Posts by Roger Cornwell

THOUSANDS of Tesco.com logins and passwords leaked online

Was it just me that, the day before this breach was announced, received a phishing email asking me to fill out a form giving my opinion of Tesco, in return for a credit of £60 or so to my clubcard account? Perhaps the data was lost by people who filled out the form and gave their clubcard info? I did try to forward the email to Tesco but could not find an abuse@ or phishing@ email to send it to. Ho, hum.

Santander's banking website craps out

Re: Muh...

No, but when I opened my business bank account they did promise that it would be "free, forever". Which to me does mean "for the remainder of your entire LIFE!"

Now they have written to me to say that they propose to charge £7.50 a month. For a service of which this is an example.

UK music-rights collection: Where does all the money go?

Yes, it;s a sample

That's right - I know somebody who works at PRS and he sometimes goes to discos and notes down what music is being played.

Openistas question UK.gov's £300k crime-mapping website

Self-inflicted DOS attack

This happens every time, doesn't it? The self-inflicted denial-of-service attack.

Back in November HMRC sent out a mail shot that read "We have published a critical November update which includes amendments to the guidance and calculators. It is important that you download this to your CD-ROM so you can benefit from the update." It crashed their server, of course.

So when I heard it on the news this morning, I turned to my partner and said "I bet it crashes their site". It's so predictable, I guess you were already writing this story yesterday?

Did ID card applications surge after scheme was scrapped?

Cheaper European travel?

As perhaps the only benefit of the ID cards is that they can be used in Europe instead of a passport, possibly some folk decided to pay £30 rather than the £77.50 a full passport costs.

Most browsers leave fingerprint that can ID users

Fractional bits

I'm now one in 866454, probably because I'm the first to use SeaMonkey/2.0.4 Like Firefox/3.5.

But the odd thing is the column headed 'Bits of identifying information' because this gives values to two places of decimals. As any fule kno, bits are units of information and so you can only have whole numbers of bits of information, surely?

And as Anonymous Coward above pointed out, it's not just being unique that identifies you, it's having that uniqueness remaining constant that is necessary. If fingerprints changed every day, thieves would not worry about leaving them behind.

Volcanic ash grounds dozens of UK flights

Thor

That's whom you should sue.

Scots unleash world's strongest beer

No, Whisky

They're Scots, remember...

BBC publishes Freeview HD timetable

Newcastle & Tyneside -- February 2010

According to the BBC press release, the Pontop Pike transmitter will get HD in February 2010, though they go on to say that Tyneside will be upgraded in 2012, which is the date for the digital switchover. I think you only spotted the second reference to Tyneside in the BBC press release.