Posts by Steve

Blighty's black honeybee comes in from the cold

Don't be blaming me....

Erm, far be it for me to be belittling of such beautiful, beastly beings, but where be the IT angle? Many readers will be visiting this site for IT stories because it be promoted thus. Okay, maybe it is time for me to beat a hasty retreat to a beach beside the sea and behave, leaving behind this message which I believe is beyond many, before I take my beef too-far and become besotted with besmirching the good names of the beavering workers of this revered beam of truth that be known as El Reg.

Paris ‘cos she could be my honey……I’ll get me coat – it’s between the bead curtain and the – oh beep … never mind!

Sheep ad not cruel, bleats Samsung

Surely I'm not the first to say....

Baaaaa d article!

New e-waste rules may be too much for UK business, warns Gov

Arghhhh......

The trouble is that it's not the big businesses that will suffer, but as ever the small guy will gets stuffed. As a small manufacturer of specialist equipment we have been hit in recent years with ROHS, WEE, REACH & a myriad of other bits of legislation that means we now spend increasing amounts of time ensuring we comply, plus the cost of the compliance schemes etc all at a time when the far east are supplying kit at half the cost we can make it for! The people running the EU seem to forget where all the money comes from to pay their wages - if we go out of business then all the money goes to China via import firms who don't even bother paying lipservice to the regs and just dissapear whenever the authorities start chasing them.

ClaraNet email falls over

Erm....

6pm comes and goes and nope, it's still not working! Good job they allow you set set your own MX records now!

Ofcom insists on emergency roaming

Thinkpol ahoy....

I guess that the 55% who aren't interested will be "encouraged" to believe that they want the Internet via the usual means - if they fail to want it after their re-education at the "Minstry of Love", then I'm sure that the can be forcibly deported so that we can claim 100% broadband penetration!

Come on, lets make people understand what they are missing - spam, pr0n, crooks, viruses etc, who wouldn't want to be a part of that!

Court rules 'ceaseless liability' for net libel fine for free speech

Nothing Orwellian about it!

The Times was at fault for not providing a "Qualification" on the archive version of the article until a year after the commencement of proceedings. Re-read the penultimate paragraph of the Reg article again - removal or re-writing of the article was not expected by the courts - only that a "Qualification" was provided. Thus this is not the re-writing of factual history performed by the "Ministry of Truth" described by a somewhat (in my opinion!) overrated second-rate novelist.

As much as it pains me to say it, but the ECHR is quite correct in its ruling: the effort required for the publisher to attach a statement to their own electronic and paper archives when they were notified of the libel action is not an onerous task and so it cannot be "an unjustifiable and disproportionate restriction of its right to freedom of expression"

Yes! It's the cardboard PC!

Doh....

Erm, cardboard is somewhat less recyclable than the conventional steel cases - it takes a lot less contamination for cardboard to become un-recyclable than with steel. That's before you even start thinking about EMC and CE requirements!

Windows 7 'upgrade' doesn't mark XP spot

Good idea....

I would never use an "in-place" upgrade if it was avoidable anyway! I always use a fresh/spare hard drive and leave the original intact so that if it all goes pearshaped I can simply put the old one back in and get back to normal. Even if an "in-place" upgrade was available you'd still be best advised to do a backup anyway!

Student charged after alerting principal to server hack

Re: @Steve

"So how do you find a security breach without looking for it? How to you prove your system is secure without attempting to break in?"

I think you are missing the point - he wasn't authorised to do any instrusion testing - if he had been asked to test for flaws then that is another matter. Another analogy - a thief pops your door lock, has a nose around your house and copies some of your personal data - then leaves a note on your table to tell you that might get burgled!

"The school administration should be in the dock for incompetence."

Probably, but that doesn't excuse the what these kids did.

"You're an <edited>, Steve."

Hmmm maybe, but perhaps you ought to refine your vocabulary a bit - there's no need to get nasty just because my opinion doesn't match yours.

"negating any chance of him being able to use the security flaw against them."

Just beacuse he told them about the flaw doesn't mean he didn't intend to exploit the data he accessed for his own purposes - the data involved could easily have been used for identity fraud.

One mans freedom fighter is anothers terrorist...

Irrespective of motive the defendant deliberately mis-represented himself and gained access to resources which he had no right to do without the consent of the proper authorities, hence the criminal charges. What would we all be saying if he had stabbed and killed a police officer in order to "test the security of the stab proof vest the officer was wearing at the time"?

Hopefully he has now learned a lesson about covering his tracks better.

NASA, USAF in $30m hypersonic boffinry push

Re: Speed of sound?

Ah, but is it an African or European sound?

Mine's the one with shrubbery in the pcoket....