Posts by Maty

Net hasn't isolated Yanks - they've just misplaced their friends

friends

Yeah, I've got about four close ones, all on the internet.

Mind you, three are servers and one's a workstation, so I'm not sure if that counts.

STRONG REAL SEX? That's not porn, rules ASA

So ...

The hands in the roots made the picture 'dream-like and unrealistic', which makes it okay for kids. Heaven forbid they might actually believe that sex happens in reality.

Agincourt: The sensational truth

Now that's settled ...

Can we rename St Pancreas Agincourt Station to go with Waterloo, for our French chunnel passengers?

Of course the French also lost Crecy, Potiers, Malaplaquet, the Battle of the Nile, Talavera, Salamanca, Ramilles, Sluys, Oudenarde, Trafalgar, Dettingen, the battle of Quebec, Louisberg and Warburg, but only because the British cheated.

In return the French can name parts of Paris after battles where they thrashed the Brits. After all they won Lauffeldt, (1747) and got a draw at Fontenoy.

WTF is this country called America?

Thing is

Canadians and Mexicans have a name for themselves. Its called a demotic.

The Inhabitants of the USA call themselves Americans because they are, even if they are not the ONLY Americans. However, they have to use that because they have never organized a demotic just for themselves. Usanians?

But the Reg's idiot commentator is both wrong, and even more of an idiot because he is patronizing at the same time. The USA is that relatively small country south of Canada. There's more of North America in Canada than there is in the USA.

Anyway, God bless America - and I'm quite happy for that to include Canada.

Beer because mine's a Molson - a great (Canadian) American drink.

Neanderthal woman could whup Schwarzenegger

Balance ...

"His footprints, preserved in the soft mud, show he was sprinting at 37 km/h - not as fast as Bolt's top speed of 42 km/h, but without the benefit of "spiked shoes, a special track, a strict training regime, and money and glory to spur him on"

Perhaps for balance we should put a sabre-toothed tiger behind Mr Bolt and see how fast he goes then.

UK.gov backs ID scheme with peanuts promo spend

Logical Watson

The more the public learn about the government's ID card scheme, the less they like it.

Why should the government spend money telling them about it?

Home Office backs down on net censorship laws

Filter ...

Fliter sounds so much better than 'censor' doesn't it? Maybe in ten years time the UK web will have all 'extreme porn' , incitements to racism, violence, homophobia or dislike of the current govt 'filtered' from viewers' screens.

As an earlier commentator said, future generations will look at ours and weep. Amazing what the children of the 1960s turned into, isn't it?

UK taxpayers hit by wave of tax refund scam mail

Except ...

A certain airline sent us an email asking for personal details (which they already have) in an email complete with a 'click this link to enter details'.

I couldn't believe it wasn't a phishing attempt until I did an IP lookup against the domain registrant and checked in phishpool and a few other sites.

While legit companies still send emails like this, it will be easy for crooks to spoof them.

Child porn threat to airport's 'virtual strip search' scanners

In 200 years time ...

...people are going to read about this sort of crap and weep.

We used to think of the Spanish Inquisition as deranged. Today's society has managed to screw itself up almost as thoroughly.

Beer, because after this article I need one.

Banking Trojans double as scareware runs wild

Pedant alert

'Payment services such as PayPal became the principle target of phishing attacks ..' The attacks were made on principle? Perhaps you meant 'principal'?

But the spell-Czech said it was ok, huh?

Delta hacked my email, says passenger rights chief

We don't hack accounts

But we know people who know people who do. Didn't HP get into trouble for something like this a while back?

'Stop NASA bombing the Moon!'

Please. please tell me they are serious

The world needs more full-scale nuts to outflank the semi-nutcases on their loony side. And some of the writing is priceless

'We as surrealists or lunatics or astrologers or naturalists or anarcho-primitivists or Greens or werewolves or pagans or psychics or UFO groupies or other concerned members of the general public ...'

There are members of the concerned general public who are not werewolves, pagans or anarcho-primitives? Gosh!

Gmail, AOL, Yahoo! all hit by webmail phishing scam

Yess ... but

'Using a different hard-to-guess password for every site you visit ...'

This system is broken. I moderate two forums, post on three others, have paypal, banking, ebay and amazon accounts and also have passwords for my computer, my two email accounts, my university account (which has three separate passwords for various functions), my ABE books account, and even a password for posting on the Reg here. I could go on ...

Now, since it's impossible to remember all these hard-to-guess accounts (hard to guess == hard to remember) I have to have them aggregated somewhere, which means that if the aggregator gets lost or compromised the whole bang-shoot goes down.

Some other system is needed - perhaps based on the IP+Mac of the user's comp, and/or a challenge response system. Passwords are compromised simply because there's so much need to use the damn things.

First Direct sorry for text mess

Agreed

Amazing isn't it, that there's at least one service that actually does what it's supposed to, and generally does it well? I've been with FD almost since they started and this is the first time I can remember hearing of them screwing up.

Their interest rates are in the can at present, but I too am prepared to take a (small) cash hit to know that I can ring 24/7 and immediately get a human - and usually quite a cheerful human - answering the phone in good English.

Game censorship crusader sues Facebook for $120m

How about ...

A game called 'Kill Tom Jackson'? (No resemblance to anyone living or dead ...) Make the guy a douchebag ambulance-chasing lawyer. The objective is to wipe him out in any one of a number of possible ways before he wins a $100million lawsuit. Extra bonus if you can get the grand piano to drop on his head just as he approaches the courthouse doorway, or attacked by a poisonous pet octopus.

Naturally this would be just a game, and I stress this lest people start stringing grand pianos over courthouse entrances or combing the south seas for venomous octopi.

I should also like to point out that reading the (totally unrelated) article about someone justifiably and properly suing Facebook for their incredible negligence caused my blood pressure to rise to dangerous levels. That puts the Reg on the hook for ... shall we say £20mill? Make it 50 to be sure.

PC tune-up software: does it really work?

It's not either/or

You don't have to choose between stopping some services on start-up or living with slow boot times.

There's a couple of apps out there that allow you to look at your start-up programmes and phase them in during the first ten min after boot up. So my comp does a fast boot, and things like windows update are phased in five min later. During this time there's a little bar at the top of my screen which tells me the loading state of the programmes I've delayed.

Google shuts down bank snafu Gmail account

Two sides to it ...

Every day a forum I moderate gets hit by spammers who register with email addresses like [e-mail] . If the bank sent my details to one of these addresses, I'd be terrified. In fact I wish Google would shut down these bullshit accounts.

If on the other hand it was a regular, in-use gmail account, how hard is it hard for big G to set up another account, differing by one letter e.g. [e-mail] -->[e-mail] and simply spoof the new address to a copy of the data in the 'dormant' account?

And of course, both Google and the email account holder have a claim against the bank for the inconvenience caused by the idiocy of one of its employees.

And to those asking why this is significant - its because an email address is an important part of many people's identity these days, and having a judge shut it down because of someone else's incompetence is just plain wrong.

Swedish military bras burst, melt during 'rigorous exercise'

A Swedish Milkitary communique has stated

Though the MOD admits it has boobed in the past, its designers are now abreast of the situation and are handling the relevant issues even as we speak. There is no doubt this problem can be nipped in the bud, if we juggle and rebralance our priorities.

Now will the Reg please stop milking the story?

Microsoft howls as Google turns IE into Chrome

Either he's a troll ...

(and a lying troll) or James O'Brien does not get viruses on his naked little computer because its being maintained by some unfriendly people in Russia in exchange for serving kiddie porn or relaying spam.

Really, is there no way to keep these morons off the net?

Pity because I was having such a good laugh until I read that post. Microsoft worried about insecure plug-ins in a browser? Oh, good one Sir!

ActiveX anyone?

IBM in £24m battle with UK spooks

Huge Government IT project fails at ginormous expense!

Keep this headline handy - it's been needed often in the past, and no doubt will be needed if the govt does decide to push on with operation ID card (code name 'Titanic')

Microsoft harries XP-loving biz customers on to Windows 7

XP pro

I upgraded from vista to XP pro in January, and it was a massive relief. Now I'm planning to stick with XP for a few years while my target OS improves a bit more. And that's Ubuntu, not win7. Frankly, if my favourite games ran on Linux I'd have switched ages ago.

Win7 should be why7? If it's based on vista it will be crappy, slow and a resource hog. Who needs it? Oh, yes. Those people who have vista and are desperate for a way out.

Complexity and confusion drive Microsoft's licensing

I can simplify this further

"We continue to look for ways to make the purchasing experience simpler for customers, including our current multi-year investment to ultimately shift the customer experience to one purchasing platform and a single agreement for any type of offer,"

to

'We continue to look for ways to make our licensing so complex and predatory that the confused customer shafts himself , but ultimately want to shift the customer to a single self-shafting experience.'

Note the resemblance to the mobile phone industry with it's multi-tier price structures, 'minutes' discounts, and packages. Overall this makes it impossible to compare one offer against another and simply choose the cheapest. And the customer coughs at the end of the month, because it's easier than working out exactly what was paid for.

There's no real option with a mobile phone, but if MS didn't have its huge installed user base, would its current product line really be able to compete?

Met shops self to IPCC over terror toddlers

all together now ...

Land of hope and glory

Mother of the free ...

We've come a long way since those words were written.

Todger-chop woman's sentence depends on hard evidence

don't forget

'Yeah, 'cuz everybody knows women just go whang whacking on willies for the fun ot it now.'

I think that the bit about not delivering on a promise to marry her might have had something to do with it.

Why teachers fear Callum, Chelsea, Connor and Crystal

A pleb by any other name ...

'Unique' means 'the only one of its kind'. Grammatically it is an absolute, so you can't qualify it. It's like being dead - you either are or you are not.

So all those proudly informing us of their 'rather unique' names please report to the chav half of the class.

Firefox to warn users of insecure Adobe Flash

one word

NoScript.

(okay its two words sorta merged into one. But it fixed my flash vulns)

Swedish bloke attempts lactation

Stop

Please. Just. Stop.

eeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwww

!

Man remanded for extreme porn offences

Traficking and porn

The more you push some activities underground, the more you will get criminal elements involved.

I'm prepared to believe some ladies prefer a pooch to a boyfriend - after all, rover doesn't want a beer afterward, and doesn't care if you watch Grey's anatomy instead of the game. And there are certainly mutts like a dog my neighbours once had that would shag anything from a table leg upwards. So no coercion there.

However, if the participants selling DVDs of their activities could do so without fear of prosecution, it would be easier to check who they were, and ensure that all concerned were indeed enthusiastic volunteers. (Society might also gain by collecting some taxes on the DVD sales).

By criminalizing the activity you force those indulging in it to become anonymous, and it therefore becomes harder to protect the vulnerable. In short, if traficked women are forced into these activities, it is partly because of, not despite extreme porn laws.

Man beaten and stabbed by Gumtree scammers

okay ...

a.) Assuming our victim has revived after his 'life-saving surgery' :

'Now Sir, look at these pictures. Do you recognize the people who stabbed you?'

'Yes/No'.

QED. Or is that CID?

b.) If the pair were arrested 'near' the scene of the attack, what chances had they to hide the money and knife?

c.) Is that 'released on police bail' without charge (because they are merely suspects), or released after being charged (deserving of general outrage)?

Microsoft apologizes for digital head transplant

Y'know

I think those smiles are fake too.

US women protest for the right to bare

Spelling pedant alert!

'I'm also a big fan of women not bearing their breasts all the time.' Bearing breasts is not an option for most women as the alternative is a mastectomy. Whether they are bared is a different matter.

I recall there was an Italian seaside town where the issue of nudity on the beach was discussed, and the mayor decided that only aesthetically pleasing bods could be so displayed - with a prior display to a committee which decided if the body in question was up to the required standard..

Linux chief challenges Microsoft to pony up on patents

Intellectual Ventures?

Somehow I read the name as 'Intellectual Vultures'. Can't imagine why.

Booming scareware biz raking in $34m a month

Oh, well done, Sherlock!

'Panda identified two major groups of players in the scareware business: program writers and distributors.'

Brilliant. Without Panda's incisive research I'd never have figured this out. Who'd have thought it? Incidentally, there's a third group - the mugus who buy and install the stuff. (But then I'm used to Panda not catching everything.)

I look forward to Panda's further research determining that viruses are written by bad people, and may harm your computer.

Lads from Lagos cut off

The lads from Lagos

Don't always stay in Lagos. I recall a recent bust where all the 419ers were all illegal immigrants working out of internet cafes in Amsterdam.

I always rather enjoy my emails from the 419 crowd. Approached with the right frame of mind, they're a fun read. On the other hand I've never got anything but spam and hack attempts from China, Korea or Russia.

Is there any way of blowing them off the net? Please?

Truck drivers! Don't go texting now

Dangerous?

How is it that the people who urge draconian laws to further lower the (already low) chance of their kid being molested by a stranger are happy enough to take them on the roads where they have a much, much higher chance of being killed by an innattentive truck driver?

Reminds me of the time when I rode a bicycle and soon learned that the most vicious sods on four wheels were those displaying 'baby on board' signs. Rather than ever more refined laws, how about one that says 'driver was hurling over a ton of potentially lethal metal at high speed down a road used by other members of the public, and failed to act according to his consequent responsibilities.'

Labour MP quits over McKinnon extradition vote

You get what you vote for

The rot set in when being a MP became a profession. Previously, MPs were people who had at least tried life in the real world, and knew something about it. Many modern MPs make their way up within the party machinery and have never held anything like a real job.

This leaves them both contemptuous of the electorate and terrified of losing the only job they know. (And which, generally speaking, they richly deserve to lose.) The result, as this vote shows, is bad for democracy, and bad for the people of Britain.

Next election, forget party tribal loyalty - vote the hacks out and get some real representatives in.

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Seriously Sarah ...

Seeing that there's a somewhat, er ... laddish, approach to most postings, how did you end up moderating them?

While this is undoubtedly as close to contact with a female as many a poster gets all week, I have this mental picture of you going through the comments with the expression of Daphne looking on whilst Scooby-doo and Shaggy have a farting contest.

Beer, because I suspect you are going to need several before we've finished with the lesbian sperm theme.

Kind soul donates Claymore mine to charity

Ever seen a claymore?

It looks like a green paperback book that someone has curved across its length. And the little sods can be really vicious. There's a steel backing plate on the concave side, a layer of explosive, and on the convex side a set of ball-bearings poured in according to the 'chocolate-box principle' (everyone gets a piece).

Thing is, its not obvious that the ball-bearings are on the convex side. There's an apocryphal story that the warning was printed on the things after a squad in Africa set them up around their camp in case of being ambushed at night. With the convex part facing inward. The sentry thought they were being snuck up on in the night, hit the dets, and ...

Feminist org declines nude calendar cash

What's the big deal?

So these people disagree with female exhibitionism. This is admittedly a minority view in a nation which would prefer to have lots, lots, more of it. But in a country that's fast running out of freedoms, let's cherish the few that we have left, and one of them should be the right not to have to take money from people with whose views you disagree.

Certainly there is a case for arguing that this group are being moralistic and priggish, but golly, some posters are reacting as though this were a new development in the feminist movement. If being so makes them happy, you don't have to agree. But you don't have to force your opinions (or your money) on them either.

Swine flu malware poses as pig plague update

Surely ...

If you were using a proper word processor - e.g. Write from Open Office - when you opened the file you would just see some garbled source code?

What kind of idiots would create a word processor that runs executables, let alone executables that have kernel access?

Oh yes ....

German cops cuff Brit potato iPod scammer

Ah yes ...

I purchased one of those. It's my I-potato. Doesn't need batteries, is environmentally friendly, and Britney Spears never sounded better.

NASA data shows 'dramatically' thinned Arctic ice

Selective ...

Wasn't it this time last year that they were predicting an ice-free north pole this summer? And I missed the bit where it said that the Greenland glaciers were due to melt any time soon.

As an aside, can someone stop all this rot about 'saving the planet'? The planet has survived much worse, and will undoubtedly continue to survive even it we alter it to the point where humans can't survive.It's saving ourselves from ourselves that's the problem.

Conviction overturned in MySpace suicide case

Let's see ...

If this happened in the UK, and a 50 year old man pretended to be a teenage girl in order to develop a relationship with a teenage boy - indeed, if he set myself up as that kid's online 'girlfriend' - do we think the British constabulary would find nothing to charge him with?

How about 'grooming' for a start?

Amazing that parts of the USA are so much more liberal than the UK

Notorious phone phreaker gets 11 years for swatting

@ Jimbo 7

'You get less for selling cocaine.'

And your point is ...? At least cocaine is sold to consenting buyers. A SWAT team is a bunch or armed men who have been given misinformation that could lead to them killing an innocent person as they bust into the house.

Frankly, this little tit is a public menace on a power trip. I'll have no complaints if they make him serve the full 11 years. Maybe he will learn some sense in the meantime.

A Google monopoly today means packet snooping tomorrow

Not so

'Other than the subscription fees that carriers collect for access to the Internet itself, the only reliable revenue stream the net has ever generated is ad sales'

This statement is total baloney, and destroys the credibility of everything else the writer of the article has to say. Have a look at the ads carried on any website - the vast majority are for products or services that can be purchased through the internet. These products and services generate the revenue that pays for the ads. How can the writer of this article not understand that?

His conclusions about DPI are extremely iffy as well. Maybe the Reg should expand its icon selection to include a set of buttocks such as those this writer is talking out of?

()()

Don't call me Ishmael

Hacker fodder?

I remember once being told that the problem with using linked computer names is that it made a hacker's job much easier. Find a machine called gandalf, and its not hard to guess there's a frodo on the net. Not sure how relevant it is in this day and age. And are there any hackers out there with machines called Jim or Humphrey? Please?

MS names ship date for free security suite

@jimbo 7

'There are tons of other sites where you can talk like that, Let's keep Register on the professional level.'

Have you just started reading the comments section, Jimbo lad? Brace yourself for disillusionment - and the manfrommars.

Mines t'one with 'I welcome our new priggish overlord' on the back, and Paris because ...

Microsoft sues family over alleged click fraud

Seriously?

"Here's a hint, buddy: This is ENTERTAINMENT, not education. Learn the difference."

Okay Jake, I'm almost sure you are trolling, but let's assume that you are as mentally and emotionally backward as you appear.

Firstly, even entertainment is seldom free - even your colouring books have to be paid for by someone. The Reg gets some of its revenue from advertising, and I prefer that rather than, say, the writers being paid by the people whose products they are reviewing.

Secondly Google's model is working, and the more that cheaters such as those described above are hammered in the courts, the better it will work.

To those people who can't understand why clicking repeatedly on a link is wrong, lets go through it one more time, and then you can join Jake with his crayons. Firstly, you can click on a link as often as you like (I imagine it would keep some of the commentards here amused for hours.) Microsoft, Google et al have software that will just ignore you. (I know microsoft software often does that in any case, but that's another story.)

However, as you will see from reading the story (you DID read it, didn't you? Even the long words?) The miscreants in this case were advertisers with Microsoft. The words " his ads would pop to the top of Microsoft's listings" are the clue in this case. Now when you sign up as an advertiser, you have an agreement called a contract (your parents will explain about these when you get older) in which you promise not to engage in the kind of jiggery-pokery these two were up to. So they cheated and have to give back the money. And the amount of money should make it clear that this business model generates a lot of cash.

Clear? Oh, and by the way Jake, you may consider this post education, not entertainment.

sheesh!

Extreme porn law used on beastly Chinese DVD pirates

Just asking ...

Why is extreme porn certain to 'deprave and corrupt' us, when extreme violence (as seen on prime-time TV) is supposed to have no effect on our behaviour?

And if the person looking at the porn is not grossly offended? Does it count because a policeman might go to extra trouble to track it down and look at in order to be grossly offended?

And where are the statistics showing the wave of depravity sweeping the country since extreme porn became easily accessible on the net?

Orthodox Jews tuck into kosher Koogle

Announcing my new ultimate net filter

Yes! sign up for '00 gle' and you get the ultimate web search experience. All web searches produce an empty page tastefully coloured medium grey, (our extensive research has shown that this colour offends fewest people).

00 gle is guaranteed to return no results that offend puritannical parents,or religious or political groups of any persuasion and as such is a perfect reflection of the grey blandness which some people feel the net ought to be reduced to. An additional benefit of a content-free page is that content causes people to think, and we all know where that can lead.

Note also that 00 gle will not work on Sundays, Lent, the hours of daylight during Ramadan, or at all on the Sabbath. By artfully including the remaining world religions, including some animistic African tribal cults, Beta 2 (00 gle follows the Mountain View naming convention) should actually not be functional for any days at all, thus putting the genie of the internet back into its bottle for once and for all.