Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

MI5 spymasters axe intel database upgrade, pour '£90m' down drain

Re: And the other half the story....

How difficult could it have been to change the business logic from, "if irish = terrorist" to "if muslim = terrorist" ?

Re: As JC would say...

Although presumably without the follow-up customer service questionaire

Re: Strokes big fat pussy and laughs.

If memory serves - evil supervillians always seem to be very good at large project management.

You never saw the underground layer half covered in scaffolding because a contractor was late or a plot to blow up Fort Knox stopped because an IT system had been abandoned.

Perhaps it's the shark+laser beam based negotiating tactics - but government IT negotiating with CapGemini / IBM / Whatever-Anderson-Is-called-Today should probably be issued with a white cat and a nehru jacket

UK superfast broadband crew: EC competition bods are holding us up

Re: What has the EU do do with it anyway?

Because BT also bids on contracts in Europe and now because it has just been given a 300M quid subsidy (assuming typical 1005 cost overruns) it can go out and underbid on every other contract in Europe.

Suppose Germany decided it was going to subside the cost of manufacturing every car so they could be given away free - but the deal only applied to companies whose intials were V and W - would a worker in a Nissan plant in Sunderland have any reason to object?

Elon Musk and PayPal chum quit Zuckerberg's immigration gang

Re: some possible explanation [have I understood correctly?]

Surely - its just a connected series of internets for oil

Re: A free market in politicians

Surely in a free market economy you would just pay them for votes directly?

They could have advertised pricing and a loyalty card

New Ubuntu for phones due 'by end of May' – usable this time

Unix phone

I want a proper unix based phone.

With a keyboard, and an escape key

And a commandline where I can make a call with "call -n 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3" and add a contact with "vi /etc/phonebook"

Techies at The Onion: Here's how Syrian Electronic Army hacked our Twitter

But why?

Either they also target other major news sources's twitter feeds but none of them fell for the bait

Or - the Syrian inteligence agency is about as well informed as its opposite numbers in the CIA., M15 and RAC

Picture the scene; in a glass-whiteboard clad, moodily lit underground layer in Damascus:

General - our crack team of cyber ninja commandos have managed to penetrate the main news organisation of the western-facist-zionist-oppressors.

Abdul - I told you before, Fox is not a real news site it's a parody, try again.

No General - this time we have struck against "the onion", the one that revealed Kim Jong Ill to be the sexiest world leader.

Well done Abdul - have a medal.

The great $45m bank cyber-heist: Seven New Yorkers cuffed

$ Million

These days that hardly counts as a bank robbery.

The bankers were probably laughing and throwing money at them saying - Million? call that a bank robbery!

'Liberator': Proof that you can't make a working gun in a 3D printer

Re: Pens should be banned

Don't forget rabid badgers.

It's because of the lobbying efforts of the NRBA (National Rabid Badger Association) that there are no laws restricting carrying a concealed rabid badger

German govt DUMPS 170 NEW PCs riddled with Conficker

Re: Overkill?

In other news - the city council have ordered 100 new BMW's after the old ones ran out of petrol

UK MPs tell Google: Get back here and bring your auditors with you

Re: Take the 5th?

Or you could just do a Murdoch and not remember anything, or do a Murdoch sons and not know anything or the MP that said he didn't recognise their jurisdiction and refused to answer anything.

'Ultimate nerd chick’ prompts C64 clone cancellation

Re: Poor sod

> without a coherent and demonstrably viable plan on how he would deliver.

Should have applied to ycombinator instead then ?

Israeli activists tell Hawking to yank his Intel chips over Palestine

Re: Is it really surprising....

Same reason we didn't like South Africa - they look like us, so they make us feel guilty.

Black safars killing blacks safars = we don't care, white safars killing kaffirs = we boycott them

Brown bacon-dodgers killing arabs = we don't care, White bacon-dodgers killing arabs = we boycott them

Re: fair enough

>'Davros' comment may get you a few downvotes

Be a laugh to hack the voice synthesizer though wouldn't it

Re: So if you diss that Intel chip, you get a lawyergram by the Anti-Defamation League?

And America's missiles and space program were designed by "a lot of very clever engineers, scientists and academics" from Nazi Germany - funny old world isn't it ?

Google's cloud dumps custom Linux, switches to Debian

Re: Windows, Windows,

Sure - but everytime you spin up the instance you will have to run GenuineAdvantage and then phone India to get your licence re-authenticated

3D printed gun plans pulled after US State Department objects

Export regulations for this thing?

And yet I can find weapons of mass destruction (AKA pressure cookers) at the supermarket

HP knew Autonomy was a duff buy, claim HP shareholders in $1bn suit

No Shit Sherlock

Has there EVER been a $Bn acquisition on another IT company that actually made sense from a financial, rather than a CEO ego, point of view? ebay/skype, Hp/Autonomy, Google/Instagram etc

Don't use Google+? Tough, Google Glass will inject it INTO YOUR EYES

Re: But there ARE uses for this!

Sales people could work.

I go into PC-World-R-us and the glasses on the spotty 17year old would recognise me, check my MS-MVP and stackoverflow score and tell them to leave me alone because I'm only in there while the wife is looking at curtains next door

Queen's Speech: 'Problem of matching IP addresses' to be probed

Re: This "problem" will only get worse

What's so hard?

BT have a record of which customer was getting which packet, BT are more than happy to help the government by handing over any data , with or without a warrant.

A more serious IP problem is that it doesn't uniquely record which site you visited. Your machine access 100.200.100.200 to download a thumbnail from an advertiser on el'reg. That server also hosts the Grimethorpe Ferret Lovers secret photo archive - so the fair and wise ms May has a recordt hat you accesssed a site showing images of under-age ferrets

VTOL hybrid flying car promises the skies

Re: No Good Can Come From This

If your Ford Cortina conks out on the motorway it's considerably easier to pull onto the hard shoulder than if the rotors on this suddenly decide to stop at 2000ft

Watchdog: Y'know what Bitcoin really needs? A REGULATOR!

Exchanges operating in America, or with American owners could certainly fall under their jurisdiction.

\But between them trying to extend this because Americans use foreign exchanges, and a few media hungry senators wanting to do something about terrorist/drug smuggling/child porn dealing interwebtubes - there will probably be trouble.

Re: Any good currency...

So by that argument if Iceland had a bigger army they could have prevented their currency tanking after they decided to stop paying back what they had borrowed?

But they have also arrested foreign programmers, living and working outside America on foreign owned gambling websites who simply visited America - because the gambling site had American customers who were breaking US law.

If I was Mr Nakamoto I wouldn't be planing on changing planes in America anytime soon - especially if some senator decides that bitcoin is being used to fund terrorists, child porn or whatever the bogeyman of the month is.

>The problem is that the US can only regulate transactions that happen in the US.

Not if their attitude to online gambling is anything to go by.

They will happily snatch operators of bitcoin exchanges, programmers that ever worked on bitcoin and anyone who enabled americans to use bitcoin passing through their territory.

US Department of Defense fingers China as top cyber threat

Re: China involved in cyber-attacks

And yet if wikileaks had leaked this - it would be top secret military inteligence and treason.

Kiwis consider new spy laws in wake of Dotcom debacle

Re: It's pretty obvious...

> a known con artists and criminal,

And a great saving if you allow the secret services to investigate known con artists and criminals - without bothering with judges, warrants and police. In fact you could abolish the police altogether and just buy a job lot of black raincoats and rubber truncheons

How did something so small and pink cause so much trouble?

Re: Lack of direction

Yes it did - it wanted a way of having control over people.

It tied all the credit card, internet history, oyster card usage together for that "total law enforcement" policy

It was a way of stopping and searching random (non-white male youth) and then nipping them down to the station for a quick DNA sample if they had forgotten theirs.

It was a way for local councils to be able to pull up something suspicous about your internet history or mobile phone usage if you went to complain about the bins.

It was a way of checking if you were a striking miner on their way to a picket ( well it does take a while to implement these things)

It was of checking if this was a nice middle class boy at a demo whose daddy may cause a row, or a chav scum that can be given a good kicking.

US Navy builds master control for military drone ops

Science fiction

"Sailor controlling an Air Force unit's ... or a Marine controlling an Army "

I think you are more likely to have a joint Royal Navy / French Navy nuclear deterrent. Or a joint US/Russian infantry unit in Afghanistan - than you are having the Navy cooperate with the USAF or the Marines with the Army.

Google formally recognises Palestine: Puts it on the virtual map

Re: There is no such thing as Palestine!

Pretty much the same argument could be made about Great Britain

Or Roman-Scandanavian-Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Hanover Land (incorpoarating Wales, Scotland and Ireland (sometimes)) land - but that is rather a lot to put on a passport

NORKS powers down whole towns to find pirates

Re: Surely that's untrue?

>I think it's way more likely that this is simply propaganda

Or a leaked lobbying document by the MPAA

Dept o' Labor says US created more jobs than it thought this spring

Lies, damn lies and unemployment statistics

So 1000s of people on unpaid leave from Nasa don't count as unemployed.

But if one of them gives in and gets a job as a Walmart greeter that's a job 'created'

Suspected Chinese NASA spy smuggled smut not state secrets

Chinese rockets

Don't worry if you kick out all the Chinese there are still lots of Russian physics grad students.

Failing that - you can kidnap a few Nazi's

Well he was right

Senator Wolf 's press release (before the discovery) said:

"I am particularly concerned that (the) information (on Jiang's laptop) may pertain to the source code for high-tech imaging technology that Jiang has been working on with NASA. This information could have significant military applications for the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army."

Assuming a digital camera is a high-tech imaging device and Chinese squadies like jazz mags then he was technically correct.

Thousands rally behind teen girl cuffed, expelled in harmless 'explosion'

Re: unintended f*c*i*g consequences.

Guns are noble defenders of America's freedom - she was using science.

Science is only one step from godless commie atheism

Re: unintended f*c*i*g consequences.

Mentos and coke would be a weapon of mass destruction and a war crime

Fraudster gets ten years after selling fake 'ionic charge' bomb detectors

Re: 27k Golf ball finder anyone...?

Same way that somebody got a $bn contract for perve scanners at airports

Re: I disagree with most people here.

Presumably the people who sold Nimrod and Chinooks to the UK and Exocets to the Argentinians will get a rather longer sentance.

Move over Radeon, GeForce – Intel has a new graphics brand: Iris

Re: Promises, promises

> Why is this?

Because the drivers are written by the guy sweeping up after those working on bleeding edge CPU's, NAND, lithography and so forth

Forget choice: 50% of firms will demand you BYOD by 2017

Re: but what about....

Then you buy it yourself, only use it for work and claim it back on tax.

If you are really clever (or an MP) you buy it yourself from a cheap chinese site, lease it to yourself at 100x the cost (using your offshore holding company) and claim the lease costs back against tax

'Chinese' attack sucks secrets from US defence contractor

Congratualtions

On getting any useful information out of qinetiq - we never managed to while working on a joint project with them.

Not that we wanted to work with them, but anybody doing any sort of high-tech defence project in the UK is 'encouraged' to partner with them. It's fantastic, all the red tape and inefficiency of Soviet era bureaucracy but you get to pay them lots of money.

NASA boffins: Space 'scope JUST missed dead Cold War spy sat

In other overblown hysteria

I was travelling to work this morning when I recieved an automated signal from the TRAFFIC (will think of contrived acronym later) light which suggested that 30tons of truck would be intercepting my orbit off the sliproad which would have resulted in a massive collision.

Fortunately my car was equipped with a kinetic energy to heat transferal system intended to reduce my orbital velocity into the parking space at the end of the mission/commute

The decision was taken to initiate a BRAKE (acronym to follow) manouver and the truck passed ahead of me missing by mere meters (a gnats hair on a canadian scale)

Brit horologist hammers out ‘first’ ATOMIC-POWERED watch

Re: I happen to have experience transporting radioactive material across international borders.

>My Tritium keyring from El Reg never so much as raised an eyebrow.

Was it under 2oz and did you put it in the magic terrorist-proof clear plastic bag?

Barnes & Noble bungs Raspberry Pi-priced Nook on shelves

Re: So, they're making a loss ...

They don't even have to make a profit on the books - they may just be trying to postpone the day that an all powerful Amazon crushes them.

Google 'will be pulled back in front of MPs' on its UK tax affairs

In the blue corner ....

MPs are going to 'name and shame' Google by publishing the details of it's tax avoidance in a parliamentary committee reported in Hansard paragraph2, subsection3, clause 4.....

In the red corner :

Google are going to splash details of MPs (perfectly legitimate) tax avoidance and creative expenses claims all over ... the internet.

Feds want to fine companies that refuse wiretap requests

Re: Dangerous thinking ..

Ironically the safest place to put your data would now be on a cloud server owned by a Cuban/Iranian/Russian company