Posts by druck

Physical size of data

"Even 25 years ago, who could have possibly thought this is a safe way to send private information about 25 million people?"

25 years ago, all you would have got in an envelope is a few sheets of paper. The physical storage medium able to contain 25 million records would be the size of a suitcase, and a few years before that the size of a room. Now you can put millions of records on a laptop, CD, DVD, or memory stick the size of your thumb, and lose it in an instant.

Systems should be designed so there is no way copying of vast amounts of data on to portable media. If it needs to be physically transported instead of transferred over secure encrypted comms links, there should only be one place it can be done, and whatever medium is used on should be contained in a lock box changed the arm of a security guard for every second of the journey.

Health and Safety

Its a very small consolation that the it hasn't been a complete whitewash and the Met have been held legally responsible for running an out of control death squad on the streets of Britain. But how pathetic the only way it could be achieved was under the legislation that's designed to give a company a mild slap on the wrist for not putting up a sign saying lifting heavy objects may give you a bad back.

The individuals concerned in this chain of tragedy that need to be held to account, and not in the least Ian Blair for the outrageous lies and attempted cover up. He should be stripped of his job and his title immediately. Otherwise we can have no confidence in this country's police force, and the real victory goes to the terrorists.

Tricky

I wouldn't like to tackle that job without a bit of preparation - a buckled solar panel with sharp spacesuit puncturing edges and high voltage running through it. The astronauts will certainly be earning their money if they fix that one.

Bungs

I bet he also had to bung the officials for entry/exit visa's, and again at customs, and leave rather a large tip for the police for recovering him too. If there's one thing more effective than the 419 boys, its the official corruption.

On the database

Practically everyone with a passport will be on the database to some extent, but they will only have limited information (i.e. only what has always been necessary) for those that renewed before the interrogation centres opened, and they wont have biometrics such as fingerprints.

I refuse to have my fingerprints taken like a common criminal, which of course is exactly what the government intends to make me if I refuse. Looks like they will have to release a few more foreign murderers to make room for me, and no doubt a few others like me, in prison.

10 years?

I don't suppose that coincides with the end of subsidies and tax breaks used to encourage the plant to set up there in the first place?

No more TLD

We don't need any more TLDs, they are just a licence to print money for the registrars and cybersquatters, and a waste of everyone else's time having to check countless thousands of similar names to your company across umpteen TLDs, most of which no one has ever heard of or will ever find any legitimate use for.

Re: To be honest about the $100

Mark, €120 - wash your mouth out. It would be the £100 laptop.

Which includes an extra Rip Off Britain surcharge of £9 at today's exchange rate.

TV phone in scams

I look forward to a similar survey in the UK, the TV phone in scams will have tricked far more of our home grown idiots than even the internet.

Not even SD

"not-quite-HD 940 x 540"

You mean not even SD, given that PAL is 576 line.

419ers

Its only fair that the whole of Africa is given the opportunity to get in on the 419 business.

Not even SD?

A quick search reveals some sites are quoting a resolution of 852x480 which isn't even SD PAL. There aren't many 1080 LCDs in that size but almost all claiming to be HD are 768p.

Re: title

Someone with numbers for a name wrote: "Doesn't it have to be believable for it to be libel: if I were to claim that Bill Gates was intent on taking over the universe then it would hardly be libel, since no-one in thier right minds would believe that."

..it wasn't the gods honest trueth?

Buggered

Forget all the new features and .NET crap, have they fixed any of the vast quantities of bugs that makes VS2005 such a pain in the arse to use for native C++ on Win32 and WinMobile?

My solution to driving, flying and everything.

I got my PPL just over a year ago, it was bloody hard work, but the most enjoyable thing I've ever done. So my solution to driving, flying and everything, would be to get rid of the driving licence and require everyone to get a pilots licence, after which they would be entitled to a free flying car.

This would mean the vast majority of drivers wouldn't be allowed behind the wheel ever again (and not before time), and forced to use the bus and the train, like the government wants, but without punitive motoring taxes, stupid reduced speed limits and other congestion making measures. As for the skies, there would probably be about double the number of aircraft, but only when the sun is out - the instrument rating is harder still!

Re: Cost

How about the cost of signing up all 130,000 potential fraud victims to credit monitoring agencys?

Deliberately crap

They might not be patting themselves on the back when the new chip based passports all start failing due in a couple of years because the chip isn't guaranteed to last 10 years.

Or will they?

As this will then force all of us who've renewed early to try to avoid the ID card scheme for as long as possible, to have to come back in for the interrogation and fingerprinting like the common criminals we are all now deemed to be.

@SpitefulGOD

A typical hotmail user if there ever was one, and exactly why no one should give a frig if mail doesn't gets through to them. Now if only Microsoft would block them from sending any mail, the world would be a better place.

Re: Hmm

RISC OS (the evolution of the OS first featured in the BBC Micro) has always been in ROM and instantly available. It's the OS the PFY's Archimedes, although we are 5 generations on from those machines now.

No HD on Freeview

I'm still on analogue, receiving 4 and a half channels (1 to 4 in perfect digital artefact free analogue, and slightly fuzzy 5) and not even watching all of those, there is mould growing on button 3 of my remote. The only real reason for me to switch to digital is if they offered HD content, but with the government committed to selling off the necessary spectrum for a quick buck, and Sky looking to buy it to prevent that happening, it doesn't look like we will ever get free to air HD content.

Come fly with me

Long gone are the days when anyone who wanted was invited up to the cockpit for a tour by the friendly captain. These days travelling by commercial airlines is one of the worst experiences you can subject yourself too, from the ridiculous overbearing security at airports, massive invasions of privacy (passenger flight data sent god knows where, being finger printed in the US and soon to be Terminal 5), then spending hours stuck in cramped seats before going through it all again at the other end.

If you want to look out of the front of a plane and really enjoy the experience of flying, get yourself along to your nearest general aviation airfield, for a pleasure flight or a trial lesson. You'll never want to go near a spam can airliner again.

Responsibilities of the job

Responsibilities of the job will include:-

1) Artificially inflating ID fraud numbers by including all card holder not present fraud and various internet scams.

2) Selling the governments ID card scheme, despite having no answer on how it can tackle card holder not present fraud and various internet scams.

3) Making the case for further erosion of privacy by wholesale data sharing with in government and to unaccountable private firms with abysmal security records.

No previous experience of fraud prevention, civil liberties or data security required.

Why indeed

x86 in phones is a sick joke, just the decode unit to convert the worlds worst instruction set in to something remotely executable is larger than an entire ARM based system on chip. The only way it will ever be competitive for mips/watt is if Intel manage to prevent any ARM designs being made on fab plants newer than 2 generations ago.

160 lying marketing GB?

Leo Waldock writes: "We saw that the 160GB drive has 144.63GB available capacity which is considerably less than we'd expect, even allowing for formatting the drive and the cut-down version of Mac OS X that the Apple TV runs."

The size of the drive is likely to be quoted in lying marketing GB (10^9 bytes) where as the unit itself no doubt displays the free space in proper true GB (2^30 bytes). So in proper GB the drive has a true capacity of 149GB of which less than 4.4GB is used.

Re: Crime Pays

No, £762,935.87 was just for one month, they've been doing it for over 2 years so the amount scammed is probably around £2m. Now, what idiot set a cap on the fine? It should be the amount scammed and then some, or its pointless even taking it to court.

Oops the plug fell out.

IT systems may be of vital importance when you are retailer trying to sell things over the internet, or offering online banking services in normal times. But when tens of thousands of people are trying to get their money out, threatening to send the bank under, having the plug accidentally fall out the back of the web server so they have to go an queue up in the rain outside the branch, isn't such a bad thing. It would be a real pain in the arse if your disaster recover system kept everything going then.

Dust off that old modem

If you still use your old dial up account's mailbox from your new broadband account, its only reasonable to dust off that old modem every so often and make a 10 second connection, to ensure the account is marked as active. At least you'll know then you have some sort of working backup should your ADSL/cable suddenly go down the tubes.

Re: ...a typically response

Quinnum from inside his own unique reality bubble writes:

"The MS developers are just ordinary hacks like you or I trying to work for a living, not deliberately setting out to destroy the world."

No, that's what Microsoft management are for.

Of course they are only only supporting Windows and a token Mac version just to pretend its cross platform, while deliberately ignoring anything that might be real competition to the desktop monopoly.

Hardly progress

$200K for sub orbital jaunt back to where you started, hardly progress. A fraction of that used to buy a flight on Concorde which actually got you to somewhere, flying at a height on the "edge of space", and I'm sure they could have chucked in a bit of zero G if the passengers really wanted it.

Come back when you can make orbit - that's proper space.

Rip off

I suggest everyone cancels their contract as matter of principle. Its a huge rip off charging a premium for these numbers which are often the only ones easily obtainable for many companies, and the calls on which you are likely to be kept on hold for the longest.

Let O2 beg you to remain with them, and don't accept until they've offered a substantially lower tariff, a new phone, and no excessive contract lock in.

Been there done that

Exactly the same technique was being used to create pseudo 3D on the BBC Micro back in 1983 or there abouts. The refresh on this system is a bit higher, but people still don't like wearing glasses to watch TV.

Dripping Sarcasm

Wow wrote: "Regardless, your dripping sarcasm is uncalled for. "

This is The Register, dripping sarcasm is always call for. Its the site's bread and butter, or rather bread and dripping.

Ferrari Home Basic

Ferrari Home Basic: http://perso.orange.fr/minismodels/autos/ferrari_doucet/chassis1.jpg

Absolute madness

I can see absolutely no legitimate reason for anonymous SMS apart from abuse, which even ICSTIS acknowledge in their consultation document. Any technological safeguards will be circumvented and SMS will be degraded from a fairly trustworthy system to no better than that of spam swamped email.

Surely ICTSIS has enough to do with TV quiz lines ripping people off left right and centre, without having to try to create an entirely new mess to step in an regulate?

I suggest everyone fires off a message to mcollins@icstis.org.uk telling him what a truly stupid idea this is.

phpBB spam bots

We used to have a huge problem with spam bots on our phpBB forum. They were able to defeat the captcha mechanism easily and either make spam posts to the forums, or more commonly just create users and leave spam links in the URL field. Which I assume they do so the user list page gets indexed by search engines.

However, a couple of months ago we upgraded the forum software and installed the Anti-Spam mod from Lithium Studios. Since then we've not had one spammer get through to either the forums or the user list, which is a welcome relief.

Counter infection

Microsoft are probably trying to infect open source projects with their own code. For example; release some code which supposedly helps interoperability with some Microsoft protocol, wait for some ill-advised coder to incorporate it in to a true open source project, wait a bit longer for some large corporations to start using it, then threaten them with a law suit over some supposed violation of the Microsoft licence, unless they immediately switch over the the Microsoft product.

Road Pricing means bye bye GPS

Hopefully they'll find out just how easy it is to block GPS, and perhaps realise that if GPS based road pricing is introduced and everyone has an incentive to jam it, it wont be long before all users of GPS will find it just doesn't work any more.