X, Safari, etc have security holes just like all other systems merely frosts the cake.

Vista 'perfection' dream over for iPhone?

X-windows UI Rant

AC pissed and moaned about X-windows: "It's a bugger to write for, and has many deficiencies"

I'll defer to the lady's superior knowledge, but this touches on on issue that, imho, makes Linux (including the Sacred Ubuntu Distribution) and Windows both, and perhaps even OS X, unfit for purpose. Namely, the failure to follow through on the concept of a GUI and remove the need to ever use the command line or edit a config file.

_Ever_ tried to set up a keyboard layout for X-windows? Something that should be a drag-and-drop from Character Map to a composition window involves tons of complex config scripting. Or try to get Samba working? Hey, I used to "do computers" for a living, I'm retired, I'm lazy and indolent, and I refuse to fuck around with stuff that requires reading the entrails of shitty documentation.

Figuring out *what* you want to do is work enough; having to figure out *how* to do it is just smearing rat shit on the biscuit.

Microsoft and the Linux community (I'm again thinking esp. of Ubuntu, where there is some semblance of central control) would both be ahead of the game if they sat down and figured out suitably GUIfied abstractions of all aspects of system control and configuration -- and then implemented it. I give the Linux folks more chance of succeeding because Microsoft has an unenviable track record for poor usability design (notwithstanding their "usability labs") and can't seem to keep themselves from arbitrarily altering the UI from release to release of Windows.

BTW, note that I say abstractions: for all I care, X-windows and Samba can still have horrible config files under the hood, just don't let me see them . . . ever.

<grumble>

Microsoft slams 'sensationalist' Vista analysis

The Microsoft business model is "old and busted"

It was never a very sophisticated model anyway. Establish a monopoly position and then use it to force customers to swallow whatever you shoved down their throats. But, aha! (and ha ha ha!) Vista is in the anomalous position of competing with its predecessor XP, and guess what? Customers much prefer XP to Vista. Moreover over there in the bushes, Linux and Mac OS are making rather attractive cooing noises and luring the adventurous in that direction. (For some values of "attractive". Does the Mac OS wear leopard-skin bikini underwear? Does Linux favor black leather bustiers?)

As far as I can tell, Microsoft is so used to ignoring what the customers want and *truly* need that finally they've produced a system so contrary to those wants and needs that the market is rejecting it.

Three things strike me about Vista: first, it's another example of pointless change in details. The way you do something in one version of Windows has often been different from the previous version, even though the previous version worked just fine. Vista merely carries on this tradition, but in spades. The administrators are justifiably annoyed.

Second, in spite of the amazing increase in processing power, PC's have slowed down; the increase in hardware speed has been stolen and handed over to the functions the users neither want nor need, for example end-to-end encryption of HD signals. See

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html#cpu

for some of the gory details.

Third, Vista, much more frequently than previous versions of Windows starting with Win95, gives rise to the cry "hey, whose computer is this anyway? Mine or Microsoft's?" When the OS starts to actively interfere with the use of your machine, as Vista evidently does, it demonstrates some kind of fundamental ethical blindspot on the part of the OS developer.

In a way, Vista is an interesting example of evolution in action. If you (hypothetically) build The Perfect OS, then any change whatsoever is a step down. I suspect that XP is reasonably close to The Perfect OS, at least as far as PC users are concerned, so Vista can only be a backward step.

The situation has its amusing elements. As others have pointed out, Microsoft's response to the Vista fuckup is spin, spin, and more spin, but we've got so used to lies, distortions, smokescreens, fairy tales, and myths that spin doesn't do much anymore except transfer dollars from Microsoft's pockets into the pockets of the spinmeisters.

High-priority patch fixes critical vulns in RealPlayer

@ AC (VLC blows goats)

Oh, come now, tell us what you *really* think.

Inquirer celebrates spammer murder-suicide

Crime and Punishment

Judith Martin is the American newspaperwoman who uses the trademarked nom de plume "Miss Manners" for her books and newspaper columns on etiquette and manners.

Somewhere in her books, she discusses what can be broadly called "penalties for misbehavior" and comments that society sensu latu imposes far more severe penalties on those who break its rules than the law does on those who violate mere statutory law. Further, that social penalties have no court of appeal: they are simply imposed by a large number of individuals acting on their own.

Now this analysis is an exaggeration, but at the same time it contains a great deal of truth. It puts the universal, profound distaste for spammers in a different light -- and leads to inhumane articles such as the one in the Inquirer under discussion.

Consider the thinking process (however flawed) of this now-deceased spammer. The worst that the law would do to him on recapture was to extend his sentence, and imprison him in a less comfortable jail. But (I speculate) his social environment had been shattered, and from that there is no recovery. Everybody hates spammers.

One can speculate that his conviction had opened his eyes to the nature of his sins, and he could not contemplate a life of social ostracism. Perhaps we can say that he had been improperly socialized as a child and only now, when it was too late, had he realized how important fitting into society is.

I will, in view of the seriousness of the discussion, refrain from childishness such as proposing courses in etiquette for geeks.

Doctors: Third babies are the same as patio heaters

Global epidemic

Overpopulation is moot topic anyway. All you have to do is find a reliable graph of (estimated) world population over the last millennium to see how it's spiked since about 1850. Any animal species, including Homo sapiens, that undergoes such a sudden and dramatic increase in numbers is eventually hammered back into the ground by an epidemic.

'Tain't going to be pretty when it happens. Hope I'm gone before then as it will genuinely mean the end of civilization as we know it.

Security shocker: 75% of US bank websites have flaws

Requires IE? Huh?

Are they insane?

Seems to me that it's time to turn the tables and set up websites that say "sorry, we do not accomodate IE, but you can download Netscape 8 *here*, Opera *here*, and Firefox *here*"

And if just a few really big sites did this -- Google, Yahoo, Amazon -- guess what? IE would be rapidly deposited on the trash heap of history.

Well, penguins can dream, can't they?

That's not Tux; that's Opus in disguise.

World's biggest ISPs drag feet on critical DNS patch

Telus okay

Somewhat to my surprise. Somebody at Telus is paying attention.

The thing I find interesting is that some very large ISPs seem to have no mechanism in place for fast tracking critical changes. Sometimes a patch is so important and so urgent that if it makes the system fall over, that's still a better situation than running without the patch.

American data pimper exposes ad equation

Said it before, say it again

Getting a legal opinion about a proposed course of action means exactly nothing. Unless you take special precautions [*], lawyers tell you what they think you want to hear. After all, you're paying them and they're not such fools as to tell you things you don't want to hear. They are hired guns, nothing more.

[*] Special precautions: waving a length of 2x4 at them sometimes works. "Tell me the truth, godammit, I don't want my ego stroked. Tell me what the judge and jury are likely to do, not what I'd like them to do." <wave> <wave> <wave> <smack>

Footnote: how amazingly BOFHish one has to be!

Free for all on London Underground

Piracy is theft? Cui bono?

The government pursues those who steal physical goods. Who pays for this? Everyone; it's a social contract between us all, something like a universal insurance policy.

Who's paying the price of chasing copyright violators? Where is the tit for tat? It's well known that corporations are very good at avoiding taxation, and that media companies in particular are experts in fudging the books to show losses instead of profits. Under the circumstances, It seems to me that holders of copyrights who benefit from government protection should be paying the tab; I suggest a percentage of gross revenue would be the best implementation.

Fugitive spammer in murder-suicide

@ Neil Hoskins & I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

"druggies have a choice not to take the drugs."

Once they're addicted they don't have that choice unless they've got a lot more will power than most people.

Just look at Alcoholic Anonymous and all the folderol they go through to stay sober; that should give you some idea just how difficult it is to stay off whatever intoxicant that has you in its grip.

"why should the ratio of nut cases to undiagnosed nut jobs be any different with the IT crowd than in every other walk of life?"

As anyone who's dealt with computers knows, the experience is all a matter of black and white, no gray areas. The natural world in which Homo sapiens has evolved is nothing but gray areas. Conclusion: it takes a somewhat twisted mind to succeed with computers, and what else is a nut job but someone with a badly twisted mind?

Bonus dig at Microsoft: Microsoft's attempts to dumb down the computing experience and make it suitable for those with untwisted minds is inherently doomed to failure. No matter how hard they try to create fuzziness and gray areas, it still boils down to inflexible true-false logic, though on a grand scale.

Hence the frequent situation where a Microsoft program in a misguided attempt to be helpful goes off the rails, to the consternation of the user.

Seattle Spam King Dark Mailer faces 47-month sentence

@ Herby

"Somebody always wants Viagra! (or so it appears!)."

What I don't understand is why the Viagra spams work at all. If you want cheap Viagra, there are any number of online pharmacies that will happily sell it to you, shipped from one or another country with less restrictive rules on the sale of Rx meds than the EU, US, etc.

Or is it shyness, a reluctance to say "hey, doc, the old pecker's a bit limp these days and the missus is unhappy about it, can you give me something to put some lead back into the pencil?"

But, ah, it's Thursday, so a true story to amuse those reading: about a year ago I ran out of Viagra and needed to get a new prescription; I use the stuff rarely and the old Rx had expired, so couldn't be used for a refill. I went to see my doctor and got his wonderful locum, whom I call Dr. Ida. She's a gal "of a certain age", a good egg in every positive sense. I explained my need, she smiled and said "well, what do you want, Viagra, Cialis, or Levitra?" Ha ha.

We nattered for a minute or two after she wrote the scrip. She laughingly described how middle-aged farts come skulking into the clinic and get all flustered at asking (gasp!) a female MD for ED meds. Evidently, her cheery and straightforward approach "well, which one do you want?" is difficult for them to handle.

Unfortunately, Viagra is very costly, so some months later scoured the web for a non-ripoff online source, and ended up with a lifetime supply of a generic version from Country X at a fraction the price of the brand name stuff.

I think Pfizer's shooting themselves in the foot with their high prices.

Back to IT.

The return of Killer Chlorine

Comments at large

First of all, my thanks to El Reg for publishing this article. I used to "do statistics" for a living, so know something whereof John Brignell wrote.

Statistics is a fucking minefield. It's very easy to draw improper and unwarranted conclusions. In particular, any conclusion based on statistics has to be reviewed for making sense in the context of everything else we know. In the present instance, unless there is a reasonable suspected mechanism whereby chlorine causes anencephaly, simply coming up with a correlation at a 5% significance level is about as useful as saying "the sky is blue."

DDT: the stuff saved millions of lives at the end of World War II. The generous use of DDT powder in refugee camps prevented the outbreak of a louse-transmitted epidemic of typhus which otherwise would have been the normal result of such huge population movements.

The villain in the DDT drama is agricultural overuse. This is, however, understandable given the tenor of the times, which led to such now-frightening slogans as "better living through chemistry" and "spray your garden once a week to eliminate insect damage." We have to thank Rachel Carson for waking us up to the fact that there was a distinct downside to the use of "chemicals" instead of them being marvelous, wonderful miracle substances with only an upside. There is no free lunch, you might say.

Attentive readers of everyday news articles may noticed how much more careful the regulation of "chemicals" is these days. That is a direct outcome from the publication of "Silent Spring" and is a good thing.

Speaking personally, my cut on this is that many of us suffer from what I like to call "the silver bullet syndrome." We look for simple solutions to our complex problems, and expect all our woes to go away if we do such and so . . . if only we can discover "such and so."

An amazing range of human follies can be explained by reference to this syndrome: transgendered people who are sure that sex reassignment surgery will make their lives Truly Wonderful -- and then discover when they get home from the hospital that their boss is as big an asshole as ever, that the neighbors are the same lowlifes they always were, and so on.

Another example: the anti-circumcision fanatics who, convinced that the lose of their foreskins as newborns is the cause of all their miseries, go to great lengths to have said appendage "restored" and then discover they still can't get a date.

And finally: the nutrition nuts who are sure that if they take special herbs and "nutritional supplements", disease will be kept at bay. We had a gal here who was carted off to hospital with something like 75% loss of liver function. Upon investigation, it turned out she was taking a witch's brew o some 20 different herbs and "supplements". These had interacted and destroyed a big chunk of her liver. Afterwards, the newspaper interviewed her and she was still blissfully unaware of her folly: "Oh, I take X to prevent disease Y, and I take Z to prevent disease Q, and I take <something else> to prevent <some other condition>." I was sorry the reporter didn't have the gumption to lift the curtain, point out to the street, and say "see all those people? They take none of these, but neither do they have the conditions you fear."

It seems to me that when the media come up with these hysterical reports of such-and-so causing evil results, it's the same mindset: a stupid, uninformed attitude that ignores the inherent complexity of life -- esp when we look at it at the molecular level.

A better approach to the question whether chlorinated water causes anencephaly would have a been a cross cultural comparison of chlorination levels and the incidence of anencephaly. A simple minded study such as the one rightfully dissed by John Bignell is nothing more than an exercise suitable for beginning students of statistics.

it's shameful this crap ever sees the light of day.

Dead vulture from too much chlorine, perhaps?

Google unfurls less laughable Wikipedia

Wikipedia woes will bite Knol

I've been using the Wikipedia more lately, and I'm impressed (positively) by the in-depth articles are some pretty obscure topics. Let me point to the articles on the Codex Sinaiticus and on the Georgian language as examples. These are clearly written by knowledgable people as a labor of love.

Of course, the coverage is patchy: the Wikipedia has very little on the Quecha and Aymara languages, which are just as interesting as Georgian.

The trouble is that when a topic is contentious, two or more schools of thought engage in a tug of war over the content, each trying to refute (and edit into nothingness) the p.o.v. of the other(s).

In some -- by no means all -- cases these "schools" are, on the one hand, some large institution that dislikes being criticized, and on the other hand the rest of the world. The RC Church and nearly any large corporation are examples of such institutions.

But other contentious topics include religion, inter-ethnic sniping, politics, you name it. And sometimes there are spats over surprisingly minor points such as "what is an abugida?" Or when scholars themselves are divided, controversy can erupt, as over the correct methodology for sorting out languages into families.

The description of Knol suggests that it will suffer similar problems, but worse. If I am first out of the starting blocks on the topic "Roman Catholic Church", then, if I understand aright, the topic is mine, mine, MINE, MINE I TELL YOU, DON'T YOU DARE EDIT MY SACRED PROSE, YOU HERETIC, YOU!

I think El Reg's readership probably gets the thrust of my objection.

Any idea how Knol intends to get around this issue of contentious topics being dragged back and forth like the baby in front of Solomon? Wikipedia tries to do so by locking articles when it becomes clear they're the subject of disputes, but at that point one of very serious defects in the set up of Wikipedia becomes apparent: the people behind the scenes who make the decisions are, as far as I know, anonymous and doubtfully qualified to handle the responsibilities and authority they have.

IMHO, Wikipedia would improve itself if its inner cabal were known by name, and whoever is the ultimate power behind the throne took steps to ensure that the cabal is both qualified and responsible.

This leaves the online EB holding a trump card: its articles are written by selected experts, not just the Joe Schmoes of the world. And the articles are edited, so you don't get the badly written material you sometimes find on the Wikipedia.

I just don't see how Knol is going to be demonstrably better than the Wikipedia.

Footnote: the Wikipedia article on Stalin, though marked with a warning that it may be biased, is surprisingly even handed.

Lesbos climax as lesbians lick Lesbians

Tsk, tsk <pulls goatee thoughtfully>

"Please note: El Reg is not a lesbian online magazine."

Methinks thou doth protest too much.

Besides, "Lester" is a pretty strange name for a girly-girl. Are you sure you didn't mean "Let's 'er"? [Yes, it's a lame joke, esp. compared to the brilliant tongue and groove one.]

Special bonus for the intellectually inclined, a quote from the great poetess Sappho (whence "sapphist"), the first known lesbian:

"If you're squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble."

UK ISPs agree to menace their filesharing users

Easy, easy, easy

All the ISPs have to do is pull some numbers out of their asses.

For example

2006: total files shared: 3,134,223; illegal 2,702,222 (86.22%)

2007: total files shared 4,448,228; illegal 4,081,249 (92.16%)

2008: total files shared 2,100,769; illegal 1,645,953 (78.35%)

See, we're reducing the number of illegal downloads *and* the percentage as well, so give us a cookie.

After all, isn't the numbers-pulled-out-of-the-ass method what the RIAA and BPI use to generate their statistics? Who's gonna disprove these figures?

Drive-by download attacks menace UK.gov

What's going on

Real simple: sound website & network design and implementation is a difficult, specialized type of work. The number of people competent at it is much, much smaller than the number needed.

Hence, most websites are built by incompetents.

A contributory element is the ready availability of point-and-drool development tools that you don't need much specialized knowledge, if any, to use. These tools try to dumb down a difficult task so Everyman can do it (also Everywoman), and in the process make the construction of insecure systems even easier.

Given what I've read today about the fiasco in San Francisco, it sounds like there's only one competent person in the city's IT department. And he's in jail.

Paris, because surely she points and drools sometimes.

MoD budget fiddles under fire

Average performance

That quango better watch their step. Sometimes learned judges don't see eye to eye with that kind of fiddling.

Indeed, back in the mid-1960s, the state of New York had a law requiring closure of beaches where the *average* coliform count was over X.

The city of Rochester, on Lake Ontario, into which they pumped the effluent from their overloaded sewage treatment facility, got creative and took a geometric average: 1 coliform today, 10^6 coliforms tomorrow, average 1000 coliforms.

Challenged by an early anti-pollution group in court, the judge held that "average" meant "arithmetic average", hence the correct figure was 500,000, hence the beaches must be closed.

It was the closing of the Lake Ontario beaches that forced the city's hand and led to the long-overdue updating of their sewage treatment system.

As the city of Rochester, so an unnamed UK quango, we can hope.

New York threatens Comcast with anti-porn suit

Binary newsgroups: a longstanding problem

Title says it all.

I was a habitue of usenet for about 10 years, but gave up when the level of discourse got too juvenile. During those 10 years, complaints were legion about the resource consumption of the alt.binaries hierarchy. I'm surprised it's survived as long as it has.

Observation: It seems like all online forums of whatever type eventually deteriorate into childishness unless moderated ruthlessly. I used to subscribe to a mailing list for discussion of alpine plants (rock garden plants). When some newly subscribed dimwit waltzed in asking how to keep her petunias from getting mildew, that was the last straw and I had to say "sayonara, turkeys!"

More recently, a mailing list devoted to geophytes had messages advertising a display of cactuses and succulent plants. Evidently the concept "staying on topic" is impossible for some minds to absorb or to believe it applies to them as well as to the rest of the N billion people on the planet.

Home Office classes openness review a secret

Plant passports, the Colorado potato beetle, and the nature of "law"

I'm none too certain what a "plant passport" is but suspect it's along the lines of a phytosanitary certificate: a piece of paper issued by the agricultural authorities in one country assuring the agricultural authorities in another country that a certain specimen of a certain plant is free of pests and diseases.

Used to be these were easy and cheap to get, so individuals found it practical, for example, to import plants from the UK into Canada, from the US into Canada, and so on, in complete conformity to the law.

But the "user pay" concept took over, the fees rose to prohibitive levels, and those days are now past. This application of "user pay" overlooks the fact that it's in everyone's interest to keep out plant pests and diseases, not just the importer who desperately wants a specimen of the double-flowered, silver-variegated form of /Veriolitsis glomulama/, the better to indulge in gamesmanship with his fellow plant nuts.

Gardeners, however, are as a class criminals and have never let anything as simple as a missing piece of paper stop them. The rise in fees has the net result that more plants are smuggled without inspection than ever before.

[Aside: phytosanitary certificates issued by China are, as you would expect, worthless. A small bribe is all that is required to get one, evidently, regardless of the subject plants' health.]

As for the Colorado potato beetle, it's a serious pest and one that's been the subject of serious efforts to block from the UK. But laws to facilitate this have been on the books a long time: probably things like mandating reports of any infestations found, and so on. Look at how the hoof & mouth disease outbreaks in Britain have been handled for an example of how this works.

And, moreover, no thinking citizen would disagree with a law giving entry in pursuit of a Colorado potato beetles.

At one time, the theoretical view of the law was that statutes merely gave voice to what everyone agreed was the law: no raping, stabbing, killing, stealing, etc. NuLizar (hail our Lizard Overlords) doesn't understand this bedrock conception, and thinks they can pass laws to institute their personal silly ideas.

Just as Monte Python had silly walks, so NuLizar has silly thoughts.

Gordon Brown & Jacqui Brown in a Punch & Judy show, anyone? Or have P&J shows been outlawed as tending to encourage violence among the young? (As thought without them Britain is an utterly peaceful place where no one does anything awful to anyone else.)

Better stop; I'm starting to rant. Please forgive me, O Divine Moderatrix!

Tesco causes couple condom catastrophe

"a new member of marketing staff"

We've established that marketers are nothing more than professional liars. Now they demonstrate that they're terminally stupid too.

Maybe they're liars because they're too stupid to distinguish true from false?

419ers crank up the menaces

No, no, please no, don't Britneyfy me, do anything you want, but not that, Br'er Fox!

"I might just spear your life"

Death by celebrification?

RSA domain glitch derails UK online retailers

@ Stuart

Verification of callers:

I refused to answer questions purporting to be from the census folks because they couldn't verify their identity. And it was so easy! Just give me a listed telephone number I can call you back at, one that's listed in the "government numbers" part of the telephone book.

The guy offered me one number, but it wasn't in my local telephone book.

Odd thing is, 15 years or so ago, I took a course from Statistics Canada in survey methodology and that's the very method they recommended -- and said they used themselves. Seems like they've forgotten their own business m.o.

[Statistics Canada carries out the Canadian census, btw.]

As for banks, these days all they list in the telephone directory is a single toll-free number, making it difficult for someone calling from the bank to offer a verifiable call-back number.

Why does this amuse me?

US court sides with Janet Jackson's breast

Prudery

Recommended reading:

"Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery" by Peter Fryer, publ. Dobson Books, London, 1963.

[Over 300 used copies via bookfinder.com]

Registrars turn blind eye to sites selling illegal steroids

"Domain registrar"

The name says it all: they register domain names.

Don't expect them to enforce other laws & rules.

For that matter, there are any number of domains that sell cheap Rx pharmaceuticals out of India. Absolutely legal per Indian law. What then?

This article implicitly endorses the idea of a totalitarian, unitary state where all organs of the state (including corporations) are expected to act as police. Can we say "fascism"?

DDoS attack floors Georgia prez website

Historico-political background

I recently got interested in the situation in Abkhazia and did some investigation (not all online, btw). I was specifically trying to figure out what Russia's interest is in detaching Abkhazia from Georgia. That remains a mystery; it may just be a Russian pleasure in stirring up trouble. There are signs that Moscow is very pissed off that Georgia escaped the Russian embrace, but it's hard to fathom the logic (or emotion) beyond that.

As for the relations between Georgia and Abkhazia, I concluded it's a situation with no possible resolution. There's long standing bad blood between the Abkhaz and the Georgians and there's too much real blood been shed to turn back the clock. Similar in spirit to the conflict in Kosovo between the Serbs and the Albanians.

Because the former Georgian inhabitants of Abkhazia, comprising about 70% of the population, were driven out by the Abkhaz in the early 1990's, Abkhazia itself is now woefully underpopulated and its economy has ground to a halt. Meanwhile, Georgia itself is trying to deal with the great mass of refugees this created and being a poor country itself, there are still hotels full of refugees from the Abkhazian ethnic cleansing.

From everything I've read, Abkhazia is a place of great natural beauty, with a gorgeous landscape and a climate ranging from sub-tropical along the Black Sea coast to alpine cold at the crest of the Caucasus. But lack of international recognition of the Abkhaz government, capital investment to make good physical damage from the conflict, and underpopulation because of ethnic cleansing, Abkhazia is dead in the water.

Various Georgian sources make all sorts of inflated claims about Georgia's right to Abkhazia, but these resemble nothing so much as the ridiculous Serb claims to Kosovo and other breakaway regions.

There is no solution; only time (generations of time) will resolve the issues

In South Ossetia, the Russian interest is more obvious: the southern adit of the trans-Caucasus tunnel is in South Ossetia, and if I were in charge in Moscow, I'd want to control the entire tunnel, not just the northern adit.

Jeremy Clarkson tilts at windmills

Get rid of speed limits?

I remember coming down a freeway on-ramp leaving Las Vegas for Los Angeles many, many years ago and noting a big sign that said "RESUME SAFE SPEED".

The state of Montana for many years had no speed limits on its highways.

There's a school of thought that says attempts to regulate traffic -- speed limits, traffic lights, stop signs, and such -- actually make traffic flow less smoothly than it you leave it all to the drivers to decide.

Sure, there'll be a few morons who try to zip along at a high speed, but existing speed limits don't stop them anyway. Every stretch of road has its natural speed if traffic is left to itself and, surprise! surprise! this natural speed is slower when traffic's thick. Imagine that! What would the nanny state say?

AOL spammer jailed for 30 months

Now if they'd just go after the telemarketers.

The US has a do-not-call database. Canada has a clumsy imitation of its own. The US version will not accept Canadian telephone numbers and vice versa.

So the Montreal boiler room operators target the gullible in the US and vice versa.

The key element in this is that many (most? all?) telemarketing calls are scams of one sort or another, some obviously and overtly criminal, others more subtly so. I regularly receive calls from an outfit apparently based in Tacoma, Washington. This outfit is well-known on the web to be engaged in "vishing" (voice phishing) for CC details they can sell, yet the authorities do not act.

Time to flatly outlaw not only e-spam but t-spam.

Stop it now!

eBay UK pimps users' privacy for targeted ads

@ Ash

"i'll still close the eBay and PayPal accounts out of principle."

Better to just leave them there and clutter up Ebay's system with dead accounts. If necessary, alter your personal details, but leave the accounts open.

@ Somebody

"sent by emarsys eMarketing Systems AG and completely ignored my eBay accounts’ text-only Preferred Email Format setting. This helped to get them labelled as spam."

Some doofus at Ebay is clueless about spam and doesn't realize that when they send email from a domain no one's ever heard of and which isn't clearly related to Ebay, it *will* be viewed as probable spam and is very likely to be deleted unread. After receiving an email via emarsys.com and spending significant time trying to figure out if it was spam or not, I sent back a reply pointing this out, but in true Ebay fashion, my email to the "Reply to" address bounced.

All in all, it looks to me like Ebay has, perhaps unwittingly, altered their business model in the interests of increasing revenue (aka unrestrained greed), with the side effect of alienating many buyers and sellers, and thereby narrowing their customer base. Modern business management techniques continue to amaze me.

By sedulously blocking any feedback, they aggravate the situation and are now the subject of considerable ill-will across the world. If you hold stock in Ebay, perhaps a letter to the CEO asking why they are pissing away the value of the brand might be in order. CEOs hate getting letters from shareholders.

Phorm protestors picket BT AGM

@ Scott McMeekin

"The lawyers who advised BT should be sacked."

They should be debarred, not just sacked.

Just as directors and executives of criminal companies should be held personally and financially liable for misdeeds done on their watch.

HMRC disc losers still getting paid

Who writes these insane contracts?

Seems to me that the essence of an employment contract is "do the specified work to a high standard, get paid the going rate." with "no bonus unless you do way more than the contract calls for." And, perhaps, "penalties for performing to an acceptable standard."

That last draconian clause applicable only to those in the highest ranks who have more or less complete autonomy; the proles have to do what they are directed to, right or wrong.

There needs to be a law forbidding any special severance or signing bonuses for the management caste; let them live under the same rules as the proles.

Now that I've got that rant out of my system, the truth: in the world of modern business (public or private) the rule is that once you make it into management ranks, you're an untouchable golden boy who can do no wrong -- and, if you *do* do wrong, you are never held to account for it.

Hence, that unspeakable incompetent Carlie What's-her-face who ran HP into the ground and walked away with a suitcase full of money.

San Francisco's 'rogue' sysadmin still being paid while in jail

"Convicted felon"

Frankly, I'd rather live in a society that forgives and forgets once a convicted criminal has done his time, rather than one that tattoos FELON on the forehead (figuratively speaking at the moment, but wait until Jacqui hears about it).

Sure, from time to time another crime will be committed by a convicted felon, but hey! crimes get committed by lots of people who've never transgressed the law before.

El Reg readers need to know that in the US, depending on the state, convicted felons can't own real estate, can't vote, and are subject to a variety of other permanent legal disabilities. It's medieval, in my opinion.

As for what triggered the alleged outrage, keep in mind that management ranks most everywhere are filled with socio- and psychopaths, with a sprinkling of plain ol' scum. Once one of these types reaches the top, the lower reaches of management quickly fill up with similar types, making for an impossible working environment.

There's such a thing as too much touchy-feeliness (cue NuLab), but I'd rather have a flock of fuzzies over me than lying, exploitive, manipulative jerks with zero empathy for anyone but themselves.

Maybe the thing to be surprised at isn't that this incident happened but, rather, that similar incidents don't happen a lot more often.

Mr. Ballmer because his outbursts are suggestive . . .

Baptist church in assault rifle giveaway

@ Juillen

Quoth Juillen: "The why of [the American Revolution] was simply to stop getting taxed without being represented."

Sorry Mack, but it was _much_ more complex than that—like any historically significant event, and most that are historically insignificant. True, the slogan "no taxation without representation" was used to justify some aspects of the Revolution, but that was a smokescreen to disguise the real issues.

But rather than drive our Divine Moderatrix wild with a discursive rant,, let me suggest an action plan: find, and read, any six *serious* histories of the American Revolution. Each author will point to a different set of factors as "the causes of" or "the reasons for" the Revolution. Having read six, you will then understand that such historical events are really not susceptible to elementary analysis, but in fact are exceedingly complex complexes of causative factors, motivations overt and concealed, consequences, and consequences of consequences.

I recommend for starters "Origins of the American Revolution" by John C. Miller, publ. Little, Brown & Co, Boston, 1943. (There are over 300 copies at alibris.com.) Not that this is the end-all and be-all of such histories, nor that it is a shining beacon of historiography, but rather that even such a straightforward analysis reveals an extremely tangled web of motives and causative factors.

It is folly to single out any one factor as the sole (or even principal) cause of the American Revolution.

Precisely the same remarks can be made anent the Russian Revolution, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Cromwellian Commonwealth in 1649., the French Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the attempted secession of Abkhazia from the Republic of Georgia.

As James Yourdon was fond of quoting, "everything is deeply intertwingled."

Tux because quoting Yourdon gives these remarks an inarguable air of IT-relevancy, the better to soothe the nerves of our frazzled Moderatrix.

Street-savvy Microsoft tries to pop the pimply face of piracy

Does it matter?

It certainly does.

I used to hang out on rec.music.classical.recordings, a newsgroup adorned by a gentleman resident in LA. He endlessly chanted the mantra that the primary cause of the entertainment industry's death wish toward piracy was very simple: piracy deprived them of the money to pay for their cocaine habit.

The endless chanting was (ahem!) disenchanting and tiresome, but you know what? I think he was hitting the nail on the head. His thesis leads us to understand why the media mafiosi continue to claim ludicrous of lost revenue: an addict in withdrawal doesn't think straight.

Meanwhile, the FBI has a section set up specifically to help these very addicts retain their source of cash: a good example of misplaced priorities.

Also, perhaps, a sign of how cheap it is to buy politicians.

Home Office unveils tagtastic immigrant control plans

@ Colin Millar

Edward Tufte wrote a screed on the cognitive effects of Powerpoint that is worth seeking out. Google

"edward tufte" powerpoint

for lots of luscious links.

I've not myself read Tufte's remarks on Powerpoint, but other books of his were my constant companions before retirement. You might summarize his main thesis as "presenting information graphically is extremely difficult and far too often failed attempts are long on bling and very, very short on provoking serious thinking." I imagine that statement applies to his remarks on Powerpoint as well.

The matter is considerably more serious than the usual flicking of bits of chicken shit at NuLab. There are hosts of decision makers in all spheres of life who have become so used to such canned presentations that they no longer have, if they ever did, the ability to follow an argument of any complexity; or to balance conflicting pluses and minuses of a proposed course of action; or to understand issues relating to "unexpected side effects."

Missing Webroot founder found dead

@ Wayland Sothcott

It can take months to come off SSRI's. I have a friend who's decided to go off bupropion (Wellbutrin), and per his doctor's advice it will take him 4 or 5 months to taper off. Very, very slowly and gradually, with regular assessment of depressive symptoms.

As for feeling like a zombie, a well-known side effect of many anti-depressants, in some cases at least it's because after about 6 weeks you should switch to a very low maintenance dose. But few doctors know this, so their patients end up overmedicated -- and feeling like zombies in consequence.

Criminal record checks could hit over 14 million people

Allegations, anyone?

"Allo, Ossifer Plod-snoop? I 'ave this neighbor, name of Gordon Brown, who I think is a kiddy diddler. And I'm sure he runs a kiddy porn ring with a gal named Jacqui Smith. Better put this in the criminal records, you never know what such people might do if given the opportunity."

It might be esp. amusing to send in allegations of assorted misconduct for every Labour MP and watch the resultant sideshow.

Too bad the system isn't something like having an intelligence check before being allowed to stand for office!

How did NuLab end up with so many idiots in positions of authority?