Posts by Stephen Stagg

New 'Cosmos' browser surfs the net by TXT alone

Bytes?

At 8 bytes per character, what type of character encoding is that?!

Munich considers dumping Linux for ... GULP ... Windows!

Re: Lack of integrated email/contacts/calendar?

My Take would be because the only provided options were: webmail or Outlook.

It's no surprise that Outlook doesn't play nice with third party servers when the email client vendor happens to also sell an email(/groupware) server solution..

Crazed Microsoft robot accuses BBC kids' channel of Win8 piracy

The request came from: http://www.leakid.com/ according to the chillingeffects page

Mythbusters cannonball ‘myth-fires’

Protip

Don't insult anything about America if you don't want to upset lots of people

Chrome 9 debuts with WebGL, app store, instant annoyance

@ Printer problems

Did you file a bug? what was the response? Printing works in the majority of Chrome installs, so your experiences will be useful to the chrome team

Microsoft pulls Windows 7 balloons from Euro 'launch parties'

Genius

These marketing types are geniuses. They spend 5 minutes airbrushing out some balloons, and manage to generate endless discussions about the meaning on blogs etc..

Microsoft warns of 'irreparable harm' on court's Word injunction

Software Patents

So, software patents are bad and stifle competition/development.... but only when they are used against Microsoft.

Camera catches Samsung's OLED iPhone wannabe

Competition

Has a WVGA screen which is 4 times sharper than the ..... QVGA.

Hmm.. I wonder what screen resolution the Iphone has? :)

US P2P bill aims shackles at browsers, IM

@Fuzzy Wotnot

"Where would we be without politicians eh?"

Unemployed probably, I wonder how much of the global software engineering workforce is currently being paid to implement some crazy government legislation or other.

Pirate Bay server becomes museum artefact

Power + Connection

Now all we need is for the museum to host an 'interactive' display and give the box power and an internet connection.

MEPs urge govs: Set up surveillance register

@Dan

I'm sorry, did you say something?

IWF pulls Wikipedia from child porn blacklist

Another censorship own-goal

Yet again, a censor has tried to prevent people from being exposed to content on the internet and, as a result, has massively increased the number of people viewing it. This is why trying to restrict the internet fails, and why [we] must continue to aggressively advertise every act of mis-censorship that happens, sooner or later these people may just realize that what they are doing is counter-productive

Judge Dredd smartshell shotguns to hit Iraq in '09

TeeCee

I think if the enemy got close enough to notice the pixellation, the bearer would be having bigger problems than trying to stay hidden.

BT's Phorm small print: It's all your fault

BT

"We will endeavour to keep our list of suspected fraudulent or illegal sites as up to date as possible and to warn you about any sites on this list if you attempt to view them..."

So if you try to visit the bt webwise site, it should block itself??

I'm more interested in the clause: "You consent, and you agree to ensure that each user of the BT Webwise service consents, to all technical operations that we may carry out in connection with providing the BT WebWise service."

As a BT Broadband user, I never consented to this, and it seems that BT have just made it impossible for me to fulfil the Terms of Service, so I can just ignore them and stop paying?

Elon Musk's Falcon 1 launches successfully

Sigmund Freud eat your heart out

There is something seriously disturbing about wealthy men literally showing their size off in public, by shooting their 21 m long phallicly shaped rockets into space.

Paris... well, you can work it out.

Logic-gate 'supermolecules' play noughts & crosses

@Pierre

Actually, it is not impossible to loose tic-tac-toe when you start, it may be fairly difficult to loose, but it is possible.

Gag order lifted for students who hacked subway card

@ Keiron

The guys could have titled their talk:

'the MBTA are f***tards and should be milked for every penny they own, come here to see how to put $10000 charges on the CEO's transit card'

and they still shouldn't have been gagged. Of course they want a sensational title that will draw interest, and if they are ethical hackers, then they won't disclose enough information to actually make a working exploit. But disclosure should never be made illegal.

'Why not try nude female midgets?' says Microsoft Adcenter

Ooh, sue Microsoft

so, the advertising term 'Under 16 Nude' has been 'recently used' has it? (line 4035). If it's illegal to link to pirated music and videos, it must be illegal to link to illegal child porn content.

Of course, vulnerable children don't have the strong legal backing the likes of the MPAA have, but still.

Judge refuses to lift order squelching students' subway card hack

This is one case

This is one case where I favour full, illustrated disclosure. preferably whith a means to clone the CEO of MBTA's card for personal use.

Council IT provider's staff exposed back-room operations

Wow

"transforming customer services" - you're telling me!

Verizon faces 65,000 worker walkout

emotes

well, it certainly is an emotive subject, going of all the flaming here.

I would suggest that there are some unions that are pretty useless and 'corrupt to the core' and I'm sure there are many unions that serve their members well.

What the nay-sayers are forgetting is that much of the abuse perpetrated by employers that prompted the forming of the first unions, is prevented nowadays by the mere presence of the unions. Therefore, even tho a union may seem pointless, it is not reasonable to say they are ineffective without actually removing them and seeing what happens.

NZ judge saves girl from bloody silly name

Parents

The parents should be surgically neutered, preferably without anaesthetic.

Cannibal's legal objection hamstrings German horror film

well

So, it seems that I'm somewhat in the minority here, but I don't see what is so wrong with that the guy did. No matter how perverted I may think the act of cannibalism, I'm not arrogant enough to want to force my morals on someone who has not involuntarily harmed anyone.

I think I'll now lie down with my hands on my head, and wait for the morality police to come knocking.

HMV lines up a few VAT-free CDs and DVDs

public interest??

<< "As with all taxes the Government will continue to keep this issue under review, taking account of the wider public interest, and will take action if appropriate." >>

you mean, they will balance the cost of enforcement against the loss of tax income, and persue the cheaper option.

SanDisk touts read-only SD cards for sensitive data

civil service memory

Actually civil servants use WOLOT memory. Write once, leave on train.

Boeing to build combo airship-copter flying cranes

Skyhook

This must be the result of some particularly stubbon pedant falling for the 'go get a skyhook' joke and setting out to prove to the world that he *could* infact have got a skyhook if only it had been invented.

Cokeheads slip AI onto Yahoo! front page

Deepak Agarwal $$$

I'd say that Deepak Agarwal's end of year bonus is safe for a few years then.

Japan to fund creation of 40W, 40in OLED TV

@ Bronek Kozicki

It really seems like Sony are 2 different companies,

Sony Consumer puts out proprietary, expensive goods that don't really compete, and tend to be DRM laden.

Sony Business tends to put out innovative, function-over-form products of the highest quality.

They even [used to] have 2 websites, Sony for consumers was pretty but useless. Sony business was functional, and had everything you might want available in an easy-to-access form.

Gmail uses DomainKeys to lock out eBay phishing attacks

@Paul

Actually, I have a contact working in the Bank of Nigeria who assures me that your $ 30 million (US) are secured, and awaiting transfer immediately to your bank account should you wish to recieve it. Just send a signed letter, including your bank account number, NI Number, Pin Number, date of birth, 3 utility bills, a photocopy of your passport, and your driving licence to:

D OdgyForkers, London. PO BOX 666

And await your millions.

Dell debuts designer laptop line

@ Eddie Edwards

where did you get the 2.8% from?

To increase £12 to £29 by adding 2.8% must mean you are using some very strange number system.

By my calculations, £29 is 2.4 TIMES(240%) the value of £12, an increase of (I think) 141%.

Paris, because, well, who'se calculator were you using anyway?

UK clamps down on bus-spotting terror menace

Actually....

The Police can search you, and confiscate film/camers/cards IF they have 'reasonable suspicion' that they can use the film/card as evidence that you are a terrorist. [Terrorism Act 2000 sec. 43.4]

This is limited to PCs and not PCSOs.

They have to give you a copy of the incident report, OR tell you how to get hold of it.

It can only be carried out by a PC of the same sex.

It's the laws that are bad, as well as the application of them, in this case.

Bugs casts shadow over Firefox 3

@ Mark

<< The only browser with 0 vunrabilities[sic.], and a track record of fixing vunrabilities[sic.] in a very short time (days), is Opera.>>

Somehow, I feel that there is a logical inconsistency somwhere in there.

Dog collared with Cat-5 cable

Also on sale

The cat5 fake-bike-chain, that I had to imrovise once.

Ransomware Trojan code break 'impractical'

Here in the UK...

If the Ministry of Rational Policies decides to confiscate your computers after you have been infected with this virus, they can throw you in jail for the crime of witholding an encryption key from the police.

On the other hand, if you are asked to surrender your keys, the defence of 'it wasn't me, it was a virus' may be worth trying :).

Old Windows exploits dominate hack attack traffic

@ foo_bar_baz

That's assuming that the PKI keys are secure. The recent debian fiasco with insecure keys proves that this is not always the case.

Harvard bitch seeks to strip Zuckerberg's Facebook trademark

Actually

Actually, Mark stole the Idea from me. I designed an S&M based social networking site called faecbook.com about a month before facebook was started. Then one day, out of the blue, Mark Zuckerberg actually abseilled thru the window of my office, and stole a USB key containing it while swinging tarzan-style past my desk. The lawyers have been informed.

Fake subpoenas harpoon 2,100 corporate fat cats

subject: Fish, object: Barrels, verb: Shooting, preposition: in

Just send emails to CEOs and Execs 'from' a local 'massage parlour' mentioning scotland yard/the FBI and billing records or security camera footage, and you'll get much more than a 10% response rate.

Security experts warn against Web 2.0 charlatans and 'premature AJAXulation'

@AC (12:58GMT)

Actually, That company with billions!, can get it right. If you are having problems with a non-compliant browser failing, you can click on the link at the bottom of any gmail page that says: 'basic html'. This is true also if you have a proxy that can't handle the AJAX requests.

If you are having a problem because of uploads failing. Then this is not Googles fault, but most likely a broken network setup that is only manifesting itself with large requests, such as trying to attach a file.

Nothing like creating a market...

What all these books are saying is that if you write/use insecure code, then you will be insecure.

Any 'web' programmer who has any professional integrity will know about secure coding practices, and how to avoid security.

Any shill paid by a software house can say: Look, I wrote a crap application and then hacked it!!!1! Buy our special extra-protective tin foil helmets and this won't happen to you.

The only solution to this problem is market regulation, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Google crawls The Invisible Web

@Henry Cobb

If you are hiding data by using simple forms (we're not talking about passwords hacking here) then you have bigger problems.

And for most people, database load won't be an issue. If you're controlling load by making it difficult for people to find publically-accesible data, then I pity you, and if you are worried about/ find that the googlebot loading your site periodically, that's what robots.txt is for.

Apple forbids Windows users from installing Safari for Windows

Apple Label

When I bought my Mac Mini, it came with several Apple labels in the box, in the form of pretty stickers, I happened to stick one on my Windows box, so I'm covered anyway :).

UK to fly the flag for OOXML

MS PR

It seems that the Microsoft PR department have done a very thorough job on this one.

Radiohead top UK album chart

@David H

Actually, this is rubbish. If someone who knows what they are doing made the MP3/AAC/WMA, and they were encoding from a studio/prepress recording, the quality of the download could well be higher than that of a CD.

Of course, I haven't actually seen/heard any of the Radiohead downloads, so I don't know in this particular case, but this myth that CD is always better than MP3/AAC/WMA is just a myth.

Intel walks out of OLPC project

@Simon

Read http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

you will see that even literacy is not essential for using a computer.

Gmail exploit aids domain hijack

@ Alacrity Fitzhugh

No, you just observed the slashdot effect in action :). Or actually the 'NYTimes, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Lifehacker and many other online sources.' effect.

GMailers: how to check

Anyone who has a gmail accout (or google apps account) should check their filters (settings->filters) for any entries that they didn't add.

Although the exploit has been fixed, someone who hacked your account before the fix could still be silently monitoring your email. The only way to be sure is to check your filters.

Rove investigator erases his PCs - to kill computer virus

@Morely Dotes

In the UK, it isn't possible to wipe highly classified data off a disk drive. Once a disk has been tainted by something at, or above Secret, the drive itself acquires that classification, and should not be de-classified, ever. In practice, however, this rule is not commonly enforced/adhered to.

Facebook sued for mis-sending dirty texts

@David Wiernicki

I suggest that you work out who is e-stalking you and get a court-oder put on then before you dissolve into a quivering pile of indignation.

iPod Nano in airport trouser conflagration horror

Liar! Liar!

I mean c'mon, his trousers caught on fire.

Boy racer cuffed for 140mph YouTube jaunt

Muppets

This must be a new 64-bit Ford with quad-core. They go bare fast!