Posts by OmgTheyLetMePostInTheUK

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Did I actually step in real bear poop?

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Is that Hillary Clinton's secret email server security system?

The last post: Building your own mail server, part 2

Does Hillary Clinton know about this article?

Has anyone informed Hillary Clinton about this article?

Apple, Google should give FBI every last drop of user information, says ex-HP CEO and wannabe US prez Carly Fiorina

Crossing off Carly from the possibles list

So much for preserving our privacy. If she feels this way, I want no part of having her in the White House.

I guess this would also explain why I cannot find a copy of the early debate to view what went on during that.

US mega-hack: White House orders govt IT to do what it should have done in the first place

Why isn't EVERYING encrypted?

Just a stupid little question...

But why would you keep the secrets of this nation stored in plain text mode?

Why isn't every last piece of government data fully encrypted?

I worked for a tiny financial company from 1999 to 2005, and one of the things I did while there was to encrypt every single thing in every database we had. It took a lot of planning. It took a lot of programming to support that. But in the end, when you opened up an database in the company using any method other that using the custom software package that I had written, you saw encrypted gobbly goop. So here we are 13 years after I did that for this small little company, and the government still has their data in plain text.

We need to fire a whole bunch of stupid congressmen and senators.

Flash dead end is deferred by TLC and 3D

First you say, "BY using this technology Intel anticipates a 10TB SSD coming in late 2016 early 2017."

Then you say, "Back-of-the-envelope math says 3x-class NAND will give us 2TB, with 2x-class NAND giving us 3TB-4TB, and then we reach the process shrink limit, around 10nm, again."

If as you say, Intel-micron release TLC using 4x-class NAND in 2016-17 timeframe, there is no way they are going to get down to 10nm-class NAND by 2020. Short of some grey, bug eyed alien showing up and showing them how to do it anyways.

David Cameron: I'm off to the US to get my bro Barack to ban crypto – report

No longer a colony... Thank God!!

If being able to read or listen in on any and all communications is what the UK Government believes is good for the people, I am thrilled that we are no longer a colony!!

Light the torches! NSA's BFF Senator Feinstein calls for e-book burning

Senator Feinstein makes ass of self again...

Senator Feinstein, back in 1995, was so ancient, she forgot that somewhere along the way, freedom of speech was put into our constitution.... But I am certain sometime in the past century or two, she has been reminded a time or two.

Now add another 20 years to her age, and we are all in trouble.'

I'm ashamed to mention that I was actually born in the formerly great state of California. Fortunately, for me, I no longer live there, and haven't for decades.

Big changes proposed to DNS overseer ICANN

Why does ICANN even continue to exist?

In light of the fact that ICANN has refused, is refusing, and will continue to refuse to do what is needed for the good of the internet, we should allow the contract with them to expire and then give it to a new group that is run by members of the internet, and with bylaws that require them to do things that are best for the internet.

ICANN is not needed for the internet to function. All they have done it line their pockets with huge sums of money, and attempt time after time to do some really stupid things. Only the fact that ICANN was forced to listen to the US Government has forced them to back off of those stupid things. Going forward, ICANN expects to get full freedom to do those stupid things without the US Government being able to stop them, and you can be sure that they fully intend to continue to line their pockets at the expense of corporations that use the internet. That is the only thing are focused on. Except for the fact that they can extort boatloads of cash from internet users, they have very little understanding of the concept where the internet should be run by the very people that use it.

Dump ICANN. Let the fat cats go find a new game. Let the internet rule itself, and things will be much better. Obviously there has to be rules to prevent nations that censor their citizens from taking over the rules, but I doubt the US Government would give control to any group that felt otherwise. Then again, the US Government created the U.N., and look at the mess it is.. So maybe we need something very different.

Hurry up and just SLAP GOOGLE, MEPs fume at EU commish

The toothless MEPs are barking...

The toothless MEPs are barking because thats the only thing they can do.

Pathetic? Of course. But it makes them feel useful. And that gives them the fake feeling of being powerful.

Let them bark. They already held a useless vote to break up Google... And then the very same people said that they were making themselves look bad by doing that. The sad part of this is, that should have been blatantly obvious BEFORE they voted to break up Google.

So let them bark.... and bark... and bark... until they fall over dead.

Sony hack was good news for INSURERS and INVESTORS

Why isn't everything encrypted?

Roughly 20 years ago, I went to work for a small credit card company as a programmer. The company used direct mailings to market itself, and was growing rapidly. When I was hired, I was the second IT employee. by the third year, there were almost 20 of us.

As with any normal company, people are occasionally let go, and we had a network admin that was creating more problems that he was fixing. So he got the axe.

About a month later, a competitor was suddenly contacting the people our mail was going to before the mail got there. It took a while to notice this, but it was causing a reduction in customers signing up that was clearly noticeable both from signup numbers and income from those.

The boss finally demanded that every IT employee come in over the weekend and audit each and every computer system in the company, checking for any possible way that the outside world could get in and steal data. So we spent 2 days checking hundreds of PC's, and in the process, we found that one computer, in the sales department managers office had a modem card in it that should not have been there, and that the card was connected to a standard phone line that the company had not ordered. We removed the modem card from the system.

Not surprisingly, a week later signups were back to normal and income was as well.

But we sat down and had a lengthy discussion about how to prevent anyone from ever getting more than just an ID code number from our systems even if they had full access, and while it took about 2 months to get the code updated, we finally spent a weekend encrypting every name, addess, phone number, and everything else on every customer in our databases. The encryption key was in a file that itself was encrypted, and any the IT department programming systems were isolated from the production systems by an air gap to keep the encryption keys safe. Even within the IT department, there were only 2 of us that knew the encryption key, plus the owner of the company.

With all the changes we made, even if someone were to somehow gain full access to the production system, everything was fully encrypted except for a unique ID code that we generated the second a new customer was added to the system. Everything anyone system-wide could access was decrypted only to display or process what had to be used. Anything that did not need to be decrypted wasn't.

So when I see these huge mega-corporations and the government losing data like they are, I just do not understand why they have not done what we did nearly 20 years ago.

SPITTLE SPATTER as America weighs into FCC net neut shoutgasm

Re: Lack of competition

Commissioner Wheeler is also addressing that problem... It did not make it into this article, but he is pretty much going to force companies to compete.

So "We the People" appear to have a double win with the FCC this week!

American internet users will win!!

It is the greedy internet and wireless companies, yes, those humongous corporations whose only concern is to make as much money as is possible that are against this.

The rest of "We the People" have been begging for this, and now it looks like it might happen. :)

Its about damned time!

Go Canada: Now ILLEGAL to auto-update software without 'consent'

WHAT do you mean you cannot read a Word 3.0 document?

Whoever wrote this, and the idiots that then voted on this should all be sent to North Korea where things like this will have almost no affect, and when they do, GENERAL KIM can quickly fix the problem.

For the rest of us, get the hell out of the way and let us live our lives without your crap interfering!!

WAY TO GO CANADA! You have stepped into the dark ages!

Google sues Mississippi Attorney General 'for doing MPAA's dirty work'

Attorney General acting on behalf of the Music Industry to file suit against Google?

When the an elected Attorney General for a State in the USA starts doing the bidding of a media company by using the States name to file the lawsuits, that is wrong. Google found from the Sony files that were leaked, that the attorneys for one of the legal firms that the MPAA retains, wrote almost the entire complaint the Attorney General used in his suit against Google, It sure sounds to me like there should be lots and lots of questions asked of the State, the AG, the legal firm that typed up the documents, the MPAA and all of the media (Music and Film) companies that knew about this, and let it happen. It sure sounds like a conspiracy to me. And that is illegal in and of itself.

Over the years, the MPAA has attempted to pull so many dirty little stunts that it now appears that they will do anything, even illegal things like this to get their way. In this case, it was to attempt to force Google to change the way their ranking algorithm ranks certain sites, or sites with specific types of info and/or materials available to the public. Despite the fact that there is no law anywhere that would require this.\

Now that Google has the facts on who did what, this should get interesting. You never know how a lawsuit is going to proceed, but the possibility of a former state AG going to prison is one possibility that I see as an option in the long run. And who knows, since Google now has the proof both the MPAA and that legal firm were directly involved, maybe Google can add a few billion dollars to that $62 Billion they already have sitting in the bank.

Android gives Google a search monopoly? Not so fast, says judge

When you buy a car, do you get the option of installing motor and transmission from 10 different companies?

HELL NO!

So why is buying a phone supposed to be any different?

You know what you are buying when you buy an Android phone, no matter who makes it. So if you don't want a Google browser, don't buy the damned phone.

Nobody is harmed. I'd bet Google Play even has the competing browsers up on their site, for free even. Go get one if you think it might be better than Chrome. Of course, you probably will not be able to find Internet Explorer 10 or 11 there.... Microsoft still hasn't fully learned to get along with its corporate neighbors. Then again, most of us would not want all that bloatware on our phones anyways.

BTW, it sounds like we have a Judge sitting on the bench who knows a thing or two about smart phones. Kuddos to this lady on the bench.

Google Tax part 94: EU's H-dot wavers over copyright levy

Some politicians are too stupid to understand when something has failed, and why it has failed. In this case, Google is offering a free service to anyone that wants to find news, and in the process, the news outlets get a lot of exposure, which can (and does) lead to more people visiting these news outlets sites.

Every time someone passes a law that says "If you aggregate any copyrighted material, you must pay a fee", Google is going to withdraw the service since they do not place any advertising in the news section, and as such, gain no revenue from it.

How this is supposed to suddenly work by making it an EU-wide law vs being single country laws is very difficult to understand. The only thing that changes is that 26 countries would be affected at once, and if that were to happen, Google would simply kill the news section for all 26 of those countries. And since Google News drives huge volumes of people to these news sites, you will see the news sites SCREAMING for an exemption to the law, or a repeal of the law, so that Google will resume driving the huge numbers of people to their sites.

The only losers here, if the law is enacted EU-wide, is going to be the consumers and the news outlets. And since both have a reason for wanting Google to continue its news aggregation, maybe there will be enough resistance to stop these clueless politicians in this case. Or maybe not... Many times they do what they want despite what the people and the companies tell them.

Only time will tell.

New GCHQ spymaster: US tech giants are 'command and control networks for terror'

It is high time Governments STOP SPYING ON US!

So you get this big wig who takes over the british spy house, and the first thing he does is bash companies that have finally made the data on our phones unreadable by hackers and governments. Boo Hooo hooo...

What did you do 10-15 years ago before we had smart phones to record everything we did? Go back to doing that you lazy ass. It is called detective work. Become a detective again. Get out there and pound the pavement. Work the streets talking to your sources. Do some real detective work. And quit whining. You do NOT have the right to whats in our phones, no matter what you think to the contrary.

And if you do not believe that you can do your job without spying on the citizens, QUIT! NOW! BEFORE YOU GET PEOPLE KILLED! JUST FLAT QUIT AND GO AWAY! Let someone who can do your job do it.

There is no alternative. Snowden showed us what the Governments around the globe have been doing. Expect EVERYTHING to become encrypted. Soon. Very soon.

The people have spoken. We do not want to be spied on. Especially those of us that are not breaking any laws and have no intention of breaking any. We like our privacy, and expect what we do to remain private. If you cannot accept that, QUIT! NOW! BEFORE YOU GET PEOPLE KILLED! JUST FLAT QUIT AND GO AWAY! Let someone who can do your job do it.

Enough said! GROW UP!

Google's 'Right to be forgotten' roadshow is just a 'distraction' – EU digital rights group

Don't do shit that gets you in a database... and ...

If you don't do things that get your name into the news or into a database, then you won't have to worry about having your name show up in a google search. Its that simple.

If on the other hand, you do do these things, then we have the right to know about your mis-doings. Its that simple.

The EU and their idiot courts will implode into a cesspool of regulation very soon since they have clueless bumbling idiots running their courts and legislatures. Enough of that, and it will simply make itself go away, never to be forgotten for its insanity.

Nexus 9: Google and HTC deliver Android 5.0 'Lollipop' at iPad prices

Not sure Andriod tablets have the same appeal?

The sold out so fast. most of us saw the announcement that they were up for pre-sale long after they were already gone... Almost instant sell out.

Personally, I do not expect to buy one. I just prefer being able to use a real keyboard and my very nice 29 inch 21:9 format IPS panel ultra-wide monitor vs attempting to read something that is much, much smaller.

But if I were to every want one, I already know it would be a Nexus unit.

Disney and chums halt Comcast-TWC, AT&T-DirecTV weddings

What are they hiding? These contracts cannot be all that secret!!

Now I want to know what kind of back alley deals have been agreed to by the big content providers and the cable and satellite companies. There has to be something in those contracts that would be shocking if other people found out. And before any of these damned mergers are approved, I think its high time we aired out the dirty laundry in plain view for all to see.

If there is dirty laundry there to be found, then the FCC should be able to see that too before deciding on these mergers.

I very strongly feel like we should be breaking up these cable and satellite companies into much smaller versions of themselves, and forcing them to start competing with each other and all of the other cable companies out there. Cities and towns that have cozy little exclusive agreements with a single cable company now should be required to open up competition to any and all companies that wish to come into that city or town, and that these cable companies be banned from forming partnerships or merging with other cable and/or satellite companies for about 35 years. That should be plenty of time for a nice, healthy, competitive bunch of companies to grow up.

The future health of the internet comes down to ONE simple question…

Re: ICANN is only consultative

ICANN is obviously a whole lot more than just a bunch of fat cat consultants. Their actions alone will tell you that. They set the prices on the new domains. They set and changed the rules many times on how the selections would be made. And they spend money like its being printed just for them to do that.

Abandoning ICANN as you suggest would be almost impossible, which is why it has never happened. In order for the internet to form a new "ICANN"\, literally every ISP on the planet would need to all switch to the new "ICANN" at the same time. And getting thousands of thousands of ISPs to agree to do anything at the same time just is not going to happen. And anything short of that would literally fracture the internet into non-connected chunks and pieces.

And as far as IPv6 goes, it will solve the one problem that it is intended to solve. And that is that there are going to be hundreds of billions of computers connected to the internet on top of all the users on the internet today. The is less than a 0% chance that IPv4 can provide IP addresses for even a small fraction of all of those tiny little computers. Much less all of the 2 legged users that want to be connected to the internet with all of their computer based devices. IPv6 is the only thing that can fix that.

I don't know where you get your info from, but you should read El Reg a little bit more often so that you at least understand how and why things are happening.

How do we fire these pompous asses?

Since the board members of ICANN seem to feel like they are perfect and can do no wrong, I would like to know what can he done to fire each and every last one of them so that we can find some people that accept that we are all human, and sometimes make mistakes. Especially in light of the fact that for 15 consecutive years, the US government has needed to FORCE ICANN to back down from some stupid decision or another.

We also need some financial watchdogs with teeth to monitor what they are doing with all the money that they have and are collecting from those expensive as hell domain fees. Running off and bankrolling an internet conference does not sound like a good way to be blowing that money.

Personally, I think the ICANN board members are completely out of control idiots and need to be fired. And the sooner the better.

It also seems to be that there are people within ICANN who are not on the board that appear to have some common sense, and who may well be people that we could promote to the board.

DOUBLE BONK: Fanbois catch Apple Pay picking pockets

Apple found a way to increase that $92 billion pile of money it has!!!

Hilarious!! Apple made people pay way too much money to buy their state-of-the-art phone that finally got some features that Samsung has had for years, and then doubles up on the charges. Now that sounds like the perfect way to toss more money onto that humongous $92 Billion pile of cash they already had...

Arab States make play for greater government control of the internet

Yes let governments control the internet, and it will be dead in less than 5 years. Especially the Arabs, Chinese, Russians, North Koreans.

The very reason the internet has grown to where it is now because for the most part, Governments have been hands off, and the people have demanded access to it.

US Senate's net neutrality warrior to Comcast: Remind us how much you hate web fast lanes

Comcast has already violated Net Neutrality... In a huge way!!

When Comcast forced Netflix into paying for the same speeds every other company was already getting for free, they violated Net Neutrality, which means they violated their agreement with the federal government that they agreed to when they bought NBC.

And while Senator might not be on a committee as Comcast states, they surely know how much power this Senator wields, and would be quite smart to not piss him off. Comcast has got to learn to stop being the greedy bastard child of the cable industry.

And I for one, hopes that the federal government drops a gallagher hammer on Comcast to make sure the message comes across loud and clear to every internet provider in this country that you will not double dip by charging more for content providers to get their content to users.

Remember that tale of a fired accountant who blamed Comcast? It's kinda true, says telco

Comcast should hire this guy and make him a Senior Vice President of Customer Service. He has obviously been on the bad end of Comcast CS, and would know oh so well, what not to do.

At least at Comcast, it should be easy to make Customer Service better. Its so bad now, how do you go any lower?

What bugs me is that I hear nobody calling for the Comcast CEO to step down, even though in the end, he is the one responsible for the crappy CS. And he seems to be quite proud of his crappy CS too. This is probably due to the fact that most cable companies operate on local government required monopolies, and as such, they are beholden only to their shareholders. Since the customers must take the cable service that is available in their area, anyone living in a Comcast area, must get it from Comcast.

I believe that instead of letting Comcast and Time Warner merge, they should both be broken into smaller companies, and forced to compete with each other all over the country. In fact, all cable companies should have to compete with at least 1 other company in any town over 30,000 people in it, and at least 2 companies in any city over 75,000. These are minimums. Basically, any cable company that wants to offer their services to a town or city, should be able to do so. Some might well fail, but that is how things go in business. Some will succeed, and become wealthy. Some will not. But only by doing this will cable CS get better, prices stop going up, and programming be expanded to keep up with the competition.

White LED lies: It's great, but Nobel physics prize-winning great?

What if energy comes from clean sources? Does it then matter?

One thing this author seems to have ignored, is that energy, sooner or later is going to stop being from fossil fuels, and from cleaner sources.

Just last week, we got some info on what appears to be a cold fusion unit. Rather try to explain it my self, I will point you to the article I read.

Cold Fusion Reactor -- Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat -- http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reactor-verified-by-third-party-researchers-seems-to-have-1-million-times-the-energy-density-of-gasoline

Now if that is what it appears to be, as described in that article, then oil and coal is going to end very soon. And like many other people, I hope this is the real thing.

ISPs' post-net-neutrality world is built on 'bribes' says Tim Berners-Lee

Re: What the ISP's have been doing is NOT bribery! its flat out BLACKMAIL!

The data \from both Netflix and Google verify that this did happen.

Netflix has also published he throughput speeds for a bunch of ISP's for many months before they went and paid them for the access they should have had for free, and in each case, the throughput skyrocketed the month after they had to pay the cash to the ISP.

You cannot deny this. By now, we know the facts. Unfortunately, Eric Holder and his department has not had the time to go after the CEO's of these ISP's, due the the numerous documents they are hiding so \that we never find out the truth on a whole bunch of government scandals. But he has probably forgotten all about that by now.

Netflix was trying all kinds of things to get around the artificial slow downs that the ISP's were doing.

I used Netflix as an example because we know what the ISP's have done to them. How many other companies are out there under the same circumstances that have not gone public with what the ISP's have or are doing to them? I dont think we will ever know the answer, but I think we can bet that Netflix is not the only company that this has been done to.

The ISP's already charge each and every customer for that bandwidth. Nearly all, if not all ISPs charge for certain levels of service. I will use Time Warner as an example since that is what I have here.

2MB bandwidth $14.99 a month

3MB bandwidth $29.99 a month

15MB bandwidth $34.99 a month

20MB bandwidth $44.99 a month

30MB bandwidth $54.99 a month

50MB bandwidth $64.99 a month

On top of that, there is a $6 a month rental fee for the cablemodem (which you can purchase on your own and then save the $6 a month on) plus various charges for other services.

Now for a very long time, ISP's were happy to take your money and let you use that bandwidth as long as you did not exceed some number of bytes of data usage within that month. But years ago, most relented and either went to unlimited usage, or some huge amount that most non-commercial users would never use.

But then the ISP(s) started getting greedy. And now they still want their customers to pay them, but they also want the companies that their customers are using to pay them too. Especially if those companies are big enough to make a profit. Netflix is the best example that is out in the public. And ISP's customer pays for say 15MB bandwidth a month, and the ISP tells them that they have unlimited amounts of data for that payment. So the customer then goes and pays Netflix for their service as well. But then the ISP quietly starts slowing down the data flow for Netflix, until Netflix customers start complaining about how slow it is, and eventually start canceling their service. Netflix in the end, is forced to approach the big, greedy ISP(s) and offer them money in exchange for what should have been equal treatment by the ISP in the first place since their mutual customer has paid both of them.

Its blackmail. And nothing short of it.

What the ISP's have been doing is NOT bribery! its flat out BLACKMAIL!

Bribery is when someone that wants something that is against the law or against some rules of business, so they pay someone else to break that law or bend the rules to get that something.

I go back to the Netflix example. I dont know which ISP was first, but one or more of the big, greedy ISP's decided that they could extort money from Netflix by intentionally slowing down their connection(s) and data flow with Netflix. The longer Netflix held out, the slower the ISP(s) made Netflix connections. Eventually, Netflix customers, who have already paid their ISP for a nice wide, broadband connection started complaining about how slow Netflix was. Some started canceling their Netflix service. And all the while, the ISP(s) were tightening the pipes, slowing down that Netflix data more and more. Netflix in the mean time was trying all kinds of ways to get around the slowdown, and some worked for brief periods of time, but every time Netflix tried something that worked, the ISP(s) figured out what Netflix had done, and then found ways to slow that connection down as well.

Eventually, Netflix was forced to pay these big, greedy ISP(s) cold hard cash to allow its data to flow just like everyone elses data was flowing.

And that my friends is the perfect example of BLACKMAIL! Which by the way, just happens to be illegal in almost every civilized country on this planet. But it seems that the Attorney General of the United States is too busy hiding documents from numerous government scandals to bother charging the CEO(s) of the ISP(s) that have performed this blackmail.

Deutschland, Uber allowed (for now): Ban on taxi app lifted

Taxi companies around the world have spent decades bribing polititians

Taxi companies have created these Taxi Associations in every major city in the free world. They then fund these Associations by charging the drivers dues, Then they take a portion of these dues and wine and dine politicians and judges to get laws passed that makes it virtually impossible for a new cab company to get started. The laws themselves vary from city to city, but its always just an incredible set of hoops to get through, and approvals needed from people that are paid by the Taxi companies, that a new company is almost never allowed to even start offering taxi services. The companies that formed the Association pretty much dictate what the rates will be, how many cabs each company can have on the streets at any given time, and so on. Its all very carefully crafted to make sure they never have any more competition than they had when they put the Association together, and that they always make a very nice fat profit for themselves.

Uber is slowly but surely cracking that shell open all over the place, putting Taxi's out there with friendly drivers, sometimes at lower prices than the established companies, and gaining traction.

While I no longer live in a large city, I wish I lived in one that Uber is in, because cab companies have been essentially a multiple owner monopoly in most cities in the free world for decades because of the politicians and judges that their Association has bought off over the decades.

Comcast merger-bait spinoff to be known as GreatLand Connections

The FCC should be splitting Comcast into about 5 parts, and also splitting Time Warner cable into about 4 parts, and then telling them that its free for all time, and that any agreements that major or medium sized cities have with their cable companies must allow unlimited competition between companies.

Each new company must hire a CEO from outside of either current company, while the current CEO's are randomly assigned to one of the new companies in a lotto run by the FCC. Smaller cities would have to allow unlimited cable company competition within 7 years. None of these newly formed cable companies created in this process could merge or form partnerships for a minimum of 30 years.

So we would end up with 9 new cable companies, 7 new CEO's (more if these 2 quit and walk away), all with a directive to compete with each other within 3 years. And this would create the competition that we need to get the prices down, speeds up, and better customer service.

This is what the FCC **should** be doing. Not more mergers to reduce competition.

TROLL SLAYER Google grabs $1.3 MEEELLION in patent counter-suit

Re: Legal term?

It was decided before you decided to have the court decide that it had jurisdiction to decide the case. And so the court did decided that it was decided.

Tim Cook: 'I'd call what's going on in fondleslabs a speed bump'

I see no evidence of a Time Warner backbone, I am on Time Warner in Wisconsin, which puts me in the North Central part of the US. If I send something from here to Los Angeles, The data goes from here to Milwaukee then to Chicago. In Chicago it gets dumped xo.net for a couple of hops, and then is dumped onto AT&T, still in Chicago. My best description of AT&T's backbone is that it is very much a laggy-ass system, For example, each hop the data takes from here through the 2nd hop on xo.net are all 17ms or less. Every single AT&T hop is between 89ms and 92ms on good days, and over 100ms on bad days. So the first 7 hops are all 17ms and less and the last 8 hops, 7 of which are AT&T are all between 89ms and 92ms. What does that tell you?

So where is this mythical Time Warner backbone?

Rejoice, Windows fans: Stable 64-bit Chromium drops for Win 7 and 8

Google Chrome 64 bit stable isn't stable...

I found out about the 64 bit versions release early yesterday morning and grabbed it.

Problem number 1... Chrome keeps multiple threads open for itself, and then apparent one (or more) threads for each and every extension, app, plug-in and whatever else names they want to call all these add-ons. When you have the 32 bit version, simply closing the Chrome window does not shut Chrome down. And since the 64 bit version of Chrome complained that its smaller sibling was still running, the only way I could kill the little brother was to go into Task Manager and manually kill off each and every Chrome entry, which was about 8 of them on my system.

Only then was the big, stable 64 bit Chrome happy to install itself.

Now I don't know what you call stable, but in the first 18 hours, I have come back to my computer to see this very low res unhappy face in the stable 64 bit Chrome window. Yes, that low res unhappy face is what Google Chrome puts on the screen when it crashes. Neither page that it crashed on was a complete page. In fact, the first page was XtremeTech a CNet page, and the second site was CNN. The only thing I can think of that they have in common is that they both refresh the page periodically if they have sat idle for awhile.

I'm certain that someday soon, the Chrome team will find this unstable bit of code, and fix it. I did my best to help them know what crashed me the first time. Who knows, maybe they will now send me a $100,000 for finding a bug they couldn't find in this Chrome 64 Unstable release... Right???? What do you mean no??? I found a bug and reported it.... Oh man... I thought reporting bugs like this was how you made money these days.... Damnit!!!!!

Password manager LastPass goes titsup: Users locked out

Re: Hang on...

Go ahead and keep your passwords on your system if that is all you need. But I have a few machines that I need all of my passwords to be available from. And after trying about 6 different solutions in the past year, and dumping the first 5 in less than a month, I read about LastPass somewhere, and tried it. And now, I can go to any internet connected computer, and login to any of the sites that I need my passwords for. And every single password is longer than 10 characters and some are as man as 20 characters long.

BTW, Last pass is free for 99% of the people. I just recently decided to pay the the $12 a year they ask for simply because it works well for me. I've been using it for free for a few months, and even at free is does everything I needed.

Re: Hang on...

The password is encrypted BEFORE it leaves your computer as it goes to LastPass. So that part is not a problem.

Portability is nice. It you need to login somewhere to pull something up, I can do it from any computer that is connected to the internet.

I looked for something that does what LastPass does for years and this is he first password program or service that I have used for more than a month.

Re: 77nZMupqUnqgFSLbAF02RQAP

Congratulations! You just started speaking MARTIAN to 99.99% of the people reading this.

I am a premium (paid) user of LastPass, and the only thing I noticed that was unusual on the 12th was that I needed to login to my account once. So I might have been one of the lucky ones, but it was no inconvenience at all to login once, and once I had done that, everything worked just fine.

Two things about LastPass that I like... Actually, 3 now that they have figured out a way to change your lost master password. One is security. I have a unique password on every site I visit regularly. Secondly, if I go somewhere else, and need to pull something up, I can still use LastPass at that other location.

I used LastPass for a few months on a free basis, and just recently paid the $12 for a year of premium. If you think you can find a solid password service that is better than LastPass somewhere else for $1 month, go for it. I don't think you will.

I don't care who you are, every company has short outages. And when a company with lots of customers loses a data center, its ALWAYS going to over-load their customer service people. Google, Microsoft, Amazon... Biggest names in the business, and they have systems go down, and they rarely tell you what happened while they are fixing them. So this isn't just a Last Pass problem.

Government's 'Google Review' copyright rules become law

El Reg Parody...

So I could now go to a pub, have a few pints, go home, make an exact copy of El, Reg, post it online, add in some sad jokes about El Reg, The geniuses at The House of :Lords, the UK in general, and call it a parody, and get rich roo? and never give a dime of my wealth to anyone but me, myself and I?

Google's Pankhurst doodle doo-doo shows the perils of using Google to find stuff out

And some extremely bored ass had to write 1000+ words to inform the masses of something that absolutely matters to nobody. Born in 1858. And can't remember the day.Either way dude, that was ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY SIX YEARS ago. Did you just happen to drop in off of a malfunctioning time machine?

And I thought El Reg produced useful things... Errr.. nevermind.

Why don't you write about someone who was never born next. I'm certain you could find some "Not yet on wiki" facts to bore us all with. After all, it is hard (but obviously not impossible) to dispute birth details about someone not yet born.

Just like it is when someone was born 156 years ago.

Google went behind our backs and really hurt us, squeal upset porn kingpins

I'm still trying to figure out how we went from God saying, "Go forth and spread thy Seed", to preachers saying that doing so is Sinful.

And there was a time when I believed that those same preachers were spreading Gods word.

On the other hand, I still haven't found the scripture that talks about lubricants... LOL

Virgin Media struck dumb by NATIONWIDE DNS outage

Never ever ask a virgin what went wrong!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Goldilocks Gliese planets don't actually exist

Eh, whats that you say? And you smoked what this morning?

Perhaps the editor should send this reporter (Brid-Aine Parnell) back to the insane asylum errr... mental institution until which time they have recovered from the madness that is clearly obvious in the writings of this article.

Qualcomm fires DMCA shotgun at alleged code thieves on GitHub – including itself

Computer generated takedown notices need to be outlawed

After years of these computer generated takedown notices going to the wrong places, how about we outlaw them.

Or maybe even a better idea is to allow anyone that should NOT have gotten a takedown notice, but did, to be paid no less than $100,000 cash within 30 days receiving the takedown notice. Second instance of getting one of these wrongfully should get them $500,000, and a third and additional ones should get them $5,000,000 each time.The money should come from the company that hires the attorneys that send these things out. The attorneys that actually sign and send these takedown notices out, should also pay 50% of what the companies pay to the receiving party.

I am certain that would stop this crap almost instantly.

Judge says there's no such thing as a 'Patent Troll'

This judge needs to learn a few things about patent trolls

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

If it looks like a patent troll, acts like a patent troll, and sues like a patent troll, then it probably is a patent troll.

If it looks like a clueless judge, acts like a clueless judge, and speaks like a clueless judge, then it probably is a clueless judge

Now that was nice and simple, right judge?.

Big Java security fixes on the way – but not so fast, Windows XP users

XP? Whats that??

After all these years, is there anything that Windows does WELL that XP did not?

My new computer runs on Windows 8.1, and while I think nearly everyone on a desktop would agree that "metro" is a stinking pile of crap, even the rest of the thing just seems so disjointed that its not even funny.

Why do I need to look in 3 different places to get all of the info on my wireless connection such as the band its connected to, the speed data is moving though that connection, and how much data has gone through that connection over time?

Its almost like someone tossed the OS into a blender, ran it for hours and hours, and then took the mess that came out, and ran links to all the bits.

If I look at internet connection(s), I should see everything about it (or them), and all my options for it (or them) should all be there.

If I look at printers, all printers should be listed, and all options that can be preset should be lised.

If I look at storage, everything about storage should be there. Hard drives, SSDs, Optical, memory sticks, external drives and so on.

But apparently this is too much for Microsoft to understand. Windows is almost 30 years old, and Microsoft still does not understand this concept.

Girl gamers sexism row: Top e-sports federation finds reverse gear

Men? What men?

*GASP* You mean there are still men that are happy to be "men"?

On earth?

Are you sure?

Do they look anything like that guy on the right over there? ----->>

When there are only 2 choices and everyone aged 1 and old knows both of them, how can you possibly forget to list both unless you are pushing an agenda? Or on drugs at work.... Either way, if you can't remember MALE AND FEMALE on anything should be fired. No excuses.