Posts by Ian Thomas

Fraud detection system with 93% failure rate gets IT companies sued

Sounds like the whole system was designed to defraud people entitled to unemployment benefits. Presumably the rules will be applied both ways, so anyone who has been falsely accused of fraud will be entitled to receive five times their losses?

AMD does an Italian job on Intel, unveils 32-core, 64-thread 'Naples' CPU

and The Register chooses to illustrate it with an American style pizza?

Splunk: Why we dumped Perforce for Atlassian's Bitbucket of Gits

Re: Biggest gripe regarding Bitbucket

When I get that sort of survey, I always give the lowest rating, and sometimes add a bitch about being interrupted.

Mozilla wants woeful WoSign certs off the list

Re: How decides, whom I trust ?

Someone has to decide for everyone, because site owners need to know that you'll trust their certificate.

If you don't trust a CA then what are you personally going to do about it? All you can do is not use sites that use their certificate (which could be a big pain). If Mozilla don't trust a CA, then they basically put them out of business. That threat alone should encourage CA to be reputable.

Trainline.com dumps Oracle and Microsoft, gulps AWS Kool-Aid

Re: Basicss first would be good

I agree that you shouldn't book directly on any of the independent sites, but this article is about the technology company, so from that point of view "The train line" also include the virgin booking website (and others).

Hacked in a public space? Thanks, HTTPS

The attack you describe causes the user's browser to connect over HTTP, so if you're checking for HTTPS at the appropriate times then you won't be vulnerable. You're not saying HTTPS is broken, you're saying there are ways you can trick users to not use HTTPS.

Console makers game the EU Commission to avoid energy-use law

"the Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox One consume two to three times more annual energy than the most recent models of their predecessors"

That's hardly a fair comparison, chip technology has moved on but the games they are required to play haven't. For a meaningful comparison you need to look at each console at the same stage in its lifecycle.

Redmond slow to fix IE 8 zero day, says 'harden up' while U wait

Re: To be fair...

If I were the sysadmin of a network that required IE8 for an internal app, then I would restrict it to be used on just that app. General browsing can be done using another browser.

Re: ZERO unpatched vulnerabilities.

According to an answer from Microsoft, IE8 on Vista SP2 is supported until April 2017, so they really should be fixing this, at least on Vista. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie8-windows_xp/lifecycle-internet-explorer-8/2d64f20f-7801-4636-82be-456302181b37

On the other hand, Vista users do have the option of upgrading to IE9. If I were Microsoft I'd be telling people to upgrade to newer versions of IE, rather than turning off important features.

Half of youngsters would swap PRIVACY for... cheaper insurance

Re: Pah!

You joke, but you (and 95% of other drivers) probably are, at least in terms of financial cost to insurance companies.

Some of the worst drivers will cause huge claims against them, so a large percentage of drivers will have lower claims than the average (i.e. mean). It might not be quite 95%, but I doubt it will be much less.

Re: Understandable

Nice idea, but you need the safe 19yos to subsidise the dangerous ones.

For example, 1000 teenagers insure their cars for a total revenue of £2m. 10% of those make a claim with an average cost of £20k, meaning the insurer breaks even.

If they only charged the accident-free drivers £400 then the total revenue would be £560k and the insurer would be making a huge loss. To break even, they would need to charge the dangerous drivers £16,400. Basically if you had an accident you wouldn't be able to drive again until you were 25 unless you had loads of money.

Even with the current system this is a problem. I know a female driver under 25 who had a slow speed collision with a push chair. The police put the blame firmly with the mother (checking that the road was clear for herself and forgetting that she had a push chair sticking out in front of her), but the mother is seeking compensation for the child's injuries. As such my friend is not currently driving, and has had to turn down jobs because they required you to operate your own car.

Customers dumping Samsung phones in wake of Apple suit

Odd logic

Assuming the stats are accurate, I can't see any reason why people would be trading in their old samsung phones for a new iPhone, which is what the article implies.

I suspect what is happening is that loyal Samsung customers are trading up from an old Samsung model to a new one in case the new one gets banned (or because they think all Samsung phones are being banned).

Advertisers slam Microsoft over 'Do not track' decision

Why should it make the online advertisers nervous? They'll just ignore Do Not Track, at least for IE10 users. This totally defeats the point of the feature.

2011's Best... Games

What about Macs

I know it's still not the biggest gaming platform, but don't Macs deserve to be listed under platform. At the very least Portal 2 runs on a Mac.

Mozilla strokes coders with Firefox 6

6 weeks

It's actually a six week cycle - the first couple of releases were just a little delayed as they transitioned. It's been eight weeks since firefox 5, but firefox 7 will be here in six weeks.

Microsoft: IE9 not yet 'broadly' available

Give it a chance

Most of the people who are likely to download a browser without prompting won't be using IE as their main browser, so it's not surprising that marketshare hasn't rocketed.

Give the corporations a chance to roll it out to their desktops and let Microsoft push out an update for non-technical folks and it'll start seeing some more significant gains.

Oh, by the way, there was a blog post on planet.mozilla.org complaining about exactly this sort of article written about Firefox. His complaint was that they were comparing direct downloads of Firefox 4 with auto-updates of Firefox 3.6.

How I went from punting PCs to betting a quarter billion on Betfair

Quarter *billion*?

Where do you get the quarter billion figure from? The article metioned an account balance of a quarter *m*illion, but says he won't give any more figures. Simple typo?

Google illegally divulges user searches, suit claims

Blame HTTP and your browser, not Google

Anyone want to point out that it's not google that sends the search terms to the site you visit, but your browser (assuming it's not Chrome of course). Sure, Google could prevent the information from being shared, but the same issue would still exist for every other website out there.

If they are really worried, I'm sure it wouldn't be to hard to extend/modify a browser to never send referrer headers.

PS4 and Xbox 720 due by 2012, says Crysis firm

What they really mean

Wii don't really know any more than you.

What conditions disqualify you from donating blood?

HIV paranoid

If you thing Q12 is bad (and it doesn't just apply to gay men, it covers any man who has ever had sex with another man - even if it was just receiving one blow job years ago), then look at Q16. A woman who has had sex with the said one-blow-job-man must wait 12 month before giving blood.

Firefox under fire from multiple security bugs

Cannot be directly compared with IE

Remember that Mozilla's bug finding & fixing process is much more open than those of Microsoft and other companies, therefore bugs which might have been quietly fixed in a private organisation become public knowledge with Mozilla.

The good news is that Firefox 1.5.0.2 has no known vulnerabilities rated higher than 'Less Critical' (2/5)