* Posts by Kevin Johnston

1537 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2007

IBM's 'Project Vulcan' sneak peeks Lotus Notes future

Kevin Johnston

mail delivery times

Ummm...perhaps you could change the refresh interval for your client? You only get delivery to your Blackberry after it has reached your mail server so it is in your mailfile first, just not visible until you (or your client) refreshes.

European court pulls plugs on terror stop and search

Kevin Johnston

Quelle surprise?

I am disappointed with the ECHR ruling in this case as we won all other challenges in the UK courts, including at the House of Lords

Hmm so those will be the 'courts' who are either under the thumb to a very large extent of HMG who wrote the law or else are the courts whose application of the law defined it....

Privacy group sues DoJ over 'digital strip search' data

Kevin Johnston

Alternatively

If they are seeing images of you naked then perhaps they should be naked (and visible) in order to install or run it. If they feel that is offensive then they are on the way to realising what it is like for the people who get processed through them without a choice

MS discovers flaw in Google plug-in for IE

Kevin Johnston

MS discover a flaw?

Oh if only they would put the same effort into their own products. I realise that these days no software product goes out 100% tested but rather than put the effort into proving a competitors product has problems, put the effort into ensuring your own doesn't.

Pointing to someone else's error only has meaning if you are error free

OK, rant over

Atheists smite online God poll

Kevin Johnston

Polls/Popularity contests

You would think by now that the people that put these on would have realised that the general population have discovered how much fun it is to produce the wrong result, witness that nice Mr Sarjeant in Celebrity X Dancers on Ice or whatever it was. Open polls such as this are a magnet for those looking for some cheap laughs.

UK.gov backs ID scheme with peanuts promo spend

Kevin Johnston

link?

Hmmm..Cartoon Ad for Micky Mouse project? Anyone want to guess where the spend for this is going to end up?

Landmark ISP piracy case could kick thousands offline

Kevin Johnston

I wonder.....

how many films include things like images of buildings which have IP protection (the Eiffel Tower springs to mind) where the studio does not have specific permission for that instance. I understand that there is probably a lot of legal history to allow them to do things the way they do but I do just wonder how hard it would be to find a few cases where they needed permission but didn't have it (or couldn't prove it in a court of law).

Translation outfit seeks Glaswegian speakers

Kevin Johnston

dialects

As someone who lived on the Isle of Wight for a while (but not 4th generation born there so still an ovener* or pile**) I encountered an annual rally there, the 'Mallyshag Rally'. A dire warning is to avoid a 'mallyshag in yer nammit'. Apparently a mallyshag is a caterpillar and yer nammit is your lunch.

* ovener is someone from the Mainland or whose family moved to the Island less than 4 generations ago

** pile - normally tourists- come in bunches, go red overnight and are a pain in the a***

Home Office makes nice cartoon ID card ad

Kevin Johnston

Hmmm

"This will help businesses with 'know your employee'

Perhaps a special copy in the internal post to that nice Baroness Scotland?

Bank sues Google for identity of Gmail user

Kevin Johnston

Wrong end of the glass again

It seems that once again people are not reading the article fully and in depth before commenting.

The details sent out by the bank were not encrypted because they were not supposed to have been included. Blaming the bank for not encrypting them misses this point.

Google are, quite rightly, not releasing any information until the bank put themselves on record with the court to define exactly what they have done and why they should have the details of the recipient. Until this is done it is all just 'media mis-representation - your honour'.

The 1300+ people whose identity is at risk are the customers of the bank, not Google or the unknown email recipient. The bank made the error and the bank carries the responsibility to fix it. The obvious first step is for them to directly contact all these people with a view to changing account numbers/names/passwords etc to make the information they sent out irrelevant.

Thieves help selves to PCs from Office for Digital Inclusion

Kevin Johnston

Timing

Theft? or simply re-allocation of resources as part of cutbacks which they would have known about if only the letter had not been stuck in the post.

Todger-chop woman's sentence depends on hard evidence

Kevin Johnston

hard time

So let me see if I get this right.......She was up before the beak and is desperate for her ex to also be up before the beak?

Anti-spam smackdown finds best junk filter

Kevin Johnston

@NogginTheNog

The problem is those pesky 'false positives'. Even if you put the onus on the ISP to do the filtering then as soon as some critical email from Auntie Flo about how her from Eastenders is now advertising nappies in Guatamala fails to make it through, up goes the cry of "damned ISPs are blocking my email".

Anyone in the industry knows that 100% is a pipedream but when has that ever stopped the media from jumping on a wobbly bandwagon?

UK banks 'not doing enough' on internet fraud

Kevin Johnston

Secure?

You have to wonder just how hard they looked at each bank's offerings as my HSBC accounts came with a securID type token to generate random numbers as part of my login. Don't care how good your keylogger is, it still is going to struggle on that basis. They also have an inactivity timeout which forces me to login all over again, an absolute pain if I have stopped to make a coffee etc but would clearly make it hard for someone to sneak in and continue my session.

If you are accessing your bank online from an Internet cafe however, then you pretty much deserve all you get.

Shame they didn't get onto the 'Verified by Visa' and suchlike where security is not so much an afterthought as non-existent. Companies get really narked when I refuse to complete a transaction because they have thrown this in but when all you need to reset the password is the cardholder's date of birth, I refuse to believe that it can be called a security measure.

Japan fine with cheap old mobile phones, ta very much

Kevin Johnston

@Charles Manning

While I too have a smartphone for the UK but while I am working abroad I have a disgracefully old standard mobile which gets a local SIM inserted. Oddly enough, the whole point of a phone is to make and receive calls and the old one can do that for days at a time before it needs charging up whereas the smartphone tends to need topping up daily if used otherwise every other day. No contest really..

UK.gov revives net cut-off threat for illegal downloaders

Kevin Johnston

MCP

Not only is there more than a passing similarity in looks between 'the gentleman also know as Mandy' and the MCP from Tron, there are now ever growing similarities in working methodologies too.

Cue the light-cycles and a search for the exit

Microsoft warns of 'irreparable harm' on court's Word injunction

Kevin Johnston

Dangerous tactic

Customers, meanwhile, could be "stranded without an alternative set of software" - rather relies on the judge and his legal team being MS fanbois (and I swore I would never use that phrase) as otherwise they will just point to any number of alternative packages which have the ability to read MSOffice documents. That does of course raise the problem of whether these packages automatically fall foul of the same patent infringement but that will be left for another court and a fresh set of lawyers to earn their fees over.

Apple blueprints warranty Big Brother

Kevin Johnston

Warranty period?

Silly thought here, but I assume that there will be some wifi or similar link for the device so it knows when the warranty has expired. Obviously once this magic date has been reached then it will turn itself off and let you do whatever you like to the innards.....won't it?

Feds seek $566m from man in online gambling case

Kevin Johnston

@Defraud Banks

It is fraud because he knowingly told porkies as what he was actually going to do was not legal so he 'fraudulantly obtained services'.

Amazon sued for sending 1984 down Orwellian memory hole

Kevin Johnston
Thumb Up

@Jeffrey Nonken

Definite thumbs up for Baen. They not only sell their eBooks DRM free but also give away CDs loaded with them 'and encourage people to copy them and send them to their friends', the Index page for the Claws that Catch CD is hilarious in this respect.

This is enlightened publishing since as many comments above note, there is nothing quite like holding a real book in your hands, and if you have been introduced to an author by a DRM-free cash-free eBook you are likely to buy the real thing, lots of them.....really lots of them.

Amazon need to have this business model writ large across their boardroom wall so they can understand that encouraging purchasers is most profitable than trying to control purchasers. They so nearly get the concept on their website where they suggest additional titles which you might like to try but then they let it down with the mintcake reader.

OK, for non-UK viewers this is a very poor pun on Kendal......look it up in a book as the wiki may have been tainted.

Small biz warns on contractor law

Kevin Johnston

Re: Agencies can stfu!!!

The problem is that almost all companies will only deal with 'recruitment agencies' as they believe it makes their job easier. All it actually saves them is the Cv search/interview stage and if they are truly temps (as opposed to contractors....a very big difference which the government stubbornly refuse to acknowledge) then they get given whatever the agency pick regardless of how well they suit. When you look at the margins most agencies run at you can see that it very quickly becomes viable to 'in-house' this sort of thing but good old inertia (and the odd 'thank you' present to senior staff) keeps the companies going back to the agencies.

Cost of seconding workers to the UK could soar

Kevin Johnston

@Jon52

The Irish have now come up with the same solution that the Netherlands used for a while....anyone employed 'in country' for more than 180 days in a taxt year is liable for local Income Tax etc.

I understand that the Netherlands gave it up due to most people finding loopholes and those that couldn't leaving the country giving a net reduction in received tax

Bezos begs forgiveness for Amazon's Big Brother moment

Kevin Johnston

@Cameron Colley

Whilst bookcases can get excessive there are many publishers that sell eBooks where you purchase the eBook and not just a license (Baen books actually give lots of theirs away to entice people to read them and go out and buy books by the author, apparently this even works). All you need to do is put those on a USB drive and you can take them with you. At last count I had over 2,000 eBooks available to me whilst away from home and if you had a netbook you could have a readable screen on something not much bigger than these 'license only' offerings.

Oh, and I should mention that I have substantial more RealBooks (tm) in their original PaperPages (tm) format

BT brings jobs back from India

Kevin Johnston

Back to Blighty

and did anyone think to ask whether the jobs would be filled by UK types or would they be bringing the current post-holders with them?

Net sleuth calls eBay on carpet over shill bidding

Kevin Johnston

@Simple Answer

I think the whole thrust of this report is that although you could get the item at a price you were willing to pay, it would be at the maximum price because of the shill bids. It is possible that without those bids you may have got the item at the startpoint of your bidding which could represent a considerable saving. With any auction you are trusting the competing bids to be genuine bids but in 'real' auctions if it can be shown that the competing bids were false you have some recourse to reduce the cost you have to pay, this would not appear to be the case at eBay.

Orange introduces mini-SIM

Kevin Johnston

This could be a pain

The phone built into my car needs the full credit card sized lump so that's Orange off the list of potential providers. Although it is just possible I could replace the car with something that's less than 12 years old....or use the handsfree with my other mobile....or....or....or

BT abandons Phorm

Kevin Johnston

Network upgrade?

Ummm....that wouldn't be BT Code for adding lots of racks for DPI usage would it? The way Phorm's prce is going BT could pick up the technology for the price of a Director's lunch soon and no nasty Phorm connection to spoil the party.

Hope I'm wrong......I really REALLY hope I'm wrong

Google code cloud punts on-demand embarrassment

Kevin Johnston

Ho humm

There was a certain inevitability about this train wreck scenario which should embarrass everyone concerned. As mentioned in the article, the whole point of having your applications 'in the cloud' is that they are available everywhere/everywhen so an outage should be an extremely unusual event and should also have a clearly definable cause. This is a business model that is reliant of tacking as many 9's as possible after the decimal point in 99.99%+ uptime and early adopters are the people who will say whether your models thrives or dies, and if it dies so do the next few regardless of their technical merits.

Hollywood prepares to battle Asteroids

Kevin Johnston
Coffee/keyboard

Please - no more

I know it is a Friday and this is the way of Friday stories but I only have one spare keyboard left after reading the suggested cast-list and synopsis.

Petrol station robbers cuffed after running out of petrol

Kevin Johnston

IT Angle

You would have to really work hard these days to find a story which is amusing/interesting which doesn't at some point have an IT element.......Let's see now, if it is on El Reg then you are reading it on a computer...that do?

Ecopocalypse causes giant fish ears

Kevin Johnston

Scientific study?

Would love to know where they found a control group....they did have a control group didn't they?

Microsoft fans call for Opera boycott

Kevin Johnston

Rewind

Said it before, will say it again and again and.......don't care which browser comes with which OS, just as long as I can TOTALLY remove it and install a browser of my choice

That is all

goto 10

German lad hit by 30,000 mph meteorite

Kevin Johnston

Impressive

I hope it leaves some sort of scar as that will allow him the ultimate in chatup lines...

What's that?

Oh, that's where I had to deflect a meteor when I was younger.....

Palm Pre's inner iPhone revealed

Kevin Johnston

@Steve

Why compare everything to an iPhone?

Well in testing circles this is known as a reference point, you know, something most people will be aware of and may have looked at when selecting their most recent phone. It doesn't say it is particularly good or particularly bad, it's just a reference. A bit like saying your garden is 1.723 Olympic swimming pools big, you are allowed to say thing like that even if you don't swim.

Mike O'Brien becomes NHS IT minister

Kevin Johnston

Mr Ben

Bradshaw should be excellent as Culture Secretary since if the reports of the state of some hospitals is accurate then he has been knee-deep in cultures for some time.

Best Buy leaked memo spills Windows 7 upgrade details

Kevin Johnston

@Tom

Hey.....leave it on 24x7 and join the Vulture Central III team on the World Community grid. All readers welcomed as we need all the help we can get. If it's as meaty a beast as you imply you could be top 10 in the group in no time, and it's in a good cause....what more could you want?

BT bumps up broadband speeds

Kevin Johnston

Free upgrade?

Wonder what Phorm of upgrade most people will see?

3 has no place Like Home

Kevin Johnston

@Shane

Umm....all the handsets I have ever had, where I used the 'abroad' and had to look, had the option to set the network manually. If the network I chose fell out of range then I had no signal. Maybe current generations of 'smart'phones are too clever to allow that to happen as it would stop the providers making money.........or am I being too cynical as well.

Airline websites forced to clean up

Kevin Johnston
Coat

Gosh, what a shock

Was looking to book some flights through Aer Lingus and noticed that the "taxes and charges" were higher than the advertised ticket 'price'. Spoke to the Airline who advised it was all 'government taxes' but unfortunately I had already checked and they accounted for less than half of the added costs, was meant to be passed to someone who could give me more detail but after a while on hold the line went dead. It seems that the only difference between Aer Fungus and Ryanair is reputation.....don't see that difference lasting too long at this rate.

Who's that dipping into my wallet?

DVLA issues double tax discs

Kevin Johnston

Interesting times

This opens an opportunity for those short of a bob or two....return one for a full refund and put the other in the car.....valid tax disc and in the correct vehicle but what will poor PC Plod do when confronted by a clear contradiction in facts.....perhaps an opening for a new Playmobil scenario

Mozilla mauls Microsoft on IE, Windows 7 bundle

Kevin Johnston

yawn yawn

Complaint is still misdirected. As everyone above (at the time of writing) has mentioned, users need/expect at least one browser available but what Mozilla et al should be complaining about is that even after installing your browser of choice you cannot Uninstall IE.

BOFH: Spontaneous Legal Combustion

Kevin Johnston

Hmmm

well...then again.....no. Somehow this one just doesn't

Brown finally wins something

Kevin Johnston

Safe bet?

"We're making a rash prediction that he will soon extend this lead over the RNLI. We're also predicting Brown will pay very little attention to the voice of the internet people."

Only slightly less risky than betting the sun will rise tomorrow.

Had contemplated the Joke icon but the whole thing isn't actually very funny

Pirate Bay loses trial: defendants face prison time, hefty fines

Kevin Johnston

@Lee

I'm probably not the first with the shin-kicking but you seem to have missed the point here. What they have been found guilty of is providing information as to where to find copyrighted material. As previous comments have explained, this is pretty much the whole purpose of the web plus countless 'real-world' facilities such as libraries, DVD rental facilities etc etc etc.

The reason for the confidence of the PB boys was that if they were guilty then so was every search engine on the web along with sites which simply held archives of past work.

I would imagine that Google et al may have an interest in assisting with the appeal, just to be on the safe side. If TPB really are breaking the law then someone needs to be a little more precise in which law that is.

Olympic champ's mom sues Google for dead blogger's post

Kevin Johnston

@Corrine

Fully agree. From what I read Google can't/won't remove it without a court order and so the Davis team are going to court to get the order. Sounds like it is all working the way it should.

IBM-led tech outfit backs EC in Microsoft browser fight

Kevin Johnston

Hobby-horse

I've said it before and I will no doubt be saying it again (and again and again). I don't care if MS do insist on putting IE into every Windows build, just as long as I am able to UNINSTALL it...not remove the icon, or set my preference to something else, actually uninstall it. If this isn't possible then it must have been integrated into the OS which harks back to previous 'abuse of market position' lawsuits.

Oh, and before we get the 'well how will you install your browser of choice then' moaners, re-read this carefully. I accept that the vast majority of computers users would not be able to get to the web to download their preferred browser from the command prompt and have no issue with launching IE to do that just so long as I can remove it afterwards as I would were I to move from (for example) Sage to MYOB for an accounting package.

PETA pitches for Pet Shop Animal Shelter Boys

Kevin Johnston

Rescue Shelter?

Could this be the same PETA who have a less than enviable reputation in the US for the lifespan of animals taken into their shelters?

http://consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm/headline/3859

Perhaps not a good time to raise their heads above the parapet......Never been too convinced by them anyway since they never seem willing to campaign in the countries they themselves say are the worst offenders, perhaps because those countries have a more robust way of dealing with protestors.

Wi-Fi Beeb viewing may break law

Kevin Johnston

Riddle me this...

All the talk here seems to be either battery or mains, but what if the 'mains' is simply a discrete 240V AC supply not connected to the national grid? Is that classed in the same way as batteries, or the discrete supply available on aircraft (most trains supply their AC power through links to the rail supply so don't count here)? Where I am living at the moment there is a water turbine producing the power but there is no overproduction selloff link so hence no connection to the national grid, is that still 'mains'?

PC firms slammed in latest Greenpeace eco report

Kevin Johnston

Ho hum

This would be so much more meaningful if Greenpeace didn't have a history of making headline use of bad science to fit their own agenda. Any credibility they may have had went out the window when one of the oil companies wanted to sink an oil rig to dispose of it. Greenpeace got involved and whipped up the unwashed masses with their 'protect the environment' rants to the point that in a number of countries petrol stations were getting firebombed and the oil company eventually agreed to bring the rig ashore to break it up.

A few months later Greenpeace turn around and say 'oops, you were right all along, it would have been safer to just sink it'. Millions of Pounds in costs to everyone (since insurance companies were involved and you know how they like to spread the bill), extra helpings of bad feeling between oil companies and the public, and Greenpeace? well they just keep on keeping on...unelected, unaccountable, uncaring and very unconcerned. I wonder what brand of computer Greenpeace actually have?

Grey squirrels invade Nutt house

Kevin Johnston

re: Nev

Yep...grew up on the Isle of Wight which is one of the last red squirrel havens and they are widely known there as tree-rats. There was a story of one of the cross-solent ferries not being allowed to dock as a grey squirrel was seen aboard and they had to catch it before docking but that may be an urban myth. Still, at least red squirrels seem to have a much lower population growth.