Posts by Mr Pedantio

'Don't panic: We're still Delicious,' says Yahoo!-owned Web2.0 outfit

A sensible use of the cloud

To me, bookmarks are precisely the kind of thing suited to a cloud solution. I never used to bother trying to keep them because I was forever changing computers, browsers and operating systems. When del.icio.us appeared, I signed up straight away and have thousands of well-organized bookmarks on there. I couldn't bear to lose my bookmarks, so have now joined Pinboard, who seem to have done a nice job of replicating delicious exactly. Clearly some people would pay for this kind of service.

Spammers exploit another Facebook flaw

Sigh

I wish the Register would stop its pointless crusade against social networking. Yet another article which seems to say "Social networks are bad because of security holes/spam" when really your agenda is "We don't like social networks because computers should enhance not overcome our isolation from one another".

There is such a thing as society, and people who actually have lives and friends like to use computers too. Get used to it.

India threatens to ban 1m BlackBerrys

Forgive me

... but why just Blackberries? I know the BB is unique in using push email, but it still goes over the same networks and protocols as other net traffic, doesn't it? If you're an evil regime (and I'm still absorbing the news that India has joined the UK in this regard), surely you'd intercept at the network level rather than implement a separate solution for each type of transaction. If I were a BB user, couldn't I just switch to using encrypted webmail?

Maybe I'm missing some intrinsic difference in the way they work. Or are these governments only just waking up to mobile devices in general?

In any case, RIM's behaviour seems eminently boycott-worthy.

BBC upgrades iPlayer to allow 'social propositions'

The kids on your lawn aren't doing any harm

Why do you at The Register have a downer on social networking? Do you prefer the web to be a solitary experience?

Smart move, BBC. I was only just listening to an excellent show on the iPlayer, and wishing there was Facebook integration so I could easily post it for my friends to enjoy too. I won't say here what it was though, cause it seems you folks don't like the web to be about sharing and personal recommendation.

(Alright then, it was Charlie Brooker's new quiz show, So Wrong It's Right. Better not mention that I first read about it on Twitter.)

3-million-km-long comet plunges into Sun

Should I be worried?

How many of these would need to fall into the sun before it went nova?

Brits blasé about 3D TV 'fad'

Who'd have thought it..?

... the latest fad turns out to be just a fad.

And could it also be that people feel burned over first digital, then HD requiring them to stump up for a new telly, with in many cases no discernible benefit?

Avatar made my eyes tired. My next screen will be a projector or large monitor.

Weak passwords stored in browsers make hackers happy

Plain text

Agree with most of the above, especially the impossibility of remembering multiple, constantly-changing passwords. One thing the article doesn't mention is that browsers store passwords in plain text . I was expecting details of a hacking attack that stole the browser password file.

On a completely separate note, if you want readers to vote on comments, get some bleedin' ajax on your site so we don't have to wade through two page loads just to register a single thumbs-up or -down..

Gmail to get realtime with Web2.0rhea makeover?

Consensus?

It seems everyone here (and by extrapolation, every nerd on the planet without exception) is against this change - if we actually understood your hideous and incomprehensible journalese. Web 2.0rhea? Since gmail was the original web 2.0 site, it's hard to know what you mean.

If it's just status updates, gmail effectively already has this as part of googletalk. But having recently visited Windows Live (or Hotmail as it was last time I used it) I hope Google has no intention of following suit and trying to turn gmail into some sort of "community". It is, as Andy 40 said, pretty much perfect as it is.

English language falls to the Slashdot effect

"unfriend"?!

If "unfriend" is a word, excuse me while I de-friend the compilers of the Oxford American Dictionary.

Vodafone to start selling iPhone on 14 January

Beware!

Vodafone's "unlimited" mobile internet package currently has a "fair use" limit of a measly 500MB per month. Unless they have, perhaps coincidentally, increased this significantly in the past few weeks, most iPhone users are going to start falling foul of Vodafone's fair use policy within weeks of getting their new phones.

Queen's Speech slammed by small biz

Faster than you think

Of course I didn't listen to the actual speech, as I have a life, but did they really promise universal "two megabite" broadband? I will be holding them to that. Sixteen megabits per second is not to be sniffed at, you know.

Mozilla unveils cure for Web 2.0 world run amok

Widgets?

This is a nice idea but will probably be ignored by authors of sites which are the most vulnerable to XSS: those who allow javascript widgets to be embedded. Such widgets *rely* on scripts being able to run from different domains, so won't be able to supply a whitelist... hmm, unless the tags which list the safe domains can be scripted into the HTML at runtime :-p

Twitter botches patch for nasty account-hijacking bug

Do what?

"People who use third party apps to view tweets are less vulnerable, as are those who use Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox with the NoScript plugin. (In this case, a test account we used was successfully attacked using the latest version of IE, and Raff says NoScript isn't likely to fare any better.)"

So, is it safer to use IE8 or FF+NoScript or not?