Posts by Grease Monkey

Alleged Silk Road boss's lawyers want murder-for-hire evidence blocked from trial

Hold on a no. The alleged murder plots were in order to prevent witnesses giving evidence against him? If those are prosecution witnesses in this case then that evidence would definitely be relevant to this case.

Thought your household broadband was pants? Small biz has it worse

Business ISPS will put in fibre anywhere if you're willing to pay. The SMEs under discussion here seem to be moaning that they can't get domestic services on business premises. They need to budget for business grade services then there won't be a problem.

Égalité, Fraternité - Oui, peut-etre. Liberté? NON, French speedcam Facebookers told

Re: Not a new problem

Not quite. It had always been a tradition of the organization that it's patrols would salute members. When spped traps came into being patrols would flag down members to wan them that they were approaching a spped trap. The story goes that this was deemed to be illegal, so they came up with the idea that patrols would not salute members if there was a speed trap ahead. The theory being that the member could then stop to ask the patrol why he didn't salute and he could then tell them about the speed trap. I've always wondered about that story simply because the patrol was still warning the driver of the speed trap and therefore breaking the law. I think it more likely that the omission to salute was a clear signal that therefore meant the driver didn't have to stop. After all stopping to be warned of a speed trap would probably lengthen you journey time more than simply driving below the limit.

They didn't think they were doing anything illegal? Since when has ignorance been a valid defence?

Manchester festival marketers fined £70,000 over spam ‘mum’ texts

Probably impossible to "overhaul" SMS in this respect. Remember it would still have to work with the millions of sold phones still out there.

Actually the facility to send a text with the sender name is important, people want to know who the text comes from rather than just a number. However this requires honesty, which is of course why the ICO has rules which forbid using false names.

Why, hello there, Foxy... BYE GOOGLE! Mozilla's browser is a video star

Re: Speed, Speed and More Speed

I'm not a fan of FF for various reasons, chief among them it's bloatiness that just gets worse and worse. However when I'm dissatisfied with something I change to a competitor, I don't continue to use it like you. That's just plain bonkers.

Oooh look Google isn't the *default* search engine. Except that presumably would't apply to upgrades, since it would be extremely bad form to change a user's default search engine without asking them. So wouldn't that mean that thee change only applies to fresh installs which will be a very small proportion of the total number of installs.

For me it would seem better to give the user a list of search engines to choose from at install, rather than force a "choice" upon them.

BTW do Google still give Mozilla a big chunk of their funding? If so, for how long will that last?

Drone in NEAR-MISS with passenger jet at Heathrow airport

Drone is as far as I know a US word for what we in the UK have always called a radio controlled aircraft. I certainly recall an episode of Batman from the sixties with a "bat drone" in it so they've been using it for some time. So why suddenly are the UK media using the word drone solely to describe a r/c quad copters? Either all r/c craft are drones or none of them are.

The idiocy goes further. I heard Jeremy Vine (OK so the man's ignorant on a wide range of subjects) claim that there were all sorts of legal restrictions on drones that don't apply to "the sort of radio controlled planes that people used to fly in the seventies". Don't you just love media ignorance?

Gigabit-over-copper VDSL successor G.fast signed off at last

In building deployments would mostly be below Ethernet cable run limits, so why use this tech? In building it would make more sense to stick with Ethernet.

Plusnet customers SWAMPED by spam but BT-owned ISP dismisses data breach claims

Honestly how did you miss that? Years ago when BT bought them I remember loads of fuss on here and other forums. There were commentards throwing the knee jerk* reaction of, like you, threatening to leave with no stated or rational reason. Then there were those predicting that all Plusnet customers would become BT retail customers. Never happened. Of course the joke there is a lot of Plusnet customers were, and still area, BT wholesale customers.

The thing is however that it was a whole load of fuss over nothing. Nothing really changed operationally. BT for some reason wanted to own a crappy bargain basement ISP so they bought one. End.

Thing is though if you react like that you'd better check out the products and services you buy and see who the ultimate owner is. You might get a few surprises.

* I would call your reaction a knee jerk if it hadn't taken many years to happen.

The one thing I don't buy here is that so many people are so anal that they have an email address that they use only to receive ISP bills. It follows therefore that they must have dozens if not hundreds of email addresses each for a single purpose.

Apple deliberately wiped rivals' music from iPods – iTunes court claim

Looking at the emails you can see that Apple were making up cover stories (is lies) for blatant anti a competitive practice. How anybody can defend this is beyond me. However it's likely the courts will probably find in favour of Apple and their money. This is the US legal system we're talking about.

Dead Steve Jobs accuses Real Networks of 'hacking' iPods

Re: Really?

Nobody was forced to buy an iPod, but once they owned one Apple did their level best to force them to buy music from iTunes. Furthermore if you bought you music from iTunes they then tried their best to prevent you from using it on any other device or player. The only way to do that IIRC was to burn the music onto a CD then rip it back into MP3 format.

The worst thing about those cade however is claiming that they blocked Real Networks as a security measure to protect users. Protect them against what exactly? Freedom?

Firmware update kills Lenovo Home Media Network HDDs. Here's how to resurrect them

"The moral of the story is always back up before performing a firmware update. Others may just choose not to buy Iomega or Lenovo again."

And that's why I have no sympathy for these idiots. Wouldn't be at all surprised to hear the upgrade advised a backup, but these lusers chose to ignore the advice and whinge later.

Pub time for NASA bods? Orion spacecraft test launch called off

Why did they mention the boat and the winds? Clearly to detract from the fact that the craft wasn't ready for launch. If the boat hadn't been there and the day had been calm the launch wouldn't have taken place due to the valve fault.

One year on, Windows 8.1 hits milestone, nudges past XP

Re: The answer is still no.

Everuy version has been terrible, but still he uses it. He hopes there will be an alternative when he buys his next laptop, but there was when he bought his last two laptops and still he chose windows.

It doesn't matter which camp you sleep in (windows sucks or windows rocks) this man's arguments make no sense.

For the record I run Windows on the household laptop purely for my sons gaming needs. None of the software I run requires windows. I'd choose Mint, but then laddo couldn't play his games. When he's old enough to have his own PC I'll be moving back to Linux.

Google Chrome on Windows 'completely unusable', gripe users

Re: Interesting; and that explains a lot

Well if defrag and cccleaner didn't fix it then it must be serious.

Used to be that a majority of commentards on here knew what they were talking about. Some of the comments above demonstrate that the authors have little or no technical knowledge. "Attach a debugger"? FFS. The demographic of el Reg has changed.

Always makes me smile when users throw tantrums about problems with free software.

Nobody seems to be taking a methodical approach to diagnosing this problem. Maybe if some of the people experiencing this issue actually tried to carry out some diagnostic work rather than simply complaining they'd get to the root of it.

BT said to have pulled patent-infringing boxes from DSL network

Here's a simple question: does any other ISP in the UK use this tech? From Arsier's comments I think that we can infer that they don't. If Arsier could say competitors were using the tech then I think they'd have a point. But if nobody is using this tech in the UK then their comments mean nothing to BT customers.

You stupid BRICK! PCs running Avast AV can't handle Windows fixes

Why blame Microsoft? If you ship software to run on another vendor's platform then it's up to you to make sure your software is compatible with the software, not the other way round. Wherever the blame why is it always the users of the free version who whinge loudest?

Woman who stung Tinder with sex-pest sueball stings again – with rival Bumble app

Funny how you meet plenty of people these days who will tell you they met online, but few who tell you they met through a dating app or agency. Why is that? For a start people who meet online usually meet discussing one shared interest, not by being matched up by a system that compares all their shared interests. In the real world couples seldom share loads of interests. Indeed in many long and happy partnerships you will find few interests that the couple shared at the start. Perhaps they have come to share interests over time or have discovered new shared interests together, but that doesn't mean that they compared interests when they met. People who meet by more traditional methods often don't even know if they share anything other than being in the same place at the same time. Dating agencies and apps seem to miss that the most important interest a couple shares is each other.

That's why they seldom work or on the odd occasions when they do the resultant couples seem a little strange.

It's the same with being introduced by friends. Most happy couples just happened to meet, there wasn't some would be cupid involved who said "I know this bloke who you'll hit it off with."

I need a password to BRAKE? What? No! STOP! Aaaargh!

The funny thing about the tired old BMW jokes is that they are out of date. All those particular knobs have migrated to an Audi, probably thanks to those adverts a few years ago that featured some sales type dickhead implying that all sales type dickheads drive BMWs while Audi drivers are all Mother Theresa.

The only BMW centric bad driving I tend to see these days usually involves older bimmers driven by twats who think that the propeller badge automatically makes their car an M3 and every road the nordschleife.

Google Contributor: Ad-block killer – or proof NO ONE will pay for news?

Re: Not playing, had enough several years ago

What a niaive AC you are. Of course the internet is a business. It takes money to run that business. If you don't like the advertising that's fine, block it or ignore it as is your right. But just as it is your right to block advertising it is the content provider or hosts right to put it there in the first place.

Films are chock full of advertising. Are you telling me you don't watch any film with product placement? If you are you must not watch many films at all. Sometimes product placement is more intrusive than an ad break. Shoehorning action or disalogue to fit in a product plug can be much clunkier than simply having a pause for a 30 second advert.

And as for your battery of tools, that would be much more intrusive to you browsing enjoyment than the adverts themselves. But then I suppose having your tinfoil hat slip down over your eyes is pretty intrusive too.

Pretty pointless service really. Firslty Google's banner ads aren't particularly intrusive and are, therefore, easy to ignore. More intrusive ads are the main reason people use ad blockers.

And secondly it only works for Google served ads, I'm betting Google's advertising will only mention that in the very small print.

But really why pay Google to block their own ads when you can get several perfectly good ad blockers gratis?

BEST EVER broadband? Oh no you DIDN'T, Sky – ad watchdog

I'm tired of all this moaning about the use of the words "up to" in broadband advertising. We're not stupid. When we see and advert for a sale with "up to 50% off" we don't complain we've been misled when the item we buy is only discounted. When we see an advert claiming we "could save up to £250 on our car insurance" we don't complain when we only save £25. Why? Because we speak English and we understand what the words "up to" mean.

One thing that would be nice is a ban on ISPs advertising services in areas where they don't offer those services. We've all seen the billboards advertising fibre speeds where you can only get plain vanilla ADSL at a maximum of 8Mbps.

Erm, you are aware you can get BT Sport on Sky aren't you. Sky OTOH have plenty of exclusive channels. The thing I don't get is why somebody would get broadband based on what TV channels they can get with it.

Re: Really?

You say that like you think a Draytek is in improvement over a cheap shitty home router. Nope it's just a different cheap shitty home router.

HACKERS can DELETE SURVEILLANCE DVRS remotely – report

Connecting your security DVR to the internet is beyond foolish.

Judge OKs $450m deal to end ebook price-hike row. But Apple just won't let it die

If they've already settled out of court then the ink is dry on that contract and as such they should have to pay. However the US legal system is such that crooks can legally buy their way out of criminal charges by paying off victims, so nothing would surprise me about that system.

Yahoo! blames! MONSTER! email! OUTAGE! on! CUT! CABLE! bungle!

How do you know it was the same cable?

Re: So...

Yahoo! Mail is very definitely free. BT give you access to free Yahoo! Email with a BT domain name. When you leave BT your email just keeps on working even though you're not paying them a penny. Free.

Re: So...

So your UK based business is so tight that it relies on free mail services from a US based business. Recommend that as a business you use business grade services rather than cheap residential grade services. And while you're at it I also recommend you put a little effort into finding out what services you're getting. Reading your contract would be a start.

I work for an ISP and I'm constantly annoyed by business customers who pay for residential services and then moan that they're not getting business services.

That's not an intrinsic part of TCP/IP the protocol is irrelevant. You are right though it should be possible to reroute the traffic either automatically or manually to work round the break. Sounds like penny pinching to me.

The thing is though that this is what you get for using low cost or free services. What's the SLA on Yahoo! Mail? Customers complaining probably never checked when they signed up. Guaranteed percentage uptime? Guaranteed time to restore service? Compensation for outages? Bet there aren't any of those in the contract.

repair

They lift the fibre onto the ship, trim the ends and splice it. Job done. Can be a real pain in deep water.

UK's non-emergency police and NHS Vodafone systems go titsup NATIONWIDE

Did you read my post? The lookup is for the dialled number and the originating number. Destination and source. This is very common and not unique to 111 & 101. Plenty of businesses will try to route you to your local office in a similar way.

The lookups for 999 as every source DN must have an address lookup for 999 (not mobiles of course). It's up to the service provider to supply these details.

Surely they don't rely on a single call routing database? As far as I can see the only thing that could cause an outage of NGN routing on this scale would be the loss of the database that ties the non-geographic numbers to ordinary directory numbers - depending of course on the source number. That being the case it makes you wonder why it took so long to get it back on line.

Fake tape detectors, 'from the stands' footie and UGH! Internet of Things in my set-top box

Re: BBC documentaries Or Channel 4's Grand Designs

Documentaries (and some other shows) on commercial TV are considerably worse than the BBC equivalent as they lead up to every ad break with "coming up after the break" and follow every ad break with a recap. Consider how short the gaps between ads are getting on some channels then take out the recap and preview section of each segment and then take out the ads and the opening and closing titles and work out how much content there is in an hour of commercial TV documentary.

The beeb make a lot of their programmes forty-odd minutes long in order that they can be sold uncut to foreign broadcasters. However it still doesn't work very well, watch old BBC shows on channels like Dave or ITV 3 and the cuts to ad breaks seem abrupt and somewhat arbitrarily placed.

Use home networking kit? DDoS bot is BACK... and it has EVOLVED

Re: Passwords? We don't need no steenkin passwords!

I never ever understood why a home router would have admin enabled on the WAN interface. Then again I've never worked on one configured that way out of the box.

It's a shocking thought but BT home routers don't have a standard default password and do get updated automatically.

On the subject of default passwords every manufacturer could do what BT and some other ISP do and ship each router with a different default password. Sure it dores't prevent the device being hacked, but it does make it that bit harder. Malware authors like other crime tend to go after the low hanging fruit so just making things a little bit harder is sometimes all it takes to stay secure.

Yorkshire cops fail to grasp principle behind BT Fon Wi-Fi network

Your dad wanted it turned off? In that case he would lose his own FON access. At least back when I was a BT customer it was a condition of you FON access that you kept the FON hotspot enabled on your router. Switching it off disabled your access to other peoples FON hotspots.

Oh and before anybody points out that unlimited BT broadband comes with unlimited BT WiFi access that does not apply to FON. Or at least it didn't when I signed up to FON as part of my BT broadband. Having said that as soon as my exchange went LLU I left.

ICO: It's up to Google the 'POLLUTER' to tidy up 'right to be forgotten' search links

It's already been said, but I have to say it again. Google did not produce the content so how exactly can Google be the polluter?

Apple fanbois SCREAM as update BRICKS their Macbook Airs

So let me get this straight. An update to fix a slow wake up results in a two hour boot time?

It just works.

BBC goes offline in MASSIVE COCKUP: Stephen Fry partly muzzled

Single gender recorded visual content for sexual stimulation? Doesn't make much of an acronym though.

@Tom Chiverton 1 sure it's not just you? Was working for others in Manchester yesterday.

New BOMB detect-o-tech 'could give sniffer dogs competition': TRUE

"One part per billion would be akin to a blade of grass on a football field."

I worry about the accuracy of their research if they think there's as many as a billion blades of grass on a football field.

Cops nab suspect using CREEPY facial recog system

The people who think that this is somehow a sinister new development are missing something about the way the police operate and have always operated. When investigating a crime it has always been common practice to investigate known local criminals, criminal groups and criminal families. After all if a crime is committed on the turf of a known criminal group then the police would be foolish not to investigate that group. This is using technology in a similar way.

And those who think that this could be used to secure a conviction haven't got a clue how the courts work.

Own a Cisco modem or wireless gateway? It might be owned by someone else, too

"Own a Cisco modem or wireless gateway? It might be owned by someone else, too

Remote code exec in HTTP server hands kit to bad guys"

or how about "Own a Cisco modem or wireless gateway with HTTP server enabled? What sort of moron are you?"

Fixed it for you.

Call girl injected Google exec with heroin, drank wine, left him to die – cops claim

"According to the cops, Hayes, who was seemingly happily married for 17 years and had five children, had a "prostitution relationship" with Tichelman – whom he met via the website SeekingArrangements.com, which matches up "Sugar Daddies" with "Sugar Babies.""

Seemingly being the significant word there. And if he was out there actively looking for and paying for whores who's to say he wasn't also into recreational drug use?

If one thing (his marriage) isn't what it seems then it's not too much of a stretch to wonder whether other things weren't as they seem.

Today's Facebook fury: Coppertone-like baby pic ban baffles US mom

Youtube for one seem perfectly willing and able to block content in specific countries. Why can't farcebook do the same?