Posts by Tom 15

Cameron loves net freedom – as long as no one's rioting

Hmm

They looked whether it was suitable after the riots to shut down social networks, they concluded it wasn't and now they're reiterating that.

Facebook 'bug' temporarily disappears some .co.uk links

Well...

I think it's pretty obvious what happened... Facebook obviously views "co.uk" as a domain as it doesn't recognise two part TLDs... someone would have reported a .co.uk link and then Facebook's system or an admin accepted the block and it viewed .co.uk as the originating domain.

El Reg in email address blunder

Ouch

Ouch

Top Tory 'lost voters' personal info' days before ID fraud week

Eh?

Does having your name and address public really expose you to identity fraud? It seems like a bit of a stretch...

Microsoft takes the Android profit, the Wonkas take the pain

Hmm

Google seem reasonably convinced that advertising revenue wise they're already seeing profits from Android.

Star Control

I remember this

I got this game when I was 5 years old... needless to say I had no idea what was going on!

Red Hat engineer renews attack on Windows 8-certified secure boot

Eh?

Surely people should be arguing with mobo manufacturers, not Microsoft. You can't really expect them to require a feature that isn't in their interests. Mobo manufacturers will want to give the option to turn it off as it requires no work from them and makes their boards more valuable.

Attention metal thieves: Buy BT, get 75 MILLION miles of copper

Somehow...

Somehow I don't think the government would let them... but then perhaps the government should buy BT outright, strip the copper cable, lay fibre as its replacement and use the copper cost to cover the fibre cost.

The real reason Google bought Motorola

Well...

Every time the big people pay taxes, the little man earns less in his wages.

BBC explains 'All your Twitter pics are belong to us' gaffe

Tax payer's money

Well, since the BBC are funded by the tax payer, surely whatever lowers their overheads is in the public interest?

Tottenham MP calls for BlackBerry Messenging suspension

Errm...

Am I the only one that doesn't get what that would achieve? They'll just switched to text messages, or obscure forums, or something similar.

Murdoch accused of operating illegal US air force

Hmm

Wouldn't the FAA still have to exist to kick in Murdoch's door?

Or as Fox News summed it up when I was recently in America: "The people who stop your airplanes from crashing aren't doing their job because Obama can't compromise!"

Google claims 'bogus patent' conspiracy against Android

Hmm

Google have always had a policy of charging the user nothing but attempting to make money from them through advertising. This has been enormously successful online and it looks like they've repeated that success through the phone market.

Google haven't done anything wrong with Android, we know they're not ripping off other's IP and we know how distorted and broken the American patent system is.

I always have respect for a company that manage to provide a better product than the competition, offer it to the user for free and still end up with the biggest margins.

Spotify trumpets move to US (and little else)

Well...

Some people might prefer Grooveshark to Spotify but I think they're kind of missing the main point... Spotify needs money because it's legal and licensed; Grooveshark doesn't charge you because it's illegal and unlicensed. Yes, the bulk of stuff on there is fine but where legal content isn't provided they will play user-uploaded content. You might as well just watch YouTube?

Spotify are a Swedish company who are legally headquartered in London (at least for Europe).

Spielberg flung Fox from Transformers 3

Hmm

Hitler may have killed 13 million people in concentration camps but at least he never created Transformers 2.

Brit CompSci student faces extradition to US over link site

Hmm

Am I the only one that doesn't really understand extradition law? How can you possibly commit a crime in America without having even been there? It'd be like me setting up my own country, passing a law saying no one can insult me and then demanding extradition of individuals who flame me on forums. He should be tried under UK law...

Google sees 15% speed boost with HTTP tweak

Errm...

Except or course, it's open-source and free... no one really has an objection with giants coming up with new technologies, it's their job, as long as they're backwards compatible and don't break stuff.

8m health records go walkabout

So basically...

So basically this is a non-story?

Germans completely humourless: Official

America?

I mean, honestly, the Americans have the worst sense of humour around. At least people without English as a first language have an excuse.

Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 7 8

It's the same...

It's the same, just an interface over the top. You click a button to go back to your normal Windows 7 desktop.

Mumsnet founder: Our members are 'very keen' on PORN ...

Pretty simple

The answer to this is pretty simple. Come up with a best-effort, porn free DNS and provide parents access to it. Job done and then the ball is in their court.

David Davis: Jobless should dig trenches for fat UK pipes

I personally...

I personally don't see the issue with requiring the unemployed to do work in order to claim benefits. Gives them good skills, references, motivation, etc.

And doing just that is one of the coalitions policies to be brought in soon. We could make BT pay a small amount for them and therefore cover a small part of their benefits?

Boobs on display in Duke Nukem web game

Rosie is...

Rose is none other than top UK Page 3 girl Rosie Jones, not sure who the others are!

Popular gamers 'should play for free' – Valve boss

Not sure...

I'm not convinced by Gabe's argument but if anyone is worth listening to then it is Valve, especially with them being so ahead of the curve and owning Steam!

PlayStation Network credit cards protected by encryption

No way

Hashing IS a silver bullet if done correctly... rainbow tables of just hashed passwords are easy but you should never simply hash the password, you should always salt it first. In most of our systems we take a unique, unchangeable piece of user information, such as a GUID that represents the user, add the password on to that and then hash it. Try building a rainbow table for that!

Amazon cloud sinks, smothers Web 2.0 darlings

Hmm

On the same day that Skynet became self-aware? Coincidence? I think not...

Angry Birds hatches a plan for Easter

Hmm

Point 1. Angry Birds is one of the biggest selling games of all time. Albeit it's reasonably cheap but it's sold more copies than all of the Call of Duty's together.

Point 2. The new Doctor Who isn't an Easter special. It's the beginning of a new series.

Fujitsu promises rural UK 1Gbit/s - if it gets 'fair deal' from BT

Errm...

I don't think they're going to offer a 1Gbps service, just put the cables for potential 1Gbps. As for Virgin offering it, Virgin can't, they only have coaxial to the premises, not fibre.

Opera embraces Google's open source JPEG killer

Opera vs Chrome

The Opera fan boys can make all the arguments they want for why Opera is better (and perhaps I even accept them) but most people that use Chrome have tried Opera and didn't like it.

I work in an office where Chrome is now almost universal, most of us having moved from Firefox but we all have tried Opera in the last few years and simply not got on with it.

Open source .NET mimic lands on Android

Hmm

I may be wrong but I don't believe Mono has yet got to the level of .NET 3.5? Until then it's pretty useless... half the fun of C# is in the LINQ/lambdas

iPhone 4 SURVIVES plunge from plane

Eh?

It sustained a 1000-foot fall as he was jumping out of the plane? That's a bit low isn't it?

Google adds tool to block shabby, dirty, vulgar sites from search results

Eh?

Black list surely, rather than white list?

AMD claims 'fastest graphics card in the world'

Fastest in the world...

Until the GTX590 in 6-8 weeks which should knock its socks off.

Hacker kills his own Pwn2Own bug for Android phones

BBC News

The BBC has had a few articles this week on Android bugs/viruses.

Launcher Pro

San Francisco...

What's wrong with the Orange San Francisco? I bought one for my sister and after deleting all of the crap it looked pretty much the same as any other Android phone...

Clear Channel turns digital billboards into 'store fronts'

I can just see it now...

"Good morning, sir, how is the haemorrhoid cream you bought last week?"

Crime UK site gets 400m hits, drives down property values

If anything...

If anything the crime map will reduce perception of crime. Unfortunately it only shows figures for one month at a time so hard to get good data but most roads in my town have zeros crimes and even the town centre only has a couple of hundred per month.

Microsoft blows Windows Phone update, again

No one?

Has no one picked up that the article says you need 4GB of free RAM on a system with only 512MB? Was it meant to be 4MB of RAM or 4GB of disk?

Library e-books to become too tatty to lend

I understand...

I understand the issue but then surely come up with a new price which reflects that they don't expire and charge that? Most books won't be popular enough to actually be rebought anyway, maybe only 10% or 20% are, so by incrementing the costs of all books by 10% or 20% you can offer life licenses. Then, knock off the manufacturing and sales costs and just give us it at the price the book already costs!

On a related note, as a user who has bought e-books will some of them get randomly deleted because in real life I'd occasionally lose or destroy a book? Or lend it out and never get it back?

Lloyds, First Direct websites hit by payday outages

Yeah...

It did go back up and worked fine but it's definitely back down. I got in for a little bit and was able to see that I'd been paid!

Actually...

Actually, Lloyds fixed about half-hour ago!

Android and iOS get a little Minecraft love

Errm...

Can we avoid videos that autoplay, please?

Virgin Media busts £1bn a quarter

Hmm

Half a terabit equals roughly 10k users using their 50Mbps connections to the full. So even at VM's busiest only 0.25% of their customers are using their bandwidth.

(I know this is a very dodgy sum taking a lot of assumptions, but I thought it was interesting none the less.)

HTC shuns Honeycomb for Android tablet debut

Eh?

The fact that it used Gingerbread was announced yesterday and is supposedly due to the fact that they haven't got round to building HTC Sense for Honeycomb yet...

Mozilla: 'Internet Explorer 9 is not a modern browser'

Good to see...

Good to see that Mozilla are basically confessing that Google Chrome is more standards compliant than themselves and will be so for the considerable future!

Google Chrome + AdBlock = WIN

Now if only they could do Firebug well for Chrome.

Boffins demand: Cull bogus A-Levels, hire brainier teachers

Dubious

I'm somewhat dubious about this article... it seems a bit out-dated and incorrect. First of all, General Studies is hardly studied any more, they stopped counting it at Universities some 4-5 years ago.

Secondarily, not doing Triple Science is no reason not to do an A-Level in any of the three sciences. Double Integrated Science is more than adequate for this and I know a lot of people who have gone on to do A-Levels, etc. from these.

Grief and disbelief greet Elop's Nokia revolution

Differentiate?

Am I the only one to fail how being one of the manufacturers for the untested and so far unpopular Windows Phone 7 along with HTC and Samsung puts them in a better position than being one of the manufacturers for the best-selling and popular Android along with HTC and Samsung?

Am I the only one that would love to buy Android on Nokia?

Anonymous hack showed password re-use becoming endemic

Bad dev

You shouldn't really just MD5 the password, otherwise you might as well store it in plain text, rainbow tables make it just as easy to find out what it is. Really you should mix it with some other stuff first, for instance we have a GUID for each user which can't change and then password is combined with the GUID for the user...

Angry Birds ruffles feathers for Valentine's Day

Or more importantly...

You only have to click the button in the App for the extra 3 levels, you don't actually have to confirm liking it on Facebook itself...

Mozilla plans four Firefoxes in 2011

Bah...

They'll be lucky to get Firefox 4 out this year, let alone 5 through 7! They should just acknowledge that Chrome have got them beat... or perhaps focus more on Developer features like Firebug.