Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

US.gov - including NASA et al - quits internet. Is the UN running it now?

Re: Who knows...

Suppose you had a contract with one of the big 3 suppliers.

And you hadn't negotiated an upfront price for "government close down pages" and you were forced to have one - how much do you think they would charge ?

500 MEELLION PCs still run Windows XP. How did we get here?

Re: Not The Whole Story

Yes but these aren't "embedded" embedded, they are regular PCs running CNC machines, assembly lines, weather stations, alarm systems etc etc - lots of machines that people have forgotten about, central IT don't know exist and might be on the internet

BlackBerry ripped itself apart wooing CIOs AND iPhone fanbois - insiders

It's very hard for a company that makes hardware to give up being a "real company that makes things" for being a mere service provider.

Google: Thanks for the billions in revenue, UK. Here are your taxes, that's ... £11m

Re: Bears, Pope and so on

c) say that if you aren't paying any taxes in this country you can't use any of it's services.

NSA in new SHOCK 'can see public data' SCANDAL!

re: social media is public

Assuming you friended the NSA !

Crack down on childporn?

So now who has the worlds biggest collection of under-age self photographs then.

Don't wait up for BBM on iPhone, Android – BlackBerry

Re: Paranoid explanation

Message to engineering staff:

Half of you are fired, the other half will be redundant in a month when the lawyers take over.

Now we need you to all concentrate on getting this revolutionary new bit of complex enterprise software out of the door.

Now CEOs will be going on a retreat to Hawaii to find out why employee moral is low.

Re: Are you kidding me.....

With the added benefit of sharing all your corporate plans with Google, and all their advertisers, and the NSA, and all their freinds.

Chinese building orbital lab by 2023 to make 'space medicine'

Re: named after a goddess?

Not as ironic as the head of a hippie-Jesus church asking him to bless a nuke sub and all who sail in her!

Re: Research? Better get the launch costs down first...

There is a slight difference between getting to space and getting to orbit.

The small matter of accelerating 21,000MPH and then slowing again.

Rare gold iPhone 5s goes up against 50 caliber high precision rifle

Re: As a point of fact

There are zero recorded incidents of a nuclear weapon being used in the commission of a crime - but the fuss that the local police make when you try and build one ....

Reg readers! You've got 100 MILLION QUID - what would you BLOW it on?

Buy (£29) South Yorkshire

Re: Simple:

Wouldn't invisible ninjas in combination with a monorail lead to a large number of industrial accidents ?

Evil super-villian workplace safety regulations would require your ninjas to wear hi-vis jackets

French data cops to Google: RIGHT, you had your chance. PUNISHMENT time

Re: Are they splitting hairs?

They can advertise to users without breaking the law.

VW sends me ads, it knows a bought a car from them and might buy another. It does not need to track everywhere I drive, who I am with, who I talk to and what shopping I put in my VW to do that.

They pulled out of china because of US political pressure and their image with their US customers - "Advertise with Google, the company that sends more users to concentration camps than any other search engine"

Standing up at a US company meeting and saying: "we are handing Europe back to Microsoft because they wont let us spy on customers there, don't be evil (tm)". Is hardly going to go down as well.

Microsoft keeps Skype content safe from police data slurping - for now

That's a relief then

It's not like the NSA would share their access to the data with law enforcement without a warrant.

London schoolboy cuffed for BIGGEST DDOS ATTACK IN HISTORY

Re: 24hrs later

Really ? Most of us just read it for the pictures

Thorium and inefficient solar power? That's good enough for me

Re: Cause for concern

If it has a half-life of 10^5 years you don't need to get rid of it - the activity is so low you can use it as landfill

30 years on: The day a computer glitch nearly caused World War III

Re: Some things are not clear to me...

Hence - the most dangerous thing in any army = " a 2nd lieutenant with a compass"

Re: The Soviets claimed the flight was a spying mission, but it was ... off course

In this case the US spyplane was a KC135 (ie 707) electronic eavesdropper rather than an SR71 - which they would never have been able to catch anyway.

The logs between the fighter pilots and their control are interesting, along the lines of "shoot down a civil airliner over neutral waters - are you serious?", very similar to the US fighters intercepting airliners after 9/11.

Re: I know, I know...

Nobody is saying the USSR were nice, or even that Stalin was noticeably better than Hitler.

But that in the 40s and 50s the USA had a very different idea about the desirability, winnability, and impact of a WWIII than the Russians - is pretty well accepted in military history.

The good side of this was that the USSR was less keen on hosting Stalingrad-2 than the USA was on performing Hiroshima-the sequel. The bad side was that it led to a Soviet high command so paranoid that many believed WWII had been a setup between UK/USA/Nazi against them and the UK vs Germany was a mere side show for forms sake.

Re: The Soviets claimed the flight was a spying mission, but it was ... off course

It's also what NATO did with civilian aircraft and ships at the time.

Trawlers used to leave Hull for the Arctic with more antennea than fish

The Korean aircraft was unlucky that there WAS an American spy plane following close behind it that night watching a soviet missile test but the Americans forgot to inform the airliner that it was off course.

Apple Maps directs drivers INTO path of ONCOMING PLANES

Re: Highway to heaven...

Presumably the TSA will now check the motorists for nail clippers and make them put 2oz bottles of eye drops into plastic bags - before allowing them onto the runway ?

EasyJet wanted to fling me off flight for diss tweet, warns cyber-law buff

Re: Optional

I just edited it out - should have replaced it with an ad for one of the internet's more gynecological offerings

I did offer to help them look for one once - I mean it weighs 60tons and is bright Orange, can't be too hard.

Their standard "delay less than 30mins" claim when they can't say if it's taken off from the last destination yet.

Oracle sued over $33,000 bill for SaaS: STRIPPERS as a SERVICE

Re: Usually 'Joint and Several'

The club accepted the card in good faith, they trusted the American Express and Oracle names on the card.

There is no question that the card was genuine and the holder was entitled to it.

Why is the store liable for Oracle's internal expenses policy?

If I buy a big screen TV and my wife says no - I can't just refuse to pay Best Buy because the expense wasn't authorised.

Radiation snatched from leaky microwave ovens to power gadgets

Re: How about .....

Batteries are large and in a limited range of shapes

They need mechanical contacts cause pollution, are difficult to recycle and mean you get hit with all sorts of extra packaging/labelling/shipping/disposal requirements.

If you wanted to print a disposable sensor with electronic polymers and only need a tiny bit of juice this could be useful

Circling the RIM: BB10 becomes chamber of horrors for BlackBerry

Re: Campaign for real English words...

Prosumer for a high valued user who demands highest performance but is paying for the device themselves rather than having it supplied to them seems a perfectly valid, precise and useful term.

If you want to criticize misused words - "Professional" is from to profess or swear to become part of a guild - not something that even the most hardened of developers do. Consumer is from to consume, to eat up or to destroy - which is perhaps more accurate.

UK.gov's e-Borders zombie still lurks under the English Channel

Re: Let's face it, they're stuffed.

It used to be a lot more common in the 60s/70s when planes landed at Shannon to refuel

Somebody would get off the plane from which ever 3rd world country was currently being fscked, claim asylum and be given an Irish passport and a bus ticket to Dublin ferry terminal pretty much on the spot.

There is a fascinating bio of an irish civil servant where he explains the Father Ted-ness of Irish politics in the era.

Re: Schengen

I don't think a passport will be required for visiting Birmingham

Of course if they ever build the extension to Leeds then they will need a way to keep people out

Re: Let's face it, they're stuffed.

You can't "close the border" ...due to the fact that it was originally the same country.

There are probably a few Germans who would disagree

RSA: That NSA crypto-algorithm we put in our products? Stop using that

Re: On the bright side...

VmWare is a large US company that relies on lots of government sales and contracts - of course you can trust them ;-)

Re: So closed source solution * NSA championed algoritm * default option * slow =

If you were a suit would you pick a solution from the world's most trusted supplier of security products. With the initials of the guys that invented public-key encryption (sort of).

Or would you trust your business to some communist free stuff off the internet written by hackers in Russia or Oregon or somewhere?

Which would you choose tomorrow?

First casualty?

If RSA knowingly published a weakened crypto system for 5 years and are only now admitting it - how many of their other libraries are compromised?

It's not like the NSA ceased being naughty in 2007.

Why would anyone continue to use any RSA product?

I know Microsoft and Goolge also cooperated - but it's impractical for a company to drop them. But the only point of buying security products from a company like RSA is trust - if you can't trust them then why buy it?

Re: Maybe the clue's in the name?

Yes - you would be much better using a hardware random number generator. Like the one Intel builds into it's chips and which the NSA also "helped design" and which Intel won't let you see the details of ....

BlackBerry inks deal to go private for $4.7bn

Re: Nice one, fellas

And they didn't exactly help themselves.

Apple might take 40% of your app sales, but at least they have a way of you getting 60%

Between BB's appalling tools, their flip-flopping on native vs flash and their announcements of a new OS which would make all your existing app development obsolete - just we aren't telling you when or what in advance. And a development sign up process that seemed like something out of an adventure game - they didn't make it easy for people.

If their business model was that BBM was the only app that was really going to be supported on their phones - they should have just said so.

Steve Jobs' boyhood home may become protected historical shrine

Re: Museum

The HP founding garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto is a historical site .

Given that it's arguably the birth place of silicon valley it seems reasonable - whatever you think of their pricing of printer ink.

Re: Twaddle

the TL;DR version:-

The American dream

Shopping list for Tesco: Eggs, milk, bread, tablets (the £60 7in Android kind)

Re: not in scotland

You mean the wee-frees whose website is closed on Sundays?

No, I've never heard of them and certainly wasn't being ironic.

Re: not in scotland

That's because Scotland doesn't have a bunch of radical Presbyterian fundamentalists - like the CoE

Re: Childish Names

Tell me about it. We have a new company name from an expensive branding agency which "envisions the qualities of ...." whatever the company is about.

The fact that it's a made up word they could get the .com for is completely coincidental

Hardbitten NYC cops: Sir, I'm gonna need you to, er, upgrade to iOS 7

Re: New York must be a Utopia or something

>major property crimes

Steal a wallet with $10 at gun point, nobody cares

Steal an iPhone worth $500.01 and it counts toward the crime statistics.

So the Police cheif gets fired because "major" crime went up.

Re: NYPD desperate to cut Apple crime

So the police shoudl just shoot fanbois - a win for everyone

Re: Absolutely Ridiculous

Ok punk hand over your wallet and your phone.

Is it an iPhone?

Now go to system->about->version, Oh I see it's 7.01, well I want be able to use that, here have your phone back sorry to have bothered you.

Latest Snowden reveal: It was GCHQ that hacked Belgian telco giant

Re: "trouble spots such as Yemen and Syria"

> I will admit salad cream is still better.

Salad cream was invented as a way of detecting Fench spies:

"Here have some salad"

"Zank you very much Mr Fellow English Person"

"Now put this on it"

"Argghh non - I admit it I'm French, please don't make me eat that...."

Axe falls: Virgin Media plans to kill 600 management jobs

Re: Virgin Mobile have staff?

Always seemed a brilliant business proposition.

Hello Mr boring 3rd tier bank/airline/phone company - nobody has ever heard of you on the internet, so buy some of the Virgin brand. All the cool kids will go there and every time beardy does something daft in a balloon you get the publicity.

You understand how to run a bank/airline/phone company -we understand how to keep the brand in the headlines - everybody wins.

Virgin Mobile have staff?

I though VM, like all beardy's other businesses was just a marketing front end for another major player?

Here VM is just Rogers for the cool kids at a lower price.

Wasn't it the same for Virgin Megastores, Money and airline?

USB 3.1 demo shows new spec well on its way towards 1.2GB/sec goal

Re: So what will they call USB 3.1?

After impossible speed ?

You have to go to plaid

One of last few iPhone 5Ss STOLEN from within MASSIVE POLICE CORDON at Apple Store

Re: Gold, Silver, Bronze or ... Silver versus low rent?

Back in the day of real cameras the makers would charge a premium for the black version over the silver.

People thought the black one looked more professional - and people would rather look like a paparazzi than just some rich idiot that bought the latest fashionable shiny toy