Posts by b166er

MPs pile pressure on ISPs over Phorm

BT's integrity questioned

Splutter ROFL

So GOV.UK wants in on the act? (there'll be no US data-mining without us being in on it)

Isn't it time all computers ran an Onion router?

Only Ubuntu left standing, as Flash vuln fells Vista in Pwn2Own hacking contest

Blame/Flame/Shame

Thing is, the vulnerability on the Mac, was Apple's fault (their browser), but the Vista exploit sounds like it was Adobe's fault. As Macaulay pointed out, with a little more work, the exploit would have worked across all three platforms.

Also noted in the article, was the fact that he spent the day switching back and forth between the 2 remaining systems. Perhaps he was more fluent with Windows than Linux ;~) (or couldn't bring himself to let the penguin down and big up Vista)

Still, I like a good laugh, flame on!

Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe

@David Harper

"Nature creates conditions far more extreme than anything that a CERN atom-smasher will ever manage, every time a supernova goes bang, and yet here we all still are"

We are nature, perhaps the reason we are still here, is that we didn't live on a planet far, far away (long, long ago), with a rogue LHC that caused it's nearest star to go supernova.

If the earth passed through it's own black hole into a parallel universe, what would happen to the earth that was there before we arrived?

Maybe the boffins of that other earth, are also about to fire up a LHC with similar consequences and we'll pass each other in the void.

Reality crashes Google hippie code fest

Intentional?

Rejection means potential new features for OpenSolaris will not benefit from the GSOH make over.

Was the Good Sense of Humour acronym used on purpose, or were you perhaps writing 2 articles at the same time ;~)

Mac is the first to fall in Pwn2Own hack contest

Titter

Tee-Hee

T5 opening turns into Airplane 3.0

Management

Beer are on you then TeeCee ;~)

All the managers I encountered on that project were blaggers.

I has to be said though, in defense of the head honcho, whose name I can't remember and can't be bothered to look up, Safety on that site was second to none, and real progress.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

No wonder the baggage system is FUBAR, the company I worked for on that site installed the CAT6 for some of it and they were a bunch of cowboys. Bet VanDerLande get the blame too, but as far as I could see, they were about the best contractor on site (Dutch).

In the run up to completion, the place was like a swan - all serene on the surface and kicking like fuck underneath to get it done.

Still, BA, that's what you get for putting all your eggs in an untested basket HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Brit TV company blamed for Peruvian tribal deaths

Pity

Wouldn't it have been ironic, if those same researchers brought back a disease that wiped out the same percentage of our world.

I hope the production company gets shafted for 'skipping' the health screening routine.

Transgender man prepares to give birth

Just asking, don't bite

But if the child develops into a criminal (and I sincerely hope that doesn't happen), who is to blame? The parents for being unusual, society for being bigotted and ostracizing the child, or the child for not being able to accept the inevitable taunting and confusion.

All power to them, and I hope the world has changed by the time that child comes of age.

Samsung shifts 22-vibrate-mode handset

Car indicators

The reason the clicking stayed, was to remind the more absent-minded driver that the indicator was still functioning. If only they had replaced that reminder with a boxing glove to the chest/bollocks. There should also be a backside electrode that is operated if you don't indicate when turning the steering wheel more than 45 degrees.

Wikipedia scores $3m donation

Gav

well observed

Apple forbids Windows users from installing Safari for Windows

Search & Destroy

Surely that's classed as malware then?

BAA boots Vulture from T5 frequent flyer club

ahem

Aren't Virgin the sole occupier of T5B?

Granted, you have to go through T5A to get to it, but it's a short ride on the TTS

Ofcom says yes on more TV ads

Flogging a dead donkey

You can watch most of ITV's stuff sans ads from their website.

I've always chuckled at the fact that you subscribe to a magazine, and then when you read it, it's full of ads, or you subscribe to Sky and then when you watch it, it's full of ads!

As was said above, if only I could pay more for a tv license and have an ad free version, I would.

But then, when did large businesses ever give a toss about their customers? They just want you to be good little couch potato consumers. Just wait until you get click this advert/press the red button now ads, and credit card slots in the front of your idiot box HAHAHA, won't even have to leave the settee.

I'm off to patent the 'moronic couch dwelling income organism' life support system.

Happy Easter, remember, Easter's cheaper at Asda.

/cynicism

BBC Micro creators meet to TRACE machine's legacy

Dogfight

was a great game on the BBC B.

I seem to recall that sending 'call!-4' to network machines was great fun too!

Scotland Yard criminologist: DNA-print troublemaker kids

Passport Sir.

Business or pleasure?

I've just left for good.

Seriously, if it's true that you can identify a future criminal mastermind, by the actions of a 5 year old, then we're fucked anyway. Evidently, there will always be criminals, and the present system is still preoccupied with putting a sticking plaster over the San Andreas fault.

Why not, instead of telling 5 year olds that they are criminals, telling them until they are blue in the face, until they believe it and guess what, become criminals; sink some serious cash into creating a better environment where less children become criminals in the first place?

Wall, meet head ?!?

'Freetard ? more like advert programmed PAYTARDS!'

DSoTW (Damp Squib)

Recently, I had begun to think AO was on the payroll for the music industry; eating from the hand that feeds IT, so to speak ;0. But his most recent article, now seems to be downplaying the 'threat' from freetards endorsing a subscription based all-you-can-eat model, perhaps suggesting that there will always be a small percentage of freetards, but in fact, it's not the apocalypse the industries have been gloomily predicting.

For the record, I'm mainly a PAYTARD, occasionally a FREETARD.

Will this £10 a month of which was spake, include all the indies as well?

How much for guilt free movie downloads too, especially the old ones you can't buy anymore? Are the P2P companies then going to start seeding everything, even stuff unavailable in shops? Are the general PAYTARD public going to finally get what they want?

Texas Instruments sounds alarm on 3G

Mobe AP

I've got web'n'walk on my WM6 phone and an app that bridges the 3G connection to the Wifi chip in the phone. My phone acts as a wireless access point. Brilliant!

PCMCIA pitches USB 3.0-friendly ExpressCard update

External GPU

If they do get round to this, I'm really hoping they also provide a way to pipe the video back into the laptops display.

Publisher fights to save comment forums from plastic surgeons

So lemme see

rather than restricting its bad press to a minority of people who visit realself, the claimant seeks to inform a much larger audience of its bad name!

It's just demonstrated to me that it is in fact absolutely incompetent at its core business, which is, 'improving appearances'

Couldn't make it up

Local councils dish out shoddy computer recycling advice

chuck it in a furnace

Or, if you're a council with lots of budget for recycling, consider a plasma converter from the guys at startech.net

Pentagon rattles sabre at Google's Street View

Concorde

Have you driven along the A30/Southern Perimeter Road recently?

Concorde is quite often visible along there in various locations.

Oh, yeah, the story. Well if it makes them feel safer that people can't see their access control points etc without actually going there.....No major inconvenience for anyone planning any sort of breach of their defenses though I'm sure.

Why don't they instead, build dummy access control points etc and use Google's mapping to misinform potential security threats? Or insist that Google use falsified images supplied by them?

Man cuffed for lamppost sex outrage

Doing the rounds of applause

Perhaps from the former lover

File-swapping Icelanders slapped on wrists

Much ado

According to Andrew Orlowski, Freetards are taking over, whilst in other news, Trent Reznor sold out of his £300 pound option in a little over a day, netting him around £750,000. The MPAA have posted a bumper year and admitted to cooking the books threefold in relation to the college file-sharing pandemic. Crikey, it certainly looks like these artists are soon to be destitute because of these freetards, eh ;p

2.5TB, is that one empirical freetard?

Pentagon attackers stole 'amazing amount' of sensitive data

Smoke-screen

It's now a matter of national security to batten down this pesky interweb thingy. Down with anyone using the internet for anything other than spending money.

Google mistakes search for teleportation

No eBay?

Didn't try it couldn't be bothered!

Could be a good thing if instead of 50 results for an item on eBay, I get one searchbar result for eBay and 49 results other than ones from eBay.

New York's Freedom Tower to depend on RFID

Spring

\uberpedant

Andy, can you tell me at exactly what time Spring commences on the 21st March?

Is this if you are standing in Greenwich and would it vary if you were anywhere else in the world? ;~p

\off uberpedant

Tories call for big changes to cybercrime offences

Under the guise of

punishing civil servants who lose public data. But really, in the background, laying down a procedure for criminalising the UK's internet population.

Has your shifty foreign neighbour got 16 mobes?

Stereotyping

WTF is a normal everyday person?

The way that lady says it on that advert is also most patronising.

"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.":- Ayn Rand

Bill Gates loses richest man crown

Correct me if I'm wrong,

but didn't Warren Buffett say he was going to give most of his fortune to Bill Gates at the time of his death? This apparently due to the fact that Mr Buffett feels Bill and Melinda Gates have the most experience with that amount of cash and are therefore the most likely to invest it wisely?

That would certainly put him right back at the top.

El Reg decimates English language

Spellcheck THAT mofo!

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Ahhh...polarised opinions

The basic stumbling blocks of communication (no matter what the language).

You see, you are all right ;p (or is that correct?)

Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia

Clearly

Back into reality for a second PT ;p

I don't contribute to Wikipedia. I must admit, that I don't have the requisite knowledge of any one particular subject, with which to contribute.

I'm here only to point out, that Wikipedia has its uses, and that the unfaltering bad press that it receives here has me question the motive. A little constructive criticism goes a long way, but the flagellation here serves no obvious purpose.

Alex, if indeed the Wikipedia is the "sum total of human knowledge", then perhaps that would include the total of uninformed human knowledge also. Perhaps not what was intended, but there you have it.

As you so rightly point out, there are many among us who would take the information found in therein and quote it verbatim as the gospel truth (that's an oxymoron surely?).Therefore it is perhaps they who deserve to be pilloried, not the source of the information.

There should be no barriers to learning and knowledge, Wikipedia has a large store of information that is available to people speaking many different languages.

If it's the aim of the Register to point out that some of this information is inaccurate, then I accept that, but does it have to be so harsh?

Bite the hand that feeds it, OK, but take the whole arm?

Alex

You're quite correct in the assertion that I don't know everything about everything.

Let's say I begin with a baseline of knowing nothing about a particular topic, if I then visit Wikipedia and browse the subject, I will gain some information that I previously didn't have. You point out, that I have no way of knowing at this point, whether that information is factually correct, however, it will undoubtedly have provided me with some pointers so I can go and research the subject more thoroughly and gain the benefit of different perspectives, to enable me to form my own well-rounded opinion.

Your analogy is flawed, in so much as you use drunk-driving as a subset of driving. All drivers are not perfect, in fact, some are drunk drivers.

As an example, off the top of my head, visit Wikipedia and search for the title of a film that you have little knowledge about. Once you have read that article, you will have a list of actors that participated in that film, a rough plot synopsis and some knowledge about the production of the film. What have you gained? More knowledge than you had!

What is your area of expertise? Perhaps you could tell us, and then point us to an article on Wikipedia that is completely wrong in its summary of the subject and would provide no useful starting point for someone wanting to begin researching the subject.

Insulting

There are many well-formed accurate and enjoyable pieces on Wikipedia and the fact that some of you attribute these to less intelligent individuals with too much time on their hands would be probably quite insulting to those intelligent individuals that wrote them.

Ironically, they are probably not at all concerned with your petty, IDLE, remarks, preferring instead to concentrate on providing a source of easily accessible helpful information.

Sure it's not perfect, but here's a newsflash, neither is humanity.

Tch, people in glass houses

If The Register considers Wikipedia to be so malformed and irrelevant, then why does it expend such negative energy on it? Sure it's fine to poke a bit of fun, that's what I love about ElReg, but rarely does an organisation or concept get shot down in such flames here.

Spose I'll put it down to everyone having their own bug-bear and needing to vent once in a while.

Vista volume activation cracked

But what happens if

you install KB940510?

Europe hits one million FTTH broadband connections

Tim

Most of our infrastructure is the oldest.

Maybe we should invade France and start again?

Vote now for your fave sci-fi movie quote

1.21 Jigawatts, Great Scott! What, what the hell is a Jigawatt?

So good I made it my incoming SMS tone!

Darth Vader: I find your lack of faith disturbing

DV : Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

Han Solo: Laff it up fuzzball

HS :Had a slight weapons malfunction, but everything's perfectly alright now. We're fine, we're all fine, here, now, thank you. How are you?

If The Rock can be included (well there is some science and fiction in it ;p), then you can have some greats from Nicholas Cage:

NC: how in the name of ZEUS' butthole did you get out of your cell?

NC: I just wanna get some rockets!

NC: Whaddya say we cut the chit-chat A-HOLE!

(It's in the delivery of course)

Went for Bladerunner 'cos Rutger made that up himself

Asus Eee PC gives Sony the willies

Poor Sony lovers

"has long depended on punters' desire for more performance"

Surely, "has long depended on encouraging punters' desire for more performance"

You Sony lot are as bad as the Apple lot ;p

I mean, c'mon, Sony sell overpriced bling, always have. (not that the quality isn't good, it is)

You can get exactly the same performance in something wrapped up slightly differently for considerably less.

oxo, how you ever arrive at the conclusion that an Asus product will be in the bin in 6 months, I've no idea. I've used Asus products for the last 10 years and have never once been let down. Perhaps you're unfortunate?

It's great that Asus don't try and pull the wool over their customers eyes, and if people can buy a £200 desktop that satisfies their computing needs, what's wrong with that? Are you saying that we should continue to subsidise these huge corporations because their profits aren't big enough already?

You guys are marketers wet dreams.

Terminator Salvation is go for May 2009 release

No brainer

The can just pick off the latest Terminator with Eye-o-Sauron towers

Google enters underwater cable business

Thinking outside the box?

What? erm....we need more bandwidth. OK, lets lay a phat cable. Phew that brainstorming was so intense, I need to lie down.

Filesharers petition Downing Street on 'three strikes'

Joe Bloggs

doesn't know what an anonymous proxy is. I doubt he ever will, it will just be built into clients and you'll never need to know about it. (EarthStation5 anyone?) Probably wouldn't be too difficult to code in a WEP/WPA cracker either.

This will certainly bring 'securing your wireless router' to the forefront, after the first few people fall victim to anonymous users downloading via their connection and having their connection cut off!

There are enough legal loopholes and technological ways around this. It will be interesting to see how they get everyone to thoroughly protect their IP address from any form of abuse. As you pointed out about Joe Bloggs and his ignorance of anonymous proxies, perhaps it should be pointed out that Joe Bloggs also is usually ignorant of securing wifi routers, removing and preventing malware, preventing his kids from installing Limewire etc, etc.

Rather than forcing ISPs to police the networks, they are delegating that to customers, who by and large don't have the requisite knowledge to secure their private networks.

Childish as it may be to mention again that this is an arms race, that doesn't detract from the fact that this IS an arms race and therefore a waste of all these well-paid peoples time and our money, due to the fact that, this time the big army is composed of 'bad guys'.

I'm not taking sides here, other than to point out that this is not really the solution, because as soon as it has mass effect, it will be circumvented, either through law or through technology.

In the mean time, lots of innocent people will be affected and made victims of others 'crimes' as so often seems to be the case with monolithic companies trying to protect their (artists) Intellectual Property.

DRM didn't last either, because it inconvenienced customers who played ball, whilst having zero effect on those who didn't!

Public don't want internet filters, MS tells MPs

Ninny Nanny

I think this ties in with being educated about unsecured wireless connections too.

The ISP, being the provider of access, SHOULD inform their customers about the problems of not having a secure wireless connection and how to secure it, and COULD offer information to help customers protect their computer and their children from things that could be perceived as malicious/inappropriate. This information is already offered by some ISPs and that's a good thing.

The decision though should rest with the customer as to what is malicious/inappropriate and to whether they want a secure wireless connection or not, the responsibility ultimately lies with them.

Takes someone from Microsoft to spell out the obvious, whatever next?

New York subpoenas Comcast 'reasonable network management' records

@Barry

Maybe it's a little naive to think this doesn't also have something to do with a lack of investment in infrastructure.

Cut to the Web Server Core: Windows Server 2008

Long time coming

But credit where it's due hopefully.

How nice to have a simple server from MS, although as already mentioned, seems a shame you can't add to it once you've chosen its role.

Still, a step in the right direction.

Disintegrating wind turbine caught on camera

Smashing

Props for the up

Shrek studio looks to Toshiba to untie HD DVD bond

@Paul

It's not just rootkits with Sony though, is it?

Exploding laptop batteries, Liksang closure, ridiculously overpriced cosmetics on their electronic goods, bet you've got an iPhone too ;p (unless you're a true Sony die-hard in which case a SonyEricsson)

HP, Dell and Fujitsu answer VMware's USB stick plea

Microsoft next?

If only Windows came in a similar manner

Subprime PC retailer coughs up $5m fine

BlueHippo

a WhiteElephant in disguise?

Apple updates laptop lines

Post-It

Long enough to garner some anticipation