Posts by Stephen White

Drunk driving: No more dangerous than talking on handsfree mobe

Erm, in what way does their research suggest drink driving should be made legal rather than banning all use of mobile telephony by the driver (hands-free or not)? It suggests both increase the risk for the occupants of the vehicle and innocent third parties.

Benchmarks are $%#&@!!

jumped?

"jumps", otherwise the sentence lacks an 's'.

BOFH: Key performance undertakers

Episode 16

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/27/bofh_2009_episode_16/

Seems not to be linked from http://www.theregister.co.uk/odds/bofh/ though

MS honeypot research sheds light on brute-force hacks

Re: #!comment:

Obviously many attackers are using a well known password.lst file as the basis of their attacks.

This file starts:

#!comment: This list has been compiled by Solar Designer of Openwall Project,

#!comment: http://www.openwall.com/wordlists/

#!comment:

#!comment: This is a list of passwords most commonly seen on a set of Unix

#!comment: systems in mid-1990's, sorted for decreasing number of occurrences

#!comment: (that is, more common passwords are listed first).

#!comment:

#!comment: Last update: 2005/12/16 (3107 entries)

or similar, then has a list of passwords.

So I think that there may be a certain amount of "parsing fail" on the part of the attackers, they're treating the comment lines at the top of the file as entries and using them as the basis for break-in attempts in addition to the proper entries in the file.

House key copied from photo

Surely the real news here is ...

that people think this is news?

Five misunderstood Vista features

I couldn't agree more about OEMs

An aquantance bought a cheap desktop (can't remember the brand) from PC World. It had 1GB of RAM and Vista installed. It was configured to allocate 256MB of this precious RAM to the graphics chipset, leaving just 0.75GB for Vista (complete with Norton and other bundleware). A totally inappropriate setting for a system with only 1GB of RAM in the first place! Ok, if you're a gamer you might want 256MB (or more) of RAM on your graphics card, but a gamer is hardly likely to be using the graphics chipset built onto a cheapo mobo are they?

Come on OEMs, you can do better.

EU slaps 'Davros tax' on mobility scooters

Well if they drive them on motorways ...

Maybe it was the driver in Hampshire that drove his disability buggy onto the M27 that prompted HMRC to think "Well if they're going to use them on motorways then they must be cars"... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/6742503.stm