Posts by Richard 1

Weird flex but OK... Motorola's comeback is a $1,500 Razr flip-phone with folding 6.2" screen

I think Motorola are on to something.

I think Motorola are on to something with the new, foldable Razr. It's half the size of a normal smart phone and it folds open to the normal size of a smart phone. I think this is much more useful to the average person than a smartphone that opens into something even bigger. I don't want a smartphone/tablet in my pocket. I want something small that I can use like my normal smartphone. That said, it's far too expensive for most people and it only has mid-range specifications for the price.

Apple kills iTunes, preps pricey Mac Pro, gives iPad its own OS – plus: That $999 monitor stand

Breakneck speed!

Notice how he rattled through those prices at breakneck speed? Probably to prevent people being able to boo any individual price. By the time people were booing about the price of the monitor stand he'd moved on by three products.

Bug-hunter reveals another 'make me admin' Windows 10 zero-day – and vows: 'There's more where that came from'

Easy to find.

If this person is going to sell vulnerabilities then I would assume that she will quickly become of interest to various government agencies. She wouldn't be too hard to find as she's happily posting her destinations. A quick delta of flights into the local areas of her treks should quickly narrow down the list of perps.

Big Tech leapt on the blockchain bandwagon but its applications are stuck in cryptocurrency

Why do they call them cryptocurrencies when it's nigh on impossible to actually spend them on anything? What use is a currency that you can't spend in the real world? Shouldn't they be called cryptocommodity?

At least Sony offered a t-shirt, says macOS flaw finder: Bug bounties now for Macs if you want this 0-day, Apple

Sell to the highest bidder.

If someone finds a flaw in software/OS/website/etc. then would it be illegal to sell that flaw to the highest bidder? What law would be breaking, if any?

If my assumption above is correct then it makes absolute sense to reward researchers for finding flaws and reporting them although they would have to be careful not to get into a bidding war with more nefarious buyers?

What's 23 times the size of Earth, uncomfortably warm – and has astroboffins excited?

What happens if they find a planet between b and c at a later day?!

Trump pulls trigger in US-China tit-for-tat tariff tiff: 10% slapped on $200bn of imported kit

Re: Kerplunk

Don't you mean that he suffers from dyscalculia?

Apple in XS new sensation: Latest iPhone carries XS-sive price tag

I only came here to watch the Android/Apple fanbois fight it out.

Infamous 'Dancing Baby' copyright battle settled just before YouTube tot becomes a teen

Not a total loss.

Of course, while the courts never really reached a decision, the copyrights holder would have paid thousands in lawyers and gained nothing in return. That, in itself, is a bloody nose for one copyright holder and others will take notice.

The hits keep coming for Facebook: Web giant made 14m people's private posts public

Upload your private pics and we'll keep them safe.

Didn't Facebook recently offer to allow people to upload their private, saucy pictures to prevent them being posted on Facebook? Let's just hope they're more careful with their stash of naughty snaps...

Facebook has open-sourced encrypted group chat

Who really needs level of secrecy?!

As above, who really needs this level of secrecy? You shouldn't have your messages snooped through but if you're putting this much effort into keeping your conversation secret then I struggle to see what you're doing that isn't nefarious.

$10bn Oracle v Google copyright jury verdict: Google wins, Java APIs in Android are Fair Use

Re: @tekHedd - I haven't downvoted a post in a long time...

Meaningful error messages are the responsibility of the coder of the software, not the language used?! The developer should put something that makes sense in the 'Exception e' before passing it on. That way, something comes out that makes sense. The stack trace is actually really helpful as well, if you know what you're looking at. ;)

Official UN panel findings on embassy-squatter released. Assange: I'm 'vindicated'

Hang on a second. Commit a crime in a foreign country, get an European Arrest Warrant out for you, wander into a third foreign embassy, claim your being detained against your will, and then the UN will say you can walk out a free man. In what crazy brain does that make sense? How far from the embassy can he walk before the arrest warrant should be respected and he gets arrested, or can he just walk freely around the UK without any concerns of being arrested? Who wants to go raping and pillaging in Sweden? We just pop back to the UK before they catch us and it's all good!

eBay scammer steals identity of special agent investigating him

His balls were WAY bigger than his brain. Full credit to him for turning minor criminality into potentially a lengthy prison term.

Working with Asperger's in tech: We're in this together

Re: Asperger's has been very good to me

Disable --> Enable

Disability --> Enability?!

Perhaps it's time for a new word in the English language?

An excellent article that really helps NTs to understand and see the world from an Aspies perspective. Thanks for sharing. :)

Airplane HACK PANIC! Hold on, it's surely a STORM in a TEACUP

Re: Times sure have changed

As we all know from films, bombs are always fitted with blinking lights. Without blinking lights they are completely harmless.

Carders crack Hard Rock casino

Casinos or not?!

Article title: "Carders crack Hard Rock casino"

Within the article: "The casino and hotels are unaffected."

Make your mind up. Did it affect the casinos or not?

Ransomware crims drop Bitcoin faster than Google axes services

Online works fine, if you've got a brain.

I use Google Drive for my online backup. I have just under 170GB stored on there. I would know within minutes if someone was encrypting my important files because the Drive icon would start showing that files were being uploaded as they've changed. I don't stare at the icon incessantly but I do notice if it's up to something. Anything encrypting my files would be quickly identified and the system would be cleaned/re-installed immediately.

Wham, bam... premium rate scam: Grindr users hit with fun-killing charges

£1 per second? I don't think so.

According to Ofcom, the most expensive call you can make in the UK is £2.60 per minute from a landline and £2.50 per minute from a mobile. I always enjoy these "I was charged £2,500 per millisecond" claims. No, you weren't. You must have been on the call for quite some time for your £30,000 phone bill. ;)

Big Blue stuffs data into backup at GIGABYTES/sec

TSM isn't an acronym. It's an abbreviation.

</pedant>

Britain's HUMAN DNA-strewing Moon mission rakes in £200k

Link to the kickstarter?

Any chance of a link to the kickstarter page? That would be just swell...

Bitcoin is great and safe, says, er, the Bitcoin Foundation

Avoid hyperinflation?!

Avoid hyperinflation? Are you retarded?

December 31, 2012 - 1 BTC = $13.41

November 26, 2013 - 1 BTC = $979.54 (7,300% increase in less than 12 months)

Today - 1 BTC = $333.97

If you consider Bitcoin an actual currency (which, personally, I don't) then you'd have to be mental to invest in this market.

'Could we please not have naked developers running around the office BEFORE 10pm?'

Fecundity?

I had to look the word up. I still have no idea what he meant, though...

Netflix releases home-grown DDoS detectors

What's a dectector?

Sounds interesting. What's a dectector?

IT blokes: would you say that lewd comment to a man? Then don't say it to a woman

Sceptical.

I, like a number of people that have put a comment on here, have never seen this kind of behaviour at a conference or, in fact, anywhere else in the IT industry. What kind of conferences is she attending?! The only way I can imagine a normal IT person acting even remotely like this is if they were totally smashed, but who drinks like that at a conference (or workplace?)

I know plenty of men that can be idiots. However, blurting "I've got a hard on" to a random woman in a semi-professional environment. Sorry, I'm sceptical.

Of course, I've only working the UK so maybe things are a bit different elsewhere, where men don't have a sense of decency or self-control?

Manhattan drone pair cuffed for NYPD chopper near miss

"The NYPD helicopter spotted the vehicle flying at around 240m (800ft), and say that at one point the pilot "had to veer off course to avoid being struck by the drone"."

That seems to imply to me that the chopper saw the drone and flew towards it then had to veer off course to avoid being struck. Surely, if they fly over to something then it's their fault if there is nearly a collision?

Sounds like a trumped up charge to me. Seems to be the American way.

PANDA chomps through Spotify's DRM

Re: Use spotify myself

Erm... if you have NowTV then you should have a TV license. NowTV allows you to watch on-demand as well as tv shows as they're being broadcast. I'm pretty sure you'd fall foul of the law if they came knocking on your door. Whether you say you don't want the broadcast stuff or not doesn't matter. It's the fact that you could.

UK cops: Keep yer golden doubloons, ad folk. Yon websites belong to pirates

Seriously?

Right. So we're going to ask the good ol' chaps at big advertising companies to grow a conscience and avoid sites that peddle pirate software, even if it brings in great click-throughs? Yeah, good luck with that one. What about companies with international holdings? Why would they care about a site in a different company with copyright infringing material?

MtGox boss vows to keep going despite $429m Bitcoin 'theft'

Got what they deserved.

Anyone stupid enough to 'invest' in something like Bitcoin has frankly got what they deserve. How many mathematically based applications have stood the test of time? MD5? DES? Even the seemingly best (mathematical) ideas have flaws that come to light and how can you base financial transactions on something that cannot be trusted? We've already seen a number of flaws in the past couple of years and even the anonymous nature of Bitcoin makes it inherently dangerous to use as a financial mechanism - if someone steals your money then how the hell do you ever prove who did it and get it back? I believe the phrased "a fool and his money are soon parted" fits well here.

REVEALED: How YOU PAY extra for iPHONES - even if you DON'T HAVE ONE

Re: Who is to blame here?

Erm... except that the iPhone 5c wasn't actually all that cheap? It looked cheap but was expensive. That needs to be the other way round, really - looks expensive, is cheap.

Apple shoots self in foot?

As you've all pointed out, if a mobile carrier doesn't carry Apple products then customers will take their custom elsewhere to a carrier that does... except there will be a break over point whereby the loss of having to pay for phones that never get sold costs more than the lost customers through not carrying Apple products. If you alienate your market then you're going to find yourself in a terminal decline as other carriers decide not to carry your product through either excessive price gouging or lack of interest due to the declining availability of the iDevices.

Supermodel Lily Cole in Impossible partnership with Jimbo Wales, YOU

Not only that but it's a crap web site, too.

I actually went to the bother of registering to see what it's all about and the lame front page of wishy-washy 'wishes' with no discernible way to sort or filter doesn't get any better when you log in. The 'wishes' range from stupid to totally stupid. Freecycle is WAY better than this and even that isn't particularly well implemented. Can I have £200,000 to start a website that nobody will use and was written by a teenager in his bedroom over the weekend?

PS. I don't wish to promote the site myself as I'm ugly.

Brit ISPs ordered to add more movie-streaming websites to block list

El reg should be blocked, too!

I conclude that The Register should also be blocked by the UK ISPs for giving away the names of all the good pirate sites that whilst now (or soon to be) blocked. With this fresh list of sites good enough the garner the attention of the copyright holders I can now find the alternate DNS names for them or proxies. Free stuff for everyone! Is this a strange case of the Streisand Effect?

'F-CK YOU GOOGLE+' ukelele missy scoops BIG WAD of $$ - for Google

Who cares about the politics?

...the song plain sucks. I thought only ten-year old kids made up lyrics that didn't fit the song.

Writing songs she should qu-ii-i-i-iiit

Because is just plain sh-ii-ii-ii-i...

Apple's shock treatment: An authentic charger-spotting guide

Re: Electrocution = DEATH

I beg to differ, sir. A picture can be HUNG but not HANGED. A person can be HANGED (to death) but they can also be HUNG (from a harness - presumably alive.) Strictly speaking, I suppose it's possible to use HUNG if you managed to die whilst being held up on a rope by something other than your neck. Possibly it's more about intent than it is about which bodily appendage is inserted into the rope. I'll let the linguists argue about that one. ;)

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/hang?q=hanged#hang__15

Electrocution = DEATH

Seriously, how many seemingly intelligent people don't know that the word 'electrocution' means an electric shock that ENDS YOUR LIFE. That's like saying he had a nasty case of execution, but got better.

Yours sincerely,

Mr Pedant.

PS. On a similar vein, a person killing themselves with a noose is HANGED, not HUNG. ;)

Apple iPhone 5 review

I agree with some of the other comments on here. Whatever my feelings on the iPhone 5 (or any other iPhone, for that matter) this review is abysmal. There's nothing tangible in there at all. It mentions a few sparse technical details and spends more time telling us about the feel of the plastic as though it were a naked woman. Just the kind of mindless drivel I would expect from an Apple Fanboi. It certainly didn't help me make an informed opinion on the new phone and glossed over a number of downsides.

Maybe failing to make the screen much bigger is a good idea? On what planet? The 16:9 aspect ratio seems weird as web sites want to be wide, not tall, but films look great? What is it? A phone or a media player?

Terrible review. Not sure about the phone.

Turing Machine brought to life with Lego

Binary?

Are the right-angled logo pieces meant to denote binary? I'm assuming that they are. If so, how does two pieces flipped up mean '2' and four flipped up mean '4'. That's not how they would be represented in binary...

3 + 3 = 15?

HTC torches forecasts as stock tsunami floods skint Europe

Patent laws = tools for the bullies

I think it is absolutely scandalous how blatantly the bigger players are using patent laws to prevent competition in their markets. If we were talking about what I would deem significant patents, such as fundamental technologies, then you could understand it but when it comes down to 'swipe gestures' blocking the release of devices in countries then something has gone wrong.

Everyone should patent everything and then we could stop the free market functioning altogether.

Russian upstart claims BitTorrent-killer

It sounds like it will be a server based denial system which would be stupidly easy to get rid of. Either you could block packets come from those servers (for example, Peer Guardian) or you will find that in the off chance it actually did any damage it would quickly be the victim of a major DDOS taking the servers effectively offline. Anonymous are willing to attack targets for much smaller crimes against the distribution of material, i.e. any ISP in the UK blocking Pirate Bay (even though they're only doing it because there is a court order telling them to!)

The Register to publish other sites' blacked-out content in SOPA protest

Wired.com

Doh! You don't need to use search engines to remove the censorship on Wired.com. There's an 'Uncensor this page" button at the bottom-left of the page that does just that...

Google lands patent for, um, estimating shipment time

Let's all get in on the action!

It's all getting a little silly but I think that with this in mind I have an idea that I'm going to patent - delivering ordered items... WHILE FULLY CLOTHED! Yes, that's right. I'm going to patent wearing clothes while you deliver products. I think a number of logistics companies backed by some big names are going to be shelling out to use my idea or risk having their operatives turn up at people's houses stark naked!

Ubisoft insists DRM 'a success'

Making life better for the pirates.

Every game ever written will be pirated. Don't bother pretending that it won't because it will. There are hundreds of eager little bedroom jockeys just itching to break the thing that took your small team of developers months to create. Getting some credit and a minute of fame from 'the scene' is what makes them tick. Once cracked the game will be downloaded by the pirates with almost zero chance of being caught and costing them a few pence for the bandwidth. They will play the game wherever and whenever they want without your DRM giving them a moment of bother.

On the other hand, honest Joe (who lives just down the road to me) will shell out his hard earned cash for your game and be frustrated when his cable connection is down, his ADSL connection is slow, he is abroad and doesn't want to pay roaming charges, can't get access to wireless connection, the network driver on his computer has stopped working, the cat has knocked his network cable out, etc., etc.

So, the pirates get it easy and the legits get it hard. Nice one.