Posts by Anigel

Security firms split over Phorm classification

@Geoff Mackenzie

It is much more likely that your ISP will utliise its rights under its ts&cs to update its ts&cs to hide some phrase in there that could just about possibly if you view it with a very highly dubious definition of stadard terms mean they can use phorm and that by not blowing up their head office you agree and opt in to this wonderful public service.

If that is the case then you been phormd

opt in should mean no spin and informed implicit opt in.

"Do you want us to send all your internet traffic to third party companies for the purpose of marketing and spamming you with advertising? [yes im a twohat], or [no phork that]"

Quake rocks Britain

Prevention

Of course ID cards, a DNA database containing every single person in the country and 10 CCTV cameras per mile would have prevented this.

Google mounts Chewbacca defense in EU privacy debate

Clarifications.

Dynamic IPs are not actually that dynamic. In this day and age of routers and cable modems, you keep the same dynamic IP addreses unless you leave the power off on your router / cable modem at the time the lease on the IP address runs out. Depending on the ISP's config the lease can last for days or hours. I personally have had the same Dynamic IP for well over a year. If you are on old skool dialup then you normally got a different IP every time you dialed in but in most cases now the same ip address shared by many people in the same day / week doe snot happen anywhere near as frequently as it used to.

As for ISPs having to pay for IP addresses, well actually no they dont. There is an administration fee for each new assignment and there is the time taken to fill out the RIPE form showing justification for why a tiny company needs 10 million IP addresses (mainly to try and make the dwindling pool of IPv4 addresses last) but there is no X pound per IP fee imposed onto ISPs

Armed police swoop on MP3-packing mechanic

Gordy Clown

Just looked like he had a gun in his pocket along with the rest of the twits in parliament

Get those criminals on every database so they can lose all their details instead of ours ASAP

Scientists warn on climatic 'tipping points'

To all the evangelists

There has been biblical fire and brimstone cast down upon the non believers here, without the radical evangelists actually taking a second to consider the position of anyone but thier "scientifically proven" bible of MMGW.

Anyone who posts something negative to each new and increasingly alarmist finding is immediately branded with negative terms like denier rather than positive ones like thinker or investigator after all much better to believe the world is still flat rather than investigate the opposite of the accepted position.

Just because someone is not afraid to speak out against the alarmism used in publication or the whole man is driving climate change argument, does not mean that they deny any form of climate change. In fact I firmly believe climate change is a natural phenomenon which is happening and is very real but the impact man could have on the issue, short of destroying 50% + of the human population or going back to live in caves is just about negligable and is certainly less than the margin of error applied to all the existing alarmist findings.

I think the following open letter to the UN signed by 100 of the worlds top scietists including heads of climate research departments and many other real scientists sums up my position quite nicely. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/open_letter_to_un.html

Basically stop wasting all this time and money on more and more alarmist ways to blame mankind for the natural climate cycle of our planet and start researching ways to live with natural climate change.

So to all the people branding me as a denier, my advice would be to stop being such a sheep and do a little investigation yourself. Once you start to read beyond the index page of the MMGW bible you will see there is very little actual science and a lot of faith (ie belief without proof)

"In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is "settled," significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But because IPCC working groups were generally instructed (see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/wg1_timetable_2006-08-14.pdf) to consider work published only through May, 2005, these important findings are not included in their reports; i.e., the IPCC assessment reports are already materially outdated."

@Mark

I find the comment about the uneducated layman to be a major proof of the lack of your scientific method.

You have done zero research into me or my education so to assert that I belong in this group is a massive shortfall in your educated position.

Try this for scientific method.

We already have evidence that the planet has already recovered from situations far worse than predicted so therefore the whole NEVER RECOVER position is fundamentally flawed.

I am sure you can apply scientific method to that and see the flaws without me hitting you with a cloo by four

tipping points

The planet would never recover if these "scientists" let the science do the talking instead of preaching doom and gloom and playing the government sponsored terror card (we will terrify you into submission).

I frankly do not believe a single word any "scientist" says if they rely on trying to scare the pants off people to get the message across.

All they are scared of is the money stopping flowing to them.

EU to ban the patio heaters that ate the planet. Not.

If it really was all about efficiency

We would be forced to just ban the EU.

Get rid of all these MEPs and the EU carbon footprint would drop by a massive percentage.

So we are banning them next?

Sun nails four buyers in 15 months with White Trash Data Center

RE: amanfromMars owns one...

Last I heard though he was upset with the latency on his wireless connection

RIPA could be challenged on human rights

The UK

Protecting your rights by removing them all, after all if you have no rights then they will be protected forevermore.

Tax deadline strike cancelled

Meaningful talks?

So does that mean the unions are going to admit their members shouldn't hold the country to ransom because they feel they deserve even more outstanding pay and conditions that make the private sector seem like scrooge.

Those that are worth more money go out and get a job that pays it. Those that are not join a union and strike

Smith says answer to knife crime is through the arch window

Smiths iq <= School leavers age

With so many non metallic blades around the stab fest will continue unabated, just make it much harder to find and fragments left inside the victim as they are looking for glass or ceramic instead of xray opaque metal.

Now forgive me if I am wrong but out of the spate of knife crime we have seen amongst schoolage children in London I believe the stabbings all took place outside of school and not inside of the wonderfully expensive, intrusive and queue forming school gates.

BTW how many friends, relatives and shares does smitty have in companies proving the research and equipment to stop children getting into school on time.

DVLA's 5m driver details giveaway

@Look on the bright side

Why do you think they are so worried about all the recent data losses, It's certainly not because we have a right to have our data kept securely and its not just cos they have made themselves look like idiots again, Its only money that worries them ;)

IT industry plugs into UK.gov green scheme

minister for climate change

Why don't we get something potentially useful like a minister for cutting down the stupidly overcomplex and oversubscribed pond scum that are ministers in this country and their cronies in the quangos instead of a minister for stopping the tide coming in.

Anti-virus protection gets worse

@Peter Koster

Unfortunately there are some flaws in your comment.

With most modern viruses taking steps to actively disable anti virus software, once someone is infected by a new vuln then their av is unlikely to work in its normal manner and perform updates and detect and remove viruses the way it used to.

In some cases the malware authors specifically prevent it detecting their specific malware in others they just stop it working totally.

This then leaves the person open to infection by any of the old vulns that have been known for years as well.

As for the damage that 40% does you only have to look back at old headlines to see how much damage they do before the av companies do add updates for them.

With more and more people becoming web2.0 addicts with blog and social network dependency problems we are seeing the spread and reach of new vulns picking up at a fair old whack.

Whilst we have finally got many of the great unwashed masses of end users used to no longer installing files they get by email the whole malware industry (and yes believe me it is an industry and not just a couple of rebel teenagers haxoring to be 1337) has moved on and will by the very nature of the beast, continue to move on at a faster pace than the av industry.

Nowadays you can get infected just by visiting some of the best known sites on the net where the adverts they carry contain carefully crafted exploits, without thinking about the number of infections from myspace and other social network sites.

This is something we cant really educate against. After all its not like email attachments where you can say just dont do it. What is the web without websites and if you cant even trust the bigger players to screen the adverts they run then you cant expect anyone to.

US switches off the incandescent lightbulb

Woohoo more fools

YEY more fools who have bought the industries lies hook line and sinker.

The CFL only lasts longer if left on long power cycles ie, left on for long periods of time and actually costs more to run if only used in short cycle duty like toilets where it is on and off a lot for short periods of time. It has many problems associated with it and not least introduces mercury back into all our homes after all the environmentalists went nuts trying to get every bit of it removed years ago.

Just proves that its ok to pollute the planet as long as its not with co2

Germans debut kitesurf-powered autonomous windjammer

realist talk

I dunno about defeatist talk but to me it seems realist talk.

Its all well and good running the UK back into the stone age in thename of decreasing CO2 but in the major scheme of things its totally pointless and more than a smattering of stopping the tide coming in.

Until they stop trying to blame humans for climate change and stop trying to tax them for it then there is no hope for any of us as the so called exspurts (whose entire funding depends on continued predictions of doom and gloom) will never predict a rosier future just a constant everything is too little too late.

Virgin Media network collapses nationwide

fine here

no problems and a decent steady 20mbps all night long

Opera hits Microsoft with EC complaint

bundle

So if Microsoft were to bundle firefox then opera would be happy?

Somehow I dont think so.

'Extortionist' turns Wi-Fi thief to cover tracks

@Dale

Anyone found guilty of using someone else’s broadband connection without permission faces a maximum fine of £1,000 and up to five years in jail.

Virgin Media eases off bandwidth throttling

theoretical 20mb is wrong

I have no difficulty getting 20mbs down from various high capacity servers around the world.

The problem that most people complain about not getting much over 2MB is just that they are talking megaBYTES not megaBITS,

Or they are talking about upload which is not 20mb but is < 1mb or they are visiting oversubscribed sites that do not have the bandwidth to spare 20mbs on a single visitor.

Brown knew data loss was disaster waiting to happen

SELECT FROM fools WHERE head in (sand)

If you have nothing to hide then it doesnt matter if the government publishes all your bank details.

If you are not a terrorist then you should beg the government to publish your childrens details to everyone.

If you are not a criminal you should be queueing up around the block to stick your fingerprints and eye scans on a db so that you can get them doled out to everyone

Lets see these fools replace their fingerprints and retina's the way they are queueing up to replace their bank account numbers.

Instead of asking what we have to hide, rather ask what have we got to lose.

HMRC coughs to more data losses

So who is going down for it?

If this was the private sector treating data this way someone would have already been locked up and sent down for it.

So come on Gordon Clown you should be going down for this.

Counterfeit Vista rate half that of XP

vista piracy lower?

This could have something to do with no one wanting vista due to it being less use than a chocolate teapot

UK gov superfast broadband summit decides... erm... nothing

Virgin media speeds

Well I hear constant moaning about Virgin media speeds, however I am on 20Mbs and understanding the internet means that I dont expect to get 20MBs but rather upto a maximum of 20Mbps (note the difference in B and b) and depending what server I am downloading from and what time of day it is I will normally get 20Mbs until i hit Virgin ontherediculous's traffic shaping aka limiting scheme which drops me back down to 5Mbps as I dared download something at my full speed.

Whilst in some areas Virgin's speeds may suffer, it is not the case for everyone and in fact most of the time I hear about people having speed issues they are trying to visit streaming content from over subscribed stateside servers at the same time as the whole of the US is awake and doing the same or something similar.

Darling admits Revenue loss of 25 million personal records

Next years headlines

And we can already predict next years headlines.

ID fraud is becoming an epidemic in the UK and the government are going to launch a massive public education campaign to stop the public leaving their details where fraudsters can get to them as it is ofc the public leaving these details and not the government losing them that causes this rise. And ofc being this government they are going to introduce an id fraud tax so that you pay tax if you get defrauded or commit fraud.

Brown announces new counter-terror plans

And we will still let anyone in

yadda yadda yadda security anti terrorism but we will let absolutely anyone into the country.

Security is impossible until we control the borders

Plastic police to enforce London bag ban?

Reworded to

We could only brow beat 90% of environmental freaks to agree it was a problem and even then with a sledge hammer swinging at their face we could only get 60% to call for a ban.

That is the only way they could have got those figures cos over 90% of the people I know would never have voted like that.

Hospital radio station struggles with Yahoo! email 'blockade'

Smacks of a con

When you have to signup for a yahoo account before they will let you fill in the form they make you fill in to stop them from blocking your legitimate mailings, it smacks of a con to get more people to signup with them.

I run an email server for an online game that has been about years and has never been used for spam and we regularly see these messages in the log files.

Admittedly they normally only delay us by minutes until the next delivery attempt but as for them getting delayed by upto 24 hours, I have never seen that on our systems.

Thousands snared by malware warning from big-name websites

ever heard of AJAX?

Oh yes thats the thing everyone has to use cos its all web 2.0 even if it makes no sense at all to use it for what they are using it for.

The company I buy my domain names from recently upgraded its entire control panel to an ajax app.

Everysingle page is an ajax request so instead of clicking a link and getting the next page served up with nameservers or whatever in it I click a link and get an ajax wait screen whilst it renders the whole new page using ajax

Sad really as most of the stuff I see regularly done with ajax is only actually done that way so they can say they use ajax. If it is an appropriate use for it is never thought of.

Man wrongly detained for 50 days has ISP to thank

Brown is doin it over here too

Dont forget that they are now upping detention without charge for suspicion of dropping a bit of chewing gum, or any other offense they care to pretend is terrorist related to 50 days over here now.

All in the name of national security they can lock people up and let the police go harass motorists for 45 days whilst you rot in jail before they bother looking for any evidence.

Brown reveals road pricing, emissions plans

Where is guy fawkes when you need him

Once again labor show how little they care about what the public think.

With massive numbers of people against road pricing an any form they go ahead and announce legislation for it.

But then again what do we expect.

Labor only stand for 2 things. TAX and big brother tracking without those 2 things they have absolutely no policies and no ideas about anything

Confused BBC tech chief: Only 600 Linux users visit our website

Public services starts adn ends at getting your license fee

to Anonymous Coward

They only care about public service when it comes to getting your license fee.

Beyond that point the beeep sorry beeb is nothing but a public disservice and joke.

Nowhere else in this country would a monopoly where you have to pay one company to use anothers' services be allowed to exist.

Heck just look at BT they insisted that BT allow other peoples equipment in thier exchanges aka LLU to prevent exactly this type of monopoly.

Now I still cant watch decent programming on discovery without having to pay the beepers to produce faked up public rip off phone ins and voting trash.

Sony said to have sub-$100 PS2 in the pipeline

100 hundered dollars

Wow sub 100 dollars.

Using the normal currency conversion rate of 1 dollar = 1 quid they will be about 100 quid. So they will probably go up in price from the sub 100 converted dollars price they are already at

Woman murdered after answering Craigslist ad

@ @yeah, right.

If you must know, I'm from "good ol blighty"

Where the hacks will blow up any murder story that possibly has any internet related angle beyond all proportion whilst ignoring all the other murders that take place.

Where the governments entire answer to crime is to either stick a camera on it and it will go away or to just fine / tax you for it.

It is not about being heartless or needing to "piss off" to use your highly educated turn of phrase, it is about the fact that murders happening because of the fact that despite hundreds upon hundreds of incidences of people meeting up with someone they don't know and getting murdered, some people are just too thick to learn that it is not a good idea.

So why don't you "piss off" and take a second to think before posting.

Make them think? yea right

"It is the first murder on the site and if it makes other young people think twice about replying to ads and turning up alone to meet strangers,"

Wow gee if they don't already know that from all the other publicity there is about X met Z on Y and got killed there has been then they deserve a Darwin award and one more out of the thousands of publicised murder cases is unlikely to make them have a single thought

2012 Olympics to be 'car-free'

rip off mayor of londonandonandonandonandonandon

Well think how it feels to be living in other London boroughs where we wont even be getting as much as longer platforms to compensate us for the council tax rip off.

The dictator of London tells us how the extra money they are conning us all out of will provide massive benefits to all of London and that the games will be profitable and all I can say is profitable for who? we wont see a single penny of this profit back so why should we pay a single penny towards it.

With the huge numbers of people who cant get to and from work in London on time at the moment because of the overcrowding on the public transport, I can only say that the idiots who believe adding an extra 800,000 people moving around London for 2 months and blocking off road lanes shows the true mental abilities of these incompetent idiots.

Cops pull plugs on TV-links, claim 'facilitation of infringement'

waaa boohoo throw dummy out of pram

Bah waaa we cant catch the people posting the illegal content so we will go after people who post a link to it and sue them for every penny they have got as well.

After all there are so many more people linking to illegal content than there are posting it.

They will be taking out arrest warrants on google, yahoo, MSN and ask next as they link to millions times more illegal content than this person ever did.

Government denies road charging 'blackmail'

public debate, yea right

Full and informed public debate,

Is that the same sort of debate we have over the EU superstate treaty where the public debate and the government ignores them.

RIAA aims lawyers at usenet newsgroup service

sane person

"Given that there's no reason any sane person would *choose* to transfer files over NNTP other than in order to rip *somebody* off"

Rather blinkered and short sighted there old chap.

Try the difference between 6KBps and just possibly completing your dl in under a week (assuming the seeds don't all disappear) on p2p or 300KB per sec on a very well seeded post and a full out screaming down at your maximum bandwidth rate from news servers.

Try the fact that despite what it says in the report above most ISPs still run local news servers or at least the last 3 I have worked at did so the traffic is over their local network rather than over p2p with the large transit bills that implies.

In fact the only reason to use another method is to deliberately throttle the speed users can get your content and to raise the costs of providing said content.

Could Linux become the dominant OS?

Outdated and inexperienced but thats just the aged windows fanbois

Well sorry but I have to look at the people saying about cant use linux to hard to set up and configure.

They obviously havent looked at linux since red hat 5 if infact they ever have and are not just repeating each others arguements ad infinitum without evidence.

Put an ubunu cd in the drive click install, answer 3 questions, get a cuppa and its all done up running and secure .

none of this windows stuff put the cd in answer a load of questions try andget that 2 gazillion digit cd code to go in right wait 45 minutes watch whilst it says click to reboot or im going to reboot then asks more questions then you finally get a desktop.

Modern linux is much faster, simpler and easier to install than windows.

The only area where windows beats linux nowadays is games and drivers for the latest greatest hardware and nowadays many of the bigger manufacturers are releasing linux drivers anyway.

As for the person that couldnt open a plain excel spreadsheet in open office I can only assumed they spent hours of investigation to find something that open office cant handle as I have had no problem and have opened up hundreds of screadsheets from many excel versions without a problem.

Shark 2 dumbs down Trojan creation

Perhaps it already hacks the hackers

I sure wouldnt trust a tool to write trojans to not have any already included in it and lets be honest if I needed this tool to write stuff then I probably wouldnt know enough to check if it was infected.

Personally I think it would be fitting justice if in the attempt to infect others they got infected themselves

ISP panicked by MS Patch Tuesday

Damn abusers how dare they download anything

This is where it would behove the government to get involved in supporting "Broadband Britain" with more than just words

Recently it was stated it would cost upto 10 billion pounds to get fibre to 90% of uk households.

I am sure that millions of Brits would feel that having fibre to the door (and cheap, fast, reliable and high speed broadband) would be a much greater benefit to them now and for the next 10 years than the 2 new aircraft carriers they blew nearly that much money on. Get the fibre laid like Stockholm did and then rent it out to a consortium of ISPs to install the equipment, maintain and run it.

Heck a simple longer term solution would be if they at least be specified in planning regulations that all new development has fibre to the door included as standard even if the equipment is not installed at teh exchange end that way the most expensive part to retrofit (getting the fibre underground and to each of the houses) is already done when they finally do realise that 20th century copper is not upto the job of 21st century communication.

So whats better for the people of Britain and the country as a whole? A) fibre to the door or B) more firepower to be the US of As whipping boy

NASA weather error sparks global warming debate

accuracy?

Scientists have been obsessed with accuracy for as long as science has been a discipline.

----------------------------

Shame they havent been even slightly bothered about it in these models that they base their whole climate change assumptions on.

Not one of the models can predict todays climate starting from 50 years ago so if they are that inaccurate then they need to shut up and actually make them work before preaching fear and destruction

Vodafone forced to recognise Connect

Yea great news

Just like with the post office the union will do everything in its power to make the company unprofitable and drive it out of business

Look at how successful the unions have been over the years, Coal, steel, docks, shipbuilding, car plants so lets have three cheers for them moving into mobile phones as well now.

Alltunes.com claims win in Russian copyright case

Regarding poor sod busting backside off

"There's a point where we're just taking the piss because we think we're owed everything for free, or at cost to the poor sod who's bust their backside off"

That is exactly big musics attitude.

They take the money (upto £19) for a cd then pay the artist somewhere between nothing at all and pennies depending if they have actually managed to cover thier advance yet.

What big music dont state is that with online distribution there is no raw materials, pressing, printing, assembling, packing, loading, trucking, shipping, trucking, unloading, storeroom stocking, shelf stocking, till scanning and add a bag costs involved, the entire physical production and distribution costs vanish. It is just the studio production and bandwidth costs.

so WTF do they still want to charge the same amount! Now tell me which of us is taking the piss.

eBay jewellery store fined $400,000 for shill bidding

Crime really does pay

5M usd in fake bids - 400,000 USD fine

= 4.6M profit for company

= 400,000 profit for treasury

and 5M loss for real people

thank goodness they are there to protect the real customers without that kind of protection the customers have lost 5M

Oh hang on they still did but this way treasury gets a share of the proceeds as well.

Endemol in 'win a kidney' TV show rumpus

Sick

May as well put a load of people in a reality show and vote who gets killed instead of who gets voted off.

Whatever sick git came up with this idea deseves to be voted off the planet for being inhuman

Virgin Media still claiming no usage limits

Title

William you are not subsidising us. You are just paying for a service then not using it. Like buying a 10 slice toaster and only ever using it to toast 2 slices. That is your choice.

You are underusing the product you have purchased. Just because some people do use the full capacity of the product they are paying for does not mean they are somehow stealing your limit just because you do not use it.

Pay-as-you-drive roads coming to the UK

YEY another government cash cow IT project

Yet more chances to pay EDS large sums of money for a software system that cannot do division, Pay Tech companies billions for other systems that cannot do as designed and all because the government wants to trace our every move.

If they really wanted pay as you drive they would just replace road tax with an extra 1p on fuel. But of course that would raise the funds without all the backhanders to mates that run tech companies.

And make no mistake we all know its about raising more money rather than doing anything about congestion.