Posts by Kevin Johnston

Ford spins pop-out anti-prang door shield

R&D Effort

I can 't help but think that there are soooo many better things that this effort could have been pointed at. It took 'how long?' to have car headlights turn off when they key was removed and as for making it almost impossible to be certain where the 'contact corners' of modern cars are...... This is the sort of project that apprentices used to be given to help them understand devlopment/production life-cycles to great applause even though everyone knew it was never going to be used. Have the 'hard of understanding' apprentices now reached 'Head of Design' level?

Samsung may try to block next iPhone in Europe too

Another thought

Could I patent the idea of suing a competitor who launches a product which has the same purpose as something which I already make or plan to produce?

Oh yeah, too much prior art although apparently if I patent it in the US...........

Just a thought

How about letting the US play silly games with patents for using your left forefinger to click a button or suchlike but put a time limit on the validity of maybe three or four years. It gives the 'creator' some time to get to market and get a return on their efforts but doesn't kill all future development. Has the advantage that all these Trolls would suddenly be HUGELY out of pocket.

It would stop all these silly children in their tracks and allow us to get on with real headlines, how is the LOHAN REHAB going anyway?

NHS loses CD of 1.6 MILLION patients' records

Dreaming

that one day, maybe not tomorrow but one day, the Manager of the department who shed the data will get the boot in a 'do not pass go, do not collect 2 years of salary' kind of way. If there is not a personal impact then why the hell should they care.

OK, yes I can see exactly why they SHOULD care, but you know what I mean.

Defendant presents Playmobil rendering of court in court

Recursive modelling

OK, yes I am a sad git but....

While growing up on the Isle of Wight we used to get taken to the model village in Godshill which includes a model of the model village which includes....only three iterations I think but a jolly good effort all the same.

BT to fibre-up another 114 exchanges

Woohoo

I'm on the list.....shame that the local council will not allow anyone to dig up the streets to put in cable, or underground power, or decent drainage.....

If only I could convince BT to join forces with the gas/leccie/water etc to browbeat the council into having it all done at once. We could get good roads and pavements an enough power that they don't ration us in the winter.

Oh sorry, that should say enough power that it doesn't cause sub-stations to turn themselves on whenever an engineer parks beside them.

Crooks rent out TDSS/TDL-4 botnet to the clueless

Following

The main problem would be the time between any siphoning and it's reporting. Most people only get a statement once a month and the perps can run a scrape for 24 hours then take the money and run. Once they have it as cash they could setup and re-run.

It's the usual problem where the black-hats have to act before the white hats can react and with electronic money you don't need much of a head start.

Christ appears in phone advert, secular authorities act

Beliefs

As the great prophets of Mythbustology say:-

Just because you believe it doesn't mean it's true

so there......

Space junk at 'tipping point', now getting worse on its own

I wonder

how much it would cost to put together an LEO dustpan and brush with re-entry capability. Could you get enough back on the scrap to self-finance?

Sage looking to mind Mind Your Own Business' business

MYOB****cks

I used to use this and was paying an annual 'maintenance' fee but was told that they had been bought out and I had to buy an upgrade to cover all sorts of crap I didn't want. Told them this in no uncertain terms and the response was 'well tough, you won't get any more PAYE/NI/VAT updates even though you have 9 months left on your annual agreement'.

Fortunately GNUCash works really well, is free, and HMRC now have their act together in providing simple information to do payroll stuff.

Sorted.

Facebook facial recognition tech 'violates' German privacy law

ICO

Anyone know where I could get a set of those Truck Nuts to send him?

World first: UK boffins print out working 3D aeroplane

Naming convention

You clearly do not watch the correct educational TV....any constructed machine which can be in any way be used for evil must be an -inator as in terminator or disintevaporate-inator or moonaway-inator and be destroyed by your nemesis just as it is about to prove maniacally brilliant (see any episode of Phineas and Ferb for more details)

Microsoft nails second Android device maker

Probably

they are stuck with it. It's like any gamble, you weigh up the risks and make your choice. If it turns out you backed the wrong horse then you just have to suck it up as it is all carefully worded to be a licence fee to 'work together' not an admission that MS are right in their claim.

Of course there is nothing to stop the manufacturer moving to a new product which is just far away from the original that the agreement no longer covers it.

Cambridge gets a white (space) wash

Hmmm...Industry led testing

So if I read the article correctly, the people who stand to make money out of this are going to independantly test the premise and report every possible problem which stands between them and making money.....

anyone else see a small credibility gap here?

BMW intros revamped Mini as sporty MG-alike

On the ugly scale...

I would put this as about the best looking of all the 'new' mini models. That is starting from a fairly low baseline though.

At least it gets past how, viewed from the back, they look like someone stuck an old mini into a low-sided trailer, although again to be fair, this seems to be the norm for all re-releases such as the mini, the fiat500 etc etc etc

BioWare latest hack victim

Legacy accounts

Well, even though I had an account with the old NWN site, I can be fairly sure I'm safe as when they setup the new stuff my account was supposed to be migrated but got thoroughly trashed.

Of course, knowing my luck it would work perfectly for hackers.....mutter mutter mutter

iCloud Communications sues Apple for 'irreparable injury' to trademark

Usage

Also depends a lot on what the Swedish mob were using it for. If they were a Meteorology company then there was no cross-over no no issue.

Royston's ANPR surveillo-plan goes to ICO

Data retention

Whilst I understand the value of these cameras (assuming a prompt response on any alerts) I cannot see any lawful need to retain data relating to vehicles which have all the right documents to be on the road and which do not have markers for criminal activities.

It would be good to know what justification the police have to even consider recording this data let alone keeping it for any length of time.

4G interference will knock out Freeview

Terminology

"-which is a bit of a bugger-"

I believe the correct phrase (by kind permission of HRH Sir Terry Pratchett esq) is 'a bit of an embuggerance'

Bloke drives with knees while manipulating two mobes

The US has this nicely covered

If you do something prattish whilst at least nominally in charge of a motor vehicle, the vehicle is classified as an offensive weapon. This would enable the police to charge people who drive with a mobile clamped to their ear with 'possessing an offensive weapon in apublic place' or something similar.

The main aim was so that when people try to flee and ram people or other vehicles out of the way it could be treated as assault with a deadly weapon etc. Would be much more effective than the current methods of dealing with these oh so pleasant ladies and (more often) gentlemen.

Sony Ericsson walks away from Clearwire logo fight

Similarity?

Quite frankly if Sony are trying to say they are confusingly similar then it doesn't say much for their opinion of the 'man on the street'. If you use enough PR-speak then I suppose you could describe them in common terms but good old Occam would say they were different.

At least some of these quibbles in the past had some merit such as the various shades of Apple logo which have been tried but if you choose a random stylised geometric 'thing' as your logo then defending it becomes almost impossible. If you cannot clearly and succinctly describe it such that a high-school art student could fairly accurately reproduce it from the written description then it should require a damned sight more than similarity to be capable of legal action.

Train firm offers phone-based ticketing across UK

Readers

Would love to know how long it will be before they can read these at all the stations where they have installed automatic gates. I am sure that station staff will be delighted to have a surge of people waving mobiles at them as they stack up, filling the areas around the gates in the midst of rush hour.

Police ordered to disclose ANPR camera sites

Dilemna

On the horns here, unlike speed cameras the ANPR cameras identify significant events.

With the speed cameras there is no allowance for circumstances and before I get flamed, most speed limits are based on worst-case scenarios ie rush hour or school-run levels of activity. There are a very large number of dual carriageways with 50mph or less limits which can be safely navigated at higher speeds in the dead of night for example. A 'copper in a car' is likely to apply the attitude test to someone doing 56mph on a 50mph section at 3am on a dry road whilst the camera just says 'That'll be £100 - or whatever the going rate is'.

If someone is driving around with no insurance etc then I don't want to be in the same vicinity and the best way is for them to be taken off the road. These are people who know full well that in the past their chances of being caught were minimal so why not. They can't be arsed to buy insurance etc (assuming they are not banned and so should not be on the road anyway) which means that when they are involved in an 'unintended occurence' the other drivers get hammered with all the consequences of delays getting things sorted and costs such as their excess.

On balance, I think I would prefer that the police could keep ANPR locations secret despite the 'nothing to hide etc etc' mob rather than in support of them.

Slack bank practice creates opportunity for phone phishing scams

Reciprocity

I have taken this to the logical extreme and ask callers for two characters from their PIN. If they don't hang up instantly I have prepared a 23 page document to request a PIN which I will send if any of these organisations are daft enough to go there. I have caused a credit card company for which I hold a card to abandon their security processes whenever they want to talk to me and we now follow a simplified process which ends with them asking me to phone them.

I fully agree that they should have to follow at least as stringent controls that they force on their customers since they clearly feel these are reasonable.

Virgin outsources techies, pulls plug on Trowbridge call centre

Helpful?

Just experienced how helpful these teams can be. OK it was their broadband team but all tarred with the same brush these days. Was having intermittent dropouts which meant having to reset the router, not the end of the world but not really acceptable either. Reported it with no great hopes but they fixed it.

No more dropouts

Well you can't have a dropout if you can't connect can you

After a whole day chasing around their little empires (yes I have switched off/on the router, yes I have tried clicking on connect etc etc etc) it seems that I had the wrong connection type set in the router. Of course it was exactly the same settings I had in there for over two years, but when they have changed it their end to fix the problem the fault was now mine!!!!!

I would change provider but is there really that much difference between them?

TomTom sorry for giving customer driving data to cops

Town Planners

Did you know that if they go for the degree they get a Bachelor of Arts degree rather than Science? Says it all really, let's make the road curve around here and then go back on itself here 'cos that'll look really cool from a helicopter.

Amonymised or not

The problem is how they 'may' have anonymised the data. If they have streamed all the data per user and 'redacted' your name/serial number/whatever then you can still be identified by the journeys you take. There will be a limit to the number of people going to/from your house every day. It is only if they have stripped off the ident AND the precise start and end timings plus mixed the tracks in some random fashion that it becomes unfeasible to try to isolate individuals.

Worryingly that can be either a very simple process (give it to a techie who uses the kit and has something to hide) or so complex that it doesn't happen (given to a bean-counter who lives with his mum with a 3.7 minutes walk to the office).

Vote now for the best sci-fi film never made

Voting Reform

Could we not have a nod to the forthcoming referendum and list them by order of preference...please...pretty please......how about just our top ten then...huh?

Greenpeace spies soot lining in cloud data centers

Reliable Scientific methods - as if

This will be the same Greenpeace that caused civil unrest when an oil company planned to sink an old oil platform will it?

The oil company claimed it was the best solution but Greenpeace claimed it would release untold toxic sludge into the sea and create mutant ninja turtles or whatever. They stirred up their troops to the extent that petrol stations in Europe were vandalised and, in some cases, set alight.

Shortly after the oil company backed down and brought the platform onshore to break it up Greenpeace came out with the classic line 'oh, maybe you were right and it would have been less polluting to just sink it'.

Just who are Greenpeace accountable to?

High Court squashes Digital Economy Act challenge

Theft Act

Unfortunately there is a bit in there which goes something like 'to obtain pecuniary advantage' ie end up either in profit or not out of pocket.

Still don't think they should be using the phrase though as it is stretching definitions beyond their elastic limit.

And no, they are NOT pirates, if you want to play word games go buy a scrabble set (am I allowed to use that word without acknowledging trademark/copyright etc etc?)

Google donates a billion cores to boffins

Oh go on then

Not really meant as cynicism but they could have thrown their lot in with the World Community Grid who do this sort of thing already. They would still have got all the publicity although it would have meant working with IBM so maybe that put them off.

Reviewers slam BlackBerry PlayBook software

Memory anyone?

Back before the Playbook even had a name, one thing that was very clear from how it was being talked up was that all the connectivity would come through the linked blackberry phone. Was I the only person that read this?

From that premise, none of the reviewers complaints in the article do anything but highlight how little they tested it for itself rather than as a direct comparison for the iPad.

Before I get jumped on, I am not saying that RIMs idea was good or bad, but it does fit well with the corporate policies in making it easier to lock down how much users can adjust the configuration etc etc etc.

Fujitsu £2bn broadband project throttled at both ends

History?

Whatever happened to those plans to run fibre along the side of railway lines and wrapped round the neutral cable on the National Grid pylons?

Surely that has at least got a decent backbone in place

Hasn't it?

MythBusters: Savage and Hyneman detonate truthiness

So true

As Adam has mentioned many times, it is the results which don't go the way you expect which are the most thrilling. How many people remember the 'are elephants really scared of mice' episode. Everyone knew it was just some cartoonish joke but when they ran through the test the elephants backed away!!

So much material used in education tends to be taken on faith when a little investigation shows either no supporting evidence or else conflicting evidence and remember, the victor writes the history (or some sycophant writes it to please them). Only later do 'balanced' viewpoints try to get written at which point the legend could be set in stone and your great-to-the-10th-Grandad ambushed my great-to-the-10th-Grandad for no reason, how on earth do you set about getting the truth behind that.

Anyone who can make it interesting to look past the pretty story to see if it is Confirmed/Plausible/Busted deserves support to if only to defeat the 'if it's on the Internet it must be true' danger.

Season of TV shows blown out of cloud... for good

Goes without saying but....

These are exactly the sort of people Douglas Adams parodied with his SEP field.

How can anyone believe that putting your only copy of critical data on someone else's systems without running unannounced tests is a good thing. Not to say the cloud is bad per se, but to rely on a sales pitch for your business strategy???

I just can't be bothered to get into the 'hold a single copy' aspects.......

Chain Reaction finds and plugs security hole that led to fraud

Stored?

and there was me thinking that the way the response stressed that they were being stolen in 'real time' indicated that it wouldn't have mattered whether they were storing details or not as they were being stolen as the details were transmitted. From my limited knowledge of financial transactions, I believe this is a point when the whole card number is rather important to enable the processing to happen and the correct account to be debited.

Judge to music industry: 'Worth trillions? Forget it'

New Music

The scarey thing is an article I saw recently which says that the biggest gigs at the moment are tribute bands and.......tribute bands OF tribute bands (you coudn't make it up)

The sad thing is that so many good 'session musicians' get little if any recognition and you can be damned sure that the record companies would hold them to their original minimum wage agreement even when the tracks hit unobtainium sales.

Osborne urged to end islands VAT-holiday by small-biz group

Alternatively...

Rather than try to control it too tightly and harming the group it was originally setup for include the phrase 'perishable goods'. That should ensure that the people it was intended to help still get that help whilst the Supermarkets lose this loophole.

Any time someone of the ilk of Tesco/Amazon goes to the cost of setting up an operation like this it is a good indicator that there is a loophole worth closing. The lost VAT from the CDs etc will amount to a substantial amount of money which should have gone straight to that nice Chancellor to help balance the books.

Gov and ISPs clash over informal policing of net

Stenography

I think you mean steganography

I would get my coat but I've lost sight of it in that huge detailed picture.

European parliament loves the Tobin tax

Well said(ish)

How refreshing, a well argued, logical and evidenced discussion on why a face-value action will achieve the reverse of it's intentions.

My only complaint is the final section which implies that as the people talking about it have no power it will 'Atlantis' on us. May I draw the writers attention to that recent 'totally impractical and illogical' idea that gender should not be used to discriminate against people in risk calculations. Everyone knew that was a non-starter too......

Microsoft says 'sorry' after Japan quake marketing gaffe

97%

I think that is in homage to the statistic that 84% of statistics are made-up

Google contradicts own counsel in face of antitrust probe

Fine them?

That would go quite some way to clearing the Euro deficit problems

Oz governments find new use for censorship

Canberries

As a fan of Billy Connelly there was a very apt scene in one of his 'World tour of Australia' shows where he visited Canberra and compared the city as a whole to those Wagnerian Triumphal Arched monuments to dictatorial states, and then went on to explain to his audience that Aussie politicians are not normal people, that they don't even look like real Australians.

This was quite a few years ago now but it seems he was right on the button

ASA rules BT Wi-Fi service works with invisible routers

Hmmm I wonder

Has anyone been able to identify the locations used to see if there is any signal? Maybe that sort of evidence would get the ASA to think again. Then again though I seem to recall that one of the mobile companies had an advert with a farmer making a call from the middle of nowhere and they got away with it even though it was proved that there was no signal within miles of his farm.

Woman sentenced for breaching former employer's PCs

USB?

If you were really looking to hide the data you would use some micro SD cards or similar which you would colour code so that you knew which one to swallow when the door burst in. The capacity of these now is quite phenomenal and more than enough for a few confidential documents.

Not that I have done anything like this you understand, but if you don't have the imagination to think of this then how will you plan to stop it.....is my defence.

Now, do I Anon this........ah what the heck, it's not like I'm anywhere they can find m

German Foreign Office kills desktop Linux, hugs Windows XP

User problems?

Just a wild thought here, could the problems have been inspired by that wonderful 'European Computer Driving License'? You know, the one that requires you to understand how MS Office 2003 works AND NOTHING ELSE.

It's all the rage in schools so our kids are being brought up to only know how to use MS Office (unless of course like me you fit Libre Office to their home PCs, works fine and helps them understand that there is moe than one way of doing things).

Apple 'outstrips' all brands at box office

Totals

Does that include the not-so-subtle use of a pear on the laptop lid instead of an apple? We all know it is meant to be an Mac of some flavour but presumably they are trying to slide past some regulation through pseudo-satire.

Kournikova worm marks 10th anniversary

Hippo Birdy

You forgot to ask to pass the song on to everyone who knows you...

DEC: The best of systems, the worst of systems

Memories

I still have a rosy glow about the day when, as an apprentice, I was shown how to put together a small programme on an PDP11( but don't recall the variant) then switch off the power, move the core store card to another machine and start it up and run my programme.

After that came the history lesson in bootstrapping with three way switches to feed in the commands...that was when summer where always sunny and big companies still hosted hog-roasts on open days.

Mumsnet backtracks support for net filter

Not so clear

As I have discovered (the hard way of course) if you use your credit card to make a payment that could be deemed to be a repeating payment and they have stored the details then they can use those details again EVEN IF THE ACCOUNT IS CLOSED. The card companies kindly call it a guaranteed payment so your only hope is to untraceably change all your accounts and leave the country.

Apparently it is your responsibility to make a note of every time you have used the card online and ensure you have agreement that they have removed your details, good luck with that one.