Posts by Tom Chiverton

Running queries on the HMRC database fiasco

That's all very nice

But the public don't read El Reg - if you've been smacking your gob over this go join you local No2ID branch, hassle the public on a few flyering sessions and make sure next time it's not 60 million records lost.

Met Police to pilot Tasers

Good timing

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/11/24/2324212.shtml: "UN says tasers are torture"

Israeli sky-hack switched off Syrian radars countrywide

Dunno about you...

Dunno about you... but if one of my SAM radar sites had just be taken out by an anti-radar missile, I would shut down all my other sites as a precaution. It's what Iraq did when they still had any AA capability.

Info chief renews call for data breach crime penalties

Just one bloke ?

Yeah, right, Channel 4 news just reported it was a management-level decision to send all of the data when only some of it was requested.

Small print is ignored and needs a rethink, govt study says

Peter Fielden-Weston

"we need a structured law which lays down the fundamental sale of goods contract between producer & customer"

We've already got one, the sale of goods act.

German amateur code breaker defeats Colossus

Um...

"allowing him to uncrack the message"

Uncrack ? That's the same as encrypting, right ?

No2ID calls in pledge cash to 'probe' ID Act's enabling laws

scamed ?

Like David, I thought I was pledging to defend people who had refused, not to engage on random fishing exercises.

Solwise pushes powerline Ethernet security - literally

Urmmm..

"It also claimed the adaptors would be handy for people setting up a network on shared mains wiring and who want to avoid other folk snooping on their data."

Doesn't evil Bob just have to plug in his own adapter and press the button on it ?

Facebook mounts Tupperware-style ads push

Thank you AdBlock

Until Steph's comment I didn't realise FaceBonk had adverts ;-)

Teflon top cop evades justice, responsibility

you shouldn't have mentioned dead man's switches

@Richard Neil - that's 'information likely to be of use to a terrorist' you know. House arrest without trial for you, if you're lucky !

MPs claim IT supply savings

Title

"save £1bn a year by 2010"

So where are they going to get the money for the other 90% of the ID card systems from ? It's not going to be us, the humble tax payer, is it ?

GMail shakes IMAP out of coma

Eh ?

"With IMAP all email is stored on the server, including sent mail"

Or not. You can choose to save sent mail to a local folder, with every client I've ever come across, and certainly in Thunderbird.

'Course, for GMail, the point is mute :-)

Jailed terror student 'hid' files in the wrong Windows folder

Good grounds for appeal, I think

"Given that you were providing internet access to what are admittedly terrorist publications, it is difficult to see what else was intended other than the encouragement etc of terrorism"

He wasn't "providing internet access to", and as to "what else was intended" how about comment (as in 'fair use') ?

Is the judge going to go after Google as well now then ?

Cafe Latte attack steals credentials from Wi-Fi clients

Err, no ?

"ARP protocol to make sure it doesn't share the same IP address"

Err, no, it's just a process of discovering IP to MAC mappings.

We'll beat Microsoft and Sun, says Adobe's chief software architect

!ActiveX

The difference between AIR and ActiveX, is that ActiveX silently installs and runs from a web page.

AIR applications have a bit fat 'I'm about to install something' window.

Yeah, users will click 'OK' on anything, but that gets back to the point that for security, AIR is just like your common-or-garden .exe download.

Fasthosts customer? Change your password now

To Si:

"they can login to the customer's account and see whatever problem"

Err, why not reset the users password ? The user can always change it back after the hell desk monkey has had a poke around.

Terminator will be back in 2009

Look familiar ?

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/multimedia/2007/10/gallery_uavs?slide=9&slideView=3

UK start-up tackles PIN fraud with patterns

Um...

"Each time you see the grid, the numbers are different, so even if you are shoulder surfed, it doesn't matter."

But the pattern is always the same, so it's just as vunerable to shoulder surfing.

Did you just repost their press release without thinking ?

Code dandy Transitive adds laptop, legacy Solaris/SPARC plays

what your're missing

Is doing it without the source code.

BOFH: In search of the lazy atom

you can actually see a single atom

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/atomo.html

New bird takes to the skies for Digital Globe

You must have missed the memo

"Surely the US Military has no powers to stop people taking photographs from space"

Actually, you should google 'space denial' and then head over to http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HJ20Aa02.html:

"George W Bush signed an executive order creating a new National Space Policy on Wednesday. The most crucial feature of this policy is that it "rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit US flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone 'hostile to US interests'." "

New GPS sats to lack Selective Availability

Who cares if Galileo has SA or not ?

If the US doesn't like it, they'll jam it (locally, as they do GPS) or just shoot down the sats.

This isn't an excuse to waste billions of European tax dollers.

Microsoft vs European Commission: the verdict

Why not apple ?

Because Apple haven't broken the law (refusing to allow resellers to do whatever the hell they like), actively preventing competition by or installation of competing products, etc. etc. etc.

Adobe and BEA team on RIAs

Correction

"Driving RIA is the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which lets developers re-use skills in Flash, HTML, AJAX and Java"

AIR lets you run Flex/Flash/HTML/AJAX applications offline, with a common API to access the local machine.

It doesn't do anything for Java.

MS lawyers take out AutoPatcher

windowsupdate.microsoft,com ? With FireFox ? Err... no ?

"Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site.

To use this site, you must be running Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later."

Boeing touts feeble Hummer-mounted raygun

Freakin' lasers on their heads

"Raytheon and the US Navy claim they can zap falling mortar shells usefully fast, with ordinary weak electric lasers, right now"

Maybe they use an array of weak lasers, focused on the same spot...

ISPs hijack BBC in tiered services push

How much would you pay your ISP for iPlayer?

Nothing. What's the point ? Sure, it's *nice* not to have to build a MythTV box, or wait for someone else to PirateBay it, but it's not worth paying for.

And I certainly don't want my licence fee used to prop up failing business.

'Wild West' internet needs a sheriff

Or not

The government doesn't want a secure, privercy-enhancing, anonymous-protecting internet because it would prevent them collecting taxes.

A handy guide to growing your own spaceship

SETI@Home

SETI@Home isn't pointless - advanced civilisations maybe trying to deliberately contact us even though they're planatery technology has gone quiet.

MP slams school biometric guidance

right

"it is inaccurate to say that it will not be possible to reverse-engineer the data stored in order to obtain the original fingerprint"

Look at the definition of a hash. It contains less information than the data that was hashed (i.e. the fingerprint) so it's impossible to reconstruct the data from the hash.

What's al-Qaeda's take on the iPhone?

Dwarf with learning difficulty

Like the title suggests, this article is neither big nor clever.

'In depth' ? On the front page ? What were you thinking ?

Sun's handling of Java security update prompts concerns

amanfromMars

Nice spam - I thought comments were moderated...

Oz boffins tout Trekkier-than-thou teleportation system

Matter waves

"fires matter instead of photons"

Photons are matter :-) At the scales in question there is little difference between wave-like and matter-like particles.

N-Gage games to equal PC games

resolution != size

They could both have the same resolution e.g. DPI, but still have different screen sizes.

Or maybe they meant about the polygon mesh 'resolution' in the models rendered to the screen ?

It's all marketing waffle, I dunno why on earth it counts as news.

Pipex-hosted sites left high and dry by flooding

How many !?!

"experienced latency issues for about 90 mins."

And I thought 90 milliseconds was bad !

Windows Live gets upgrade

Mmm

Call me when it works on Linux

Orange simplifies data by capping at 30MB

Where are the details ?

And Orange's site still doesn't have details of it - although you can add the new bundle online yourself, http://www2.orange.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?pagename=OUKPersonal&c=OUKService&cid=1096023564495&mid=1137070320264&t=Service&tab=2 still doesn't list it.

Microsoft puts a figure on open source 'patent infringements'

SCO mark 2

Show Us The Code.

Really, just point at the lines in the kernel you think are yours.

About that TV service, Mr Branson...

Odd...

I've got the exact opposite of your experience with the V+ PVR service.

Sounds like your line is broken - have you actually had them round to check it ?

Virgin throttles national cable network

Move elsewhere

Zen (for instance) have a very clear capping policy (arround 20G/month with the ability to buy more), and will shortly announce Perl, Mac and Windows programs to see your usages, as well as a Firefox plugin.

VeriSign will ship two-factor authentication for debit cards

Err, no, you've got it wrong

"a criminal would need both physical access to the card and the knowledge of the permanent password"

No, he wouldn't need anything like that level of access.

He'd just proxy all the authorisation instructions backwards and forwards, *then* raid your account.

Classic man-in-the-middle.

Beeb's iPlayer service gets greenlight

Still stupid

So it wont have some things that are on 'listen again', because of a stupid non-reason.

And it's being given out to cable TV people after the Windows release, who already have time-shifting / PVR (Virgin's 'V+' service) functions that are far better than the system the BBC is foisting (for instance, iPlayer can only hold on to a program for a week, and only a tiny amount of series content will be on it. V+ allows unlimited keeping of any content, series or not, and works on any channel too).

And then they'll do a Mac version, followed by Freeview (just in time for everyone to have got one type of Freeview box for the digital switchover, they'll need to get an upgraded box for BBC iPlayer support).

Apparently the hold up is 'third parties outside of the BBC's control', which I take to mean the DRM and peer-to-peer aspects, both of which are proprietary and Windows only at the mo.

Still, at least there are regular reviews, so we can make sure the content we pay for is accessible to us correctly.