* Posts by Nick Leverton

28 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2007

Yahoo! Teams! With! eBay! And! PayPal! To! End! Phishing!

Nick Leverton

Yahoo spam

Considering the amount of spam I get which is sent from authenticated Yahoo webmail accounts, or sometimes even authenticated Yahoo SMTP accounts, I feel they at least could do much to clean up their mail sending act.

I already run Domainkeys checks on Yahoo, Ebay and Paypal (and others) and receive little forgery spam as a result - only spam sent from Yahoo's users which has received the slight scoring boost I give Yahoo Domainkeys mail.

Brain-sucking parasitic killer menaces warming lake waters

Nick Leverton

@Life imitating art

>One of the characters on House MD almost died from this in season two.

Oooh, don't tell me, I know this one ... his team thought it was two other conditions first, and nearly killed the patient through treating them, but then clever Doctor House worked out it was really a fourth thing.

No ? you mean they've changed their single plotline ?

New euro coin stuffs Turkey

Nick Leverton

@disestablishmentarianism

How nice to see one's name in lights :) I just couldn't easily fit antidisestablishmentarianism into the thread ....

Seriously though, I do have serious objections to admitting Turkey to the EU, but they are based on its human rights practices rather than any insinuations about its poverty or its having a state religion as the UK does. I can't help wishing Lester had chosen this angle to mention instead of jocularly repeating popular racism.

Still, our own human rights record will soon have descended to Turkey's level (some would probably say it's there now) so then we can welcome them with open arms ....

Nick Leverton

Turkey cock

I too believed Turkey was in fact quite well known for its secular system of government. More secular indeed than the British state which, absent any recent disestablishmentarianism, is still nominally based around the Sovereign being authorised to rule by God's Representative On Earth i.e. the Archbish of Canterbury.

Or have I been wrong all along ?

Halo 3 UK launch fails to fire

Nick Leverton

Cost

Our lad is definitely a victim of the marketing hype for Halo 3 and has himself up into a tizzy over wanting it yesterday (not that our local outlets are likely to open all night in any case !)

Unfortunately he's forgotten that we told him if he insisted on having an expensive Xbox 3 for his birthday last month, there would be no money left in our kitty to buy extra games for it.

Shame eh ?

Nick

Symantec accidentally warns of internet meltdown

Nick Leverton

@Symantec

$ vi

tum te tum ...

Pattern: Subject: DeepSight Increased ThreatCon

Pattern: From: *symantec*

filter as spam

send to spam-learner

file in junk

:wq

Job done !

Google sued for 'crimes against humanity'

Nick Leverton

@Norrey

>Why does the reg describe this guy as 'a crusader'? I think he's a few cents short of five billion.

We have this concept called irony in the UK. If it helps you detect it when it occurs in El Reg, you might think of it as being like sarcasm, but more factually based ...

Ofcom moots the 900MHz boot for O2 and Vodafone

Nick Leverton

Let's have another spectrum auction ?

That must mean the Government is having trouble balancing its budgets again ...

ICANN dukes it out with the USSR in cold war rematch smackdown

Nick Leverton

Guys like .us

I am always tempted, when Mr. Hansen starts wibbling on about top level domains and trotting out his great knowledge of how they ought to be run, to ask why he doesn't mention the little used and badly planned mess that appears to comprise the .us CCTLD (country-code top level domain).

So, err, why ? Did I miss that week's opinion of his ?

FTSE 100 switchboards confused by data protection

Nick Leverton

Privacy versus money

"The cost of securing a server is less than it once was. If you can implement https cheaply, it's well worth doing. But that won't be £500 for all sites. Your website might use a content management system that wasn't designed with secure forms in mind. Making that change can cost a lot more than a few hundred pounds."

I am not a lawyer, but I somehow doubt you would be successful if your defence consisted of "we bought a sub-standard CMS system that wasn't capable of securing the personal data it held to an appropriate standard unless we paid someone shedloads more wonga - which we didn't bother to do" ....

ESO galaxy hunters come up trumps

Nick Leverton

Close at hand in images of elsewhere

The quasars are far away: the starburst galaxies are not so far though (being inbetween us and the quasars). From other reports, the starburst episodes in question are only about 6 billion light years distant so are significantly more recent than, say, the age of the Milky Way, let alone the universe. Sorry I haven't programmed 'units' with Bulgarian airbags or other Reg-enhanced units yet.

For comparison, the oldest detected non-quasar galaxies are IIRC in the area of 12 billion light years away.

The term "Milky Way" here refers to our galaxy and not to any form of confection ...

AMD gives itself Web 2.0rhea

Nick Leverton

Posting it where it counts

Henceforward I will think of all these twitter-alikes as "micro-bogs" Thanks !

Cassini reveals two faces of Iapetus

Nick Leverton

More pics

It looks for all the world^WSaturn as if a gob of soot hit a marshmallow:

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001136/

Nick Leverton

Unofficial pics

Including brief but stunning animation of the mountain belt flypast:

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001131/

The mole people surface in Macau

Nick Leverton

@fly them

You made a good choice, the only IT angle here is about two lines in the second paragraph. I still don't know why I wasted my time reading this - and I normally do follow the IT gambling stuff with a horrified fascination ...

Monster.com torpedoes rogue server as malware scam rolls on

Nick Leverton

Money laundering phish

I had one sounding like that ("Transfer Manager") get through the filters but it just looked like any other money laundering phish. I think I reported it and binned it. I have never subscribed to Monster.com btw.

US customs bust coke-smuggling 'submarine'

Nick Leverton

Ding dang

>The sub is rusty and dinged. It looks well used

It's all right though, it was just a bit of foam that fell off during launch.

Web designer-turned-hacker avoids jail

Nick Leverton

There could be a security book deal in this

Such as Zen and the art of web site maintenance ? Bags I copyright on the title anyway, just in case ...

Only 'major' EU countries to be in second iPhone rollout

Nick Leverton

Alternatively

Alternatively, the iLusting euMasses could just buy one off Ebay - a 99p eBid should secure an unused iModel, though admittedly "secure" isn't quite the word to use of an iPhone - in the full confidence that third party unlockers will soon have it connecting to any iNetwork you want.

Google sees big money in tiny cell sites

Nick Leverton

Femtocells

So an attocell is going to be room sized (10^1 metre)

a zeptocell is going to be desk sized (10^0 metre)

a yoctocell is going to be inside-of-a-machine sized (10^-1 metre)

What on earth will we do when we get down to chip-sized cells, overtaking the SI in their naming strategy ? It doesn't leave any room for cells that really are a femtometre in size.

Or do we think the technologists are just choosing sexy names without reference to their meanings ? That would never happen, surely ...

US ocelots on the brink

Nick Leverton

The ocelotization of Money

At last, Ashley is revealed as just another ID of Amanfrommars ...

Oracle UK systems accused in 'SSH hacking spree'

Nick Leverton

Spamacle

Oracle's networks have long been a significant source of spam, apparently injected from compromised machines. I've reported it on numerous occasions to their postmaster and their abuse desk but never even had a reply. I am not in the least bit surprised to find out these pwn3d internal Oracle machines are now part of a botnet. Be a blood good thing if they do clean them up at long last.

IBM becomes nuclear tutor

Nick Leverton

IBM becomes nuclear tutor

So when we all finally glow together, Big Blue will be there to sell us hot iron ...

Elasmobranch scanner tech ready for War on Terror

Nick Leverton

Re: Am I missing something . . .

You could sell it dodgy fin-ancial schemes.

About those 844 security breaches... 'fess up, Congress tells DHS

Nick Leverton

"Data Spillage"

Sounds unfortunately parallel to "Semen spillage"

Ooo did i say that ? ...

LG locates Google phone in Europe

Nick Leverton

Special request

Can I have one in matt blazoned with "I do evil" ?

Pluto demoted again

Nick Leverton

Holst's Planet Suite

>When Holst wrote his suite "The Planets", it was seven movements only, and finished with "Neptune". (The Earth wasn't included.) In 2000, Colin Matthews was commissioned to add an eighth movement called Pluto, which was premiered in Manchester in May 2000, and also played at the Proms that year.

>It was therefore inevitable, by Sod's Law, that Pluto would lose its designation as a planet.

Let's just hope nobody writes a movement called "Earth" ...

Nick

Paris takes on Ubuntu in techno celebrity clash

Nick Leverton

You have: uspint. You want: brpint.

>Except that we like pints. Of lager, if you're buying.

If I'm buying, you can have US pints. Especially if it's lager.

Mine's a British pint, of bitter, please.

Cheers !

Nick