Posts by John Lettice

OMFG, what have you done?

Re: Comments?

It's intended to be a more open, less cramped look, but we've currently got some extraneous white space caused by ads misfiring. We'll get a lid on that tomorrow, if not before.

Press proves immune to FBI's anthrax corrective

Re: Et tu, el Reg?

Um, George is American, and is therefore allowed to ize as much as he likes, in acordance with The Register style book. Which we have. Oh yes we do.

Lag log leaks - Home Office contractor loses entire prison population

Re: But unfortunately...

Straw's data, Jacqui's contractor. But the PNC stuff I assume is Jacqui's data. So go ahead...

Re: It's not a memory stick ffs!

It may well not be a memory stick. I would hazard a guess that it most certainly is not a memory stick. However, the Home Office says it is a memory stick, and I see no purpose to me arguing the toss with them about that. You go flame them if you like, but leave us out of it.

Apple pulls posted pulled iPhone modem app

Re: "who're"

Deliberate. I was doing colloquial - humour me.

Re: How abbout writing articles that are easy to read?

http://www.beanotown.com/

Home Office minister gets tough, then gets stuck

Re: Must be a slow news day...

Nah. Slow reader day.

Screwgle™ - Google's new ad revenue model

Re: Er..

Ah yes. A swift edit to avoid confusion, then. (-:

UK and US agree biometric heavily vetted trusted traveller deal

Re: 'All ten'?

As I understand it, they're phasing that in airport by airport. SFO, home airport of Reg US, is now collecting all ten.

Top airline bosses launch assault on airport ID card plan

Re: Nice to see...

"... the Airlines and airports finally developing a spine"

Up to a point. I couldn't help noticing the absence of a signature from BAA, that notoriously customer-focused (right down to the fingerprints) organisation. Course, being Spanish, they might not care. Had 'em since Franco, can't see the problem, that kind of thing. (-:

Neighbourhood Watch 2.0: Your tensions are being monitored

Re: What if there aren't any people from different backgrounds?

They do to some extent cover the differences between multi-ethnic urban environments and rural communities. In the case of the latter, they suggest that the panic button threshold (not exactly what they call it) should be lower. Draw your own conclusions about what that's supposed to mean. City folks are used to minor rucks? People in the sticks reach for the pitchforks at the first sight of a "you're not from round here, are you?" Whatever... (-:

Private sector saviours wanted for desperate ID scheme

Re: Very poor journalism

Try reading the report, and reading the story while you're about it. Where in that do I say they are to close? I do say that they are effectively pulling the plugs on the IPS-run interview centres, but that is not the same thing as closing them. I also quote the report as saying that IPS now plans to provide the application system through the open market.

As the IPS-run interview centres were intended as the key component of the application system, it would seem reasonable to me to conclude that this effectively pulls the plugs on them.

Very poor commenting, I'd say. If you care to try again once you've done some background reading, I suggest you keep a civil tongue in your head.

Is Europe's war on Islamist terror running out of terrorists?

Re: Al Who?

Is this really a story? Well...

The Europol report itself does not appear to be a story as far as the papers are concerned. The Herlad Trib ran it as "Home-grown terrorism rising in Europe" (which seems a bit of a desperate stretch to me), and the UK press doesn't seem to have touched it at all.

The 2007 report didn't get much news traction either, but if Europol's figures had shown even a 20% rise in Islamist terror arrests I guarantee you we'd have headlines a go-go. They go nuts every time a senior spook tells us how many plotters they're investigating, they don't want to know when some armed to the teeth fringe crazy gets busted, if the crazy happens not to be an Islamist crazy.

Huge terror scare stories build circulation, statistics that suggest that the huge terror scare stories are somewhat overblown do not. But round here we think it's worth doing a corrective every now and again. So as far as we're concerned, yes, it's really a story.

Re: Dangerous game of figures...

Actually I don't recall concluding anything, just drawing attention to a couple of mismatches. But if we're doing numbers, according to the Spanish ministry of the interior ETA has killed 822 people since 1968. It hasn't been particularly effective in recent years, but historically it's been way more dangerous than Islamist terror in Europe has been. So far, I concede...

But I don't quite grasp how measuring success through time between attacks works. If we have massively repressive terror laws plus an absence of attacks for say, five years, does that mean what we're doing is successful, and we should therefore pass more repressive laws? I'll grant you number of arrests isn't particularly meaningful, but I don't think either I or Europol presented it as a measure of success anyway.

Re: Does the Uk number include the Muslim Goth poet?

I presume she would have appeared in the 2006 figures as an arrest, and as a conviction in 2007.

Plugs pulled on satellite paedo tracking after pilot flops

Re: Telling Lies

They were telling lies when asked whether they had breached their parole conditions. So yes, the lies weren't necessarily about children, and many of them could well have been of relatively low consequence. The more intense than normal focus on the behaviour of the subjects in the pilot may, it seems to me, have simply indicated that people on parole or under a community order are quite frequently guilty of minor breaches of the Ts & Cs.

Caution - FBI fit-ups of Muslim patsies in progress

Re: WTF El Reg?

It's similar to set-up. George actually suggested set-up in his original headline, but I changed that to fit-up as it seemed to me that the latter was maybe more appropriate. Set-up is maybe more about entrapment, while fit-up maybe better covers the essentially presentational factors that got Abu-jihaad.

That's what I thought at the time, anyway. The possibility that the expression was meaningless in the US escaped me entirely. (-:

Re: "so crazy and anile"

Wash your mouth out. We looked it up.

Road charging, the sequel - Kelly unveils 'wired m-way' plans

Re: Average Speed Measurement

The report twitters happily about the high level of compliance with these when they're used to enforce limits around road works, and seems to take the view that this means drivers are happy about them. But in my own experience one's compliance is secured first by threat of a fine, and second because the lane's frequently sectioned off, meaning you can't non-comply your way past the driver in front even if you wanted to.

The report also mentions a bizarre 'voluntary overtaking ban trial' which, surprise surprise to everybody but the DfT, had a very low level of compliance. Actually if it was really voluntary, then it had a 100 per cent level of compliance, right? Or did they mean 'we're just saying it's voluntary, but we don't mean that. But we're not going to do anything to you anyway.'

UK media consultant dupes 2.4m randy YouTubers

Re: Steamy windows?

The client was the Lancaster District Alcohol Harm Reduction Partnership, which wanted an anti drink drive campaign covering the local area. Combing the whole of YouTube to hit that target audience does seem a kind of round the houses way of going about things, but presumably they're happy...

Points mean passports: Citizenship Smith unveils 'like us' plan

Re: great

The plans certainly look bad news for the sick, disabled and vulnerable (aside from the ones you're supposed to work with to get your brownie points). There seems to be some kind of financial weighting against those likely to be more of a burden on health services, and full access to benefts won't be available until you have citizenship. All very welcoming...

El Reg collectible pops up on eBay

Re: old logo

I think that one's logo number two. The first one was more of a gothic confection, and a first vulture a piece of Corel clip art. I'm fairly sure the issue is in a backup somewhere in, er, Describe format. So in principle I could find it and rebuild it. (-:

Re: Remarkably modern looking logo

Well spotted, that man. There was in fact an A4 version with one of our earlier logos (which existed, oh yes) handed out to about 12 people in the press bar at CeBIT in, I think, 1998. Do you recall buying me a beer in exchange? AIR that was the price...

EU squeals over US pre-flight personal data grab

re: Steve Browne

Alexander, you've missed a critical point about ETA - it IS the future of the VWP, as far as the US is concerned. As and when the US demands ETA compliance, the EU countries who're currently in the VWP will need to adopt ETA if they want to stay in. Otherwise, they have to go back to visas.

Regrettably, you're also not entirely right about extradition. The UK end of the 2003 extradition treaty simply requires that the US come up with an allegation and a warrant. The requirements are sufficiently narrow for there to be very little leeway for the UK courts, although the subjects naturally tend to try to appeal all the way. Gary McKinnon is currently appealing to the Lords, while Babar Ahmad's case is being considered by the European Court of Human Rights. The Natwest three ran out of road.

Top cop urges RIPA review in coded attack on snoop code

Re: "over-interpretation"

If one were being charitable one might decide Sir Ronnie actually meant 'over-zealous interpretation'. Or one might not. (-:

Trial for T5 mandatory biometrics kicks off at Heathrow

Re: deducted, or measured?

Deducted. And in taking the so-called 'digital photograph' of you, they are of course stealing your soul.

EU to ban the patio heaters that ate the planet. Not.

Re: Missing the point

You're missing points here yourself. The intent of the Commission exercise, as I noted in my apparently bitter report, is to achieve energy savings by encouraging the use of more efficient appliances, and it is doing so via an 'action plan' that targets specific areas where significant gains can be readily achieved. This seems to me to be a relatively sane approach in that it's a matter of making stuff work better and doing stuff that will make a difference.

When it comes to patio heaters, the MEPs' report has two problems. First, they are making a moral judgement about the use of external heaters. Certainly heat from them not used to warm bodies could be termed 'wasted', but extra heat consumed indoors because you decline to wear two jumpers could also be termed wasted. There's a sliding scale from thoughtless or careless to wicked, if you want to get moral about it, and when legislators get into this territory they have to decide where they start and where they end when it comes to forbidding things.

That cuts against the Commission approach, and introduces counter-productive arguments. You won't get too many people arguing against just trying to make stuff work better, but you'll get big rows when you start to tell them what they ought or ought not to do, what is and is not 'bad'.

The second problem is that the impact of these devices is negligible. And personally I don't much hold with the 'every little helps' approach. Time spent worrying away at little things that aren't going to make a lot of difference could far more usefully be spent on things that will make a more substantial difference. They're a waste of energy, right? So what's the carbon footprint of that?

BTW, for the contributor who mentioned flaring in the energy industry, the DEFRA figure for this in 2006 was 3.8 million tonnes, 0.7 per cent of total emissions.

Forget passports - teachers and kids are the new ID card targets

Re: Error in article

Pah, I spit on spell checkers. That was what you might call a head to fingers data corruption. Head sends word to fingers, moves on to next word, leaving fingers to it. Fingers mishear the word, and reconstruct as best they can into something that is a word, but not necessarily the right one. Journalists are somewhat like dinosaurs in that they have sub-brains in their wrists. Unfortunately the sub-brains don't do sentences, paragraphs and context. They just do one word at a time.

Thanks for the correction, BTW. (-:

'Coercion' plan to force ID cards on first time drivers

Re: Don't post here

"Don't post here"? So how's MY 16 year old daughter supposed to eat if they don't post here? Just watch it, Sunshine, OK? (-:

IPS leak suggests ID card fingerprint chop

Re: So, who exactly did the feasibilty study? Can the Home Office get their money back?

We haven't actually had a feasibility study as part of this project. We've had the original 'entitlements cards' consultation that was repurposed to serve as the ID card one. The submissions for this were inaccurately precised by Home Office droids for the report (you can verify this by checking the published response document against those submissions that are still available elsewhere in full). The response report was also backed up by pre-spun focus groups which were intended not to measure public opinion on ID cards, but to identify applications that were likely to be popular with the public. That is, they were asking how they could best sell it, as opposed to whether or not people wanted it. AFAIK practically all subsequent work has been undertaken on the basis that ID cards are non-negotiable, and that the task is therefore to figure out the purposes the public are going to be most OK about. The flaw in this approach is of course obvious... (-:

Just how cute are cats? W3C can help

Re: Er...

Now don't get the <cite>Reg</cite> HTML Nazis started, or they'll get <em>really</em> tedious at you about how uncool and <em>wrong</em> <i> </i> is...

Israel electric car project aims to wipe out oil

Re: Off oil? Not bloody likely

He claims 50 per cent of oil is used to power cars, 20 per cent for 'plastic bags etc' and 30 per cent for other industrial processes. So while there's clearly hyperbole to the "off oil" target, taking cars out of the picture makes a big dent. How much the trend away from plastic bags will reduce the total depends on how big that 'etc' is, I suppose.

Re: @ herman (Bad batteries)

The pricing model they're suggesting is that you buy miles, not batteries. The batteries remain the property of the distributing company, and you pay for 200 miles. So long as you get that, you don't give a hoot about the age of the battery, is their theory.

Re: Pretty good idea

I caught a Daimler presentation last night that was pitching far less horrid (were they Smarts? Think so) toys zipping around. They claimed they'd been running some around London for a while, and they'd be marketing them RSN.

WPP chief sees headroom for Internet ad growth

Re: Clogged already

It's probably a mistake to assume that increased spending would equal increased volume of ads. It could also result in higher rates, and/or a more sophisticated approach to advertising by agencies and clients. And it's not actually in the interests of the clients for their advertising to be viewed by the consumer as oppressive - pay money to make people hate you, how weird is that?

Currently, in my opinion, they don't altogether grasp where cute and clever ends and oppression begins, but in the longer term they'll start to figure it out. Or die. You probably don't notice, but we at The Register try to cousel them and divert them away from their worst excesses - I'll grant you we don't always succeed. (-:

Immigrant ID cards and border checks slip towards 2009

Re: Do we assume...

The Schengen opt out doesn't cover that bit, which makes it interesting. Say all the signs are correct, and ID cards for UK citizens slide off the roadmap sometime in 2009. The UK is treaty bound to treat all EU citizens equally, so if there's no longer an intent to issue cards to UK citizens, cards cannot be issued to other EU citizens either. So it becomes a non-EU citizen card only, or likely non-EEA. Even without the cards, if they actually get e-borders up and running to spec, AND get on top of their database issues, we've still got the Big Brother problem to worry about, though, because the card itself is only a bit of plastic.

Re: 2,000 colleges, 256 inspected, 124 bogus ?

If you drill down through the related links on the BBC story you'll possibly find an investigation they did for R4 a year or two ago. As I recall they exposed a bogus college, reported it to the Home Office, then checked it again some months later and nothing had been done. I suspect they've actually only recently started checking, so the productivity rate mightn't be as grim as it looks. And the reason they don't check before authorisation is that they'd then have a huge backlog of colleges that needed to be checked NOW, no mechanism for granting prospective students visas, and therefore a savagely curtailed overseas student business.

Tag-a-lag: Chip implants mooted for UK prisoners

Re: can GPS be confused?

Yes, can be done, and has been demonstrated, I think.

Sun reveals war on data centers

Re: Evolutionary manor????

It's an evolving, moving manor that Sun (presumably the whole of it) will move in. So it's a sort of shape-shifting Death Star meets next generation Winnebago, right?

Is it or isn't it? Brown keeps bottling the ID card question

Re: "foreign nationals" only eh?

The claimed reason for the higher passport price is the cost of added security features. The price has been jacked up with this excuse several times, with the addition of biometrics being the most recent component of 'extra security'. Also present in the excuse list is 'we have to do it' in order to conform to ICAO passport standards. So actually it's got precious little to do with ID cards for foreigners, and no you can't have your £10 passport back. (-:

FBI's 'idiot dude' fails to boost US Navy terror emails

Re: That would be the same USS Cole that got attacked by jihadis?

Sorry people, we had a headlining goof there. The reference to the Cole in one of the emails in the piece triggered the wrong ship name in my head when I was headlining the story. My bad, now fixed. The ship he was actually on was the Benfold.

FBI preps $1bn biometric database

Re: Is it me or what ?

No. it's not you. There's been research into 'liveness detection' in relation to various biometric technologies, in order to make it harder for the readers to be fooled by pictures and dead bits. In the case of iris recognition you could maybe do checks on how the 'iris' was moving, on to ensure that it was in the middle of an actual live face.

MIA in Iowa - personal data on 3m UK driving test candidates

Re: hang on

You probably have it right there. The loss was known to Stephen Ladyman, who was then a minister at the Department for Transport, last June, and he'd agreed a review with Pearson. Ruth Kelly however wasn't informed when she took over, and is said only to have heard about it via Gus O'Donnell's reviewe of procedures, which was set up as a consequence of the HMRC debacle. We're surely hearing a lot of stuff now simply because nobody will risk the consequences of keeping quiet about it and being found out.

Daring Register raid snatches key government URL

Re: FOIA request?

I was proposing to ask that very question shortly, just after I'd refreshed my memory on the Cabinet Office consultation guidelines. My own registration attempt has so far yielded nothing but silence, and I'd be pleased to hear from anybody who has successfully made it past whatever multi-headed mutt they have guarding their select discussion group.

Re: the whois data is interesting

More interesting still, a Jayenne Montana posted an earlier comment saying "I suspect nothing more than a typo has given a lot of publicity to the new site and you know what they say about 'all publicity'" (to which I say, 'Gary Glitter').

Someone of that name is also listed at Linkedin as owner of Polygonsoup Ltd, which runs the nameservers for ukictmarketingstrategy.co.uk. Hiya, Jayenne. (-:

Re: Perhaps we can clear this up

Well, erm, a small typo crept into an earlier version of the press release that was published on 16th November, and again in a second release published on 7th December. Nobody apparently noticed until we publicised it, so well done for that, team. Would we be correct in thinking that traffic to your splendid registered-users-only consultation site has in the interim been in the high severals?

Re: This can only end badly

Well, we reckon we know a thing or two about marketing ourselves, and are of the opinion that there's a goodly quantity of cheap publicity to be had, should HMG feel the urge to sue us for cybersquatting. So whenever you're ready, Lord Jones...

Met plan moves police to out of town megabases

Re: I like how

A local example I'm aware of. The problem: knife-point muggings of young people at a particular bus stop, often around 11.30pm as they come home from the pub. The solution: increased community police officer visibility, plus community liaison officer showing up at local community meetings to explain that said community police officers clock off at 8pm. Crime problem? Quick, send out for some more press releases... (-:

Public says no to ID cards, No2ID says 'starve the beast!'

Guy Herbert comments

I suppose it's understandable that Guy Herbert won't sign up for The Register, but as with a previous outing he's asked me to post his response to a few queries. As previously, I'm happy to do so:

1. Why a certificate?

Because it is easier for people to keep a promise if they tell people about it. It makes reference to exactly what they have promised easier. And it makes spreading the idea automatic, because at least one other person is involved in witnessing the promise.

2. But the Government is being clever and undermining resistance by the leverage of passports, etc...

Well that's precisely the point. The Government plan is to go softly softly, so we need to undermine that. The more people resist, say "I would rather not..." to any particular thing, the more induction mechanisms have to be set up in parallel, and the hungrier and messier they will become. That helps build resistance, and exposes the database state. You can, by the way, renew your passport right now and get out of that one for 10 years. The interrogation centres are behind schedule.

3. HIt them in the ballot box, by sponsoring candidates.

Nope. Because that means (1) we would forfeit our all party opposition support , and (2) we would end up being regulated by the Electoral Commission which would cause massive administrative overhead AND contradict our commitment to anonymity for our supporters if they want it.

However, I'm sure a lot of people - and politically thoughtful people, highly likely to vote - will decide their vote on this issue. I have lifelong socialists coming to me and saying, "I would never, ever have voted Conservative, but..." There is an electoral effect, if enough people are made aware. That was what did for the Poll Tax - general unpopularity, even among those who paid up.

Welcome to the El Reg bumper demographic survey

Re: Stop the Americanised nonsense...

Er, no.

It has always been Reg house style for our US staff to be permitted to write in US English, and for our UK staff to write in UK English. We realise that the logic of this tends to fall apart when staff switch continents but don't switch spelling, or when they return totally confused after a longish stint on the other side. But we regard this as one of our defining eccentricities, and we're rather proud of it.