Posts by Ross 221 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2007
I'm sorry, if Andrew Orlowski personally sent the RIAA attack dogs round my mothers house and she was dragged through the streets for having copie done of her Johnny Cash CDs to tape I would still read the Reg. But you just linked to the Daily Fail.
I have to draw the line somewhere...
There's nothing wrong with traffic shaping *per se*, but like all things, when it's done badly it's a nightmare.
The trouble with Tiscali is they (and many other ISPs) have the same business model as Northern Rock - they offer way more than they have the resources to back up. All they need to do is to be honest with their customers and say "ok, you can have 50GB/month at 16Mb/s but you pay for it. If you just want a web/email type package then it's nice and cheap"
But no, they effectively lie to get subscribers in, then realise they don't have the capacity or funds to actually provide what they offered when you signed the contract. It needs looking at by the regulators. Yeah I know - that's almost as big a joke as the broadband market.
Me no like this way of thinking.
Testing would cost someone money. Me in fact. And you. If it were introduced it would be run by somebody with fairly close links to No. 10, so you can expect your taxes to spent either implementing it, or at least running "focus groups".
Yes there is a problem, and yes it will cost money to fix it. I personally would prefer the root of the cause gets charged tho. I use Windows at work, I use it at home, but damn it has its issues. If it weren't designed by ppl whose metric of decency is "how pretty is it?" then it could be a decent OS, but no. It asks, nay begs, to be compromised and abused. The problem(s) lie firmly at the door of a company that happily sold a product that isn't fit to be networked.
Multi user OSes have existed for what? 40-50 years now? And MS still can't make a simple one that doesn't require n layers of 3rd party protection to even *hope* you can check your mail without needing a reinstall.
The basic fact is that ppl are stupid. That's why we have ABS, seat belts, crumple zones, air bags etc in cars - we *know* someone will make a mistake and so we try to mitigate that by making the safest cars we can. Why isn't our most popular (or should that be common?) OS the same?
I'm not sure even the iPhone 2 will see the heady US style sales here in Europe. Paying for the hand set puts it at a distinct disadvantage, texting will always be a bit of a struggle, and it's too darned big! Geek chic not geek brick plx.
Frankly I just wish Nokia would re-release the 3210 or 8310 with colour screen, Java, 1000 hours battery life and about 75% of the depth taken out. I'd be there like a shot. Man I loved my 3210...
[What's the difference? A fine for unclamping or a fine at home when it's too late to prove you 'left within the 2 hours', or whatever the claimed broken contract term is]
You can actually get home without having to fork out £90 or whatever they charge to get the clamp removed and then trying to get your money back. Best of luck with that btw.
[Ask them to leave, if they don't leave get the car towed and notify the police. The DVLA has no duty to take sides and release data it has been given in confidence and subject to data protection act]
Trespass isn't a criminal offence so the police have no jurisdiction. Why do you want to notify them? And you think towing is fine but clamping/ticket isn't? Towing like clamping requires a SIA licensed operator. They are identical in the effect on the driver which you are so concerned about. The only difference between the two is the land owner gets their land back quicker. The driver still has to part with money before they can go home and then try to get it back later.
[They know where I live and which car I drive, hence they know when I'm out, and they send bailiffs around to extract money by intimidation.]
*sigh* Bailiffs can only exercise their powers under a warrant ISSUED BY A COURT. You can easily avoid that by not avoiding the correspondence from the company that issued the ticket.
[Supermarkets no doubt get a cut of the money. Ka chink. But the supermarket does not charge for the parking, and penalties for parking badly or taking a little too long look like unreasonable terms for a free service]
Whether they charge or not is entirely irrelevant. And the "taking a little too long" statement is a joke - I've yet to see a supermarket car park that has a max stay under 3 hours. How long does it take to do your shopping?! Of course if you go to Tesco then off to the nearby B&Q or whatever without moving your car then you get what you deserve when they ticket/clamp/tow you.
If you don't agree with the terms of parking, then don't park. It really is that simple. I'm afraid you can't decide to park there under your own terms - it's private land.
I don't get why parking is such an emotive issue. There;s nothing wrong IN THEORY with what the DVLA are doing. If you get other ppls details without proper cause then you risk a £5k fine. Think of it like the PNC - omg any police officer can misuse it to find where you live and kick the living *** out of you when he's off duty. Oh but wait, you get in trouble for misusing it. Do you think we should ban the PNC? Or should police officers be allowed to trace ppl by their car reg when it's reasonable to do so? Yeah of course.
If your only argument about this is that you don't think there should be any comeback against you when you park somewhere you shouldn't then I am afraid I think that;s a childish and selfish attitude.
1. There is no correlation between the registered keeper of the vehicle and the owner in property law. If you're that scared about your info being sold after you park somewhere you oughtn't then get together with some mates, set up a legal entity and register all your vehicles to it. Privacy assured. Jesus...
2. Get over yourselves - yes, there are unscrupulous clampers and parking ticket issuing companies out there, just like there are unscrupulous lenders. You don't see people screaming "OMFG ban the banks!!!1!!!!!!"
If you own a shop with a bit of land for your customers to park on, and I being a cheap bastard park on it all day for free whilst I go to work you will be rather annoyed. Trouble is the police won't give a damn, so what are you going to do about it? You have no idea who I am, and the only way to identify me is my car reg. You might think about clamping my car yourself, but then I reckon I'll call the police and get you nicked for contravening the Private Security Industry Act. You can get anything up to 5 years in the clink for that (although I admit you'd *really* need to piss the judge off to get anything like that) Private parking has a very valid use (well, if it's well operated it does).
In short, if the DVLA give out your details don't complain - you had no reason to give them your name and home address in the first place. Do you register your domain names and leave your full personal details for all the world to see? If you park on someones private land without permission then be a man and take the consequences instead of whining like a 4 year old. And yes, yes - the rules DO apply to you. You are not special (in that sense anyway)
</rant>
[Landesman also reports how hard it is to remove the attack code from tainted web systems...But when she disabled them, she was dismayed to find the changes reversed and that the machines had soon resumed their attacks]
Removing it is very simple. It's a lot of work, but it's simple. Any rooted system *has* to be considered beyond redemption and reinstalled from known clean media. Thinking that applying a patch is enough risks leaving a root kit installed, so in essence you are doing the attacker a favour by protecting "their" server from other possible attackers.
Yes the system may be compromised again if you can't patch it, but given a clean system and IDS you can at least see *how* it's compromised again then (unfortunately) reinstall again then make the necessary modifications to avoid future compromise. Then you can obviously advise every bugger else and another wave of attacks comes to a (temporary) halt.
It's not sexy, it's hard bloody work, but that's the real world of IT for you.
WHM is a software package (see www.cpanel.net) - there was a locally exploitable vuln in it in late 2006 that elevated the attackers privs to root. It was patched fairly swiftly, but those ppl running it without paying for it don't get support and so no patch.
No need to worry about the hosting mafia :o)
Had some time to play at last :o)
Gotten a hold of the .js and binary. Seems the binary is served in a similar fashion to the .js file - random file name that is deleted after being served.
The server exploit seems to be the one Matt Bradley above linked to. It's only usable locally tho so owners of affected domains might want to check their systems for key loggers. I really can't imagine the attackers bought a hosting account on each affected server, although it may be possible to execute the exploit through the "try before you buy" test account that some providers have...
Frankly if I were one of the users caught out by this, and my customers were being trojaned and it did turn out to be an exploit that was patched back in September 2006 I'd be fuming.
The binary is a 453k PE file. PEiD says it's packed with:
UPX 0.89.6 - 1.02 / 1.05 - 1.24 modified -> Markus & Laszlo [Overlay]
Going to have to find my OllyDB CD out to see what's inside.
That'll teach me not to get up until lunch :o/ Seems all the domains listed have been scrubbed and are (with the exception of reallybored.com which prolly actually gets some traffic) showing cPanel holding pages.
I mean Jesus - web hosting support staff working on a weekend?! Who'd a thought it?
The domains seem to be spread across a number of hosts, although it is of course possible that some of those hosts are resellers and it's one parent host that has been exploited. Probably not tho - I would bet 50p on it being an automated cPanel exploit.
Oh well, no reversing on a quiet Sunday afternoon for me :o(
1) -ology degrees are looked down upon? I don't think my lady will be very happy to find her biology degree from a "proper" university counts for naught.
2) Citing Wikipedia is just asking to be ridiculed.
3) There's nothing wrong with trying to find your own references per se. However, the vast, vast majority of freshers have *never* done proper research before. They get given a text book in class and that is their world. Throwing them in at the deep end is therefore a bad idea. You may as well give a learner driver their first lesson on the M25 at 8am on a Monday morning. Yes, they need those traffic dodging skills one day, but let's start off nice and simple eh?
By giving them texts that you have checked you can teach them how to use them properly and see that they are actually doing it in their papers. Once they have that down pat *then* they can start to find their own stuff.
4) Books *are* better than the internet. The main and most obvious reason is that books cost money to print, and nobody will buy your book if it's filled with inaccurate prattle.
I don't understand how ppl can be complaining about this. If the story was "Brighton Uni Media Studies course accepts Wikipedia as a quotable source" there'd be uproar (rightly so) that such courses count for bugger all and the UK education system is circling the drain etc.
A few ppl here saying "but if your PC is compromised who cares about a printer?"
Think about privileges ppl. If there are exploitable printers out there then all you need is some JavaScript to run in a local users browser. Yes the PC has technically been compromised, but the JS is only running in the context of the browser, and with limited privileges. However, by exploiting a printer you get *more* privileges and thus more resources with which to carry out more attacks. The PC may well be fully patched making further inroads impossible, but poorly programmed priinter firmware opens up new avenues to an attacker.
The PC does not need to be rooted to get to the printer, and this is the whole point - it's very similar to the ADSL router attack through your browser. Do you think that having your nameservers changed by a malicious piece of JavaScript is nothing to concern yourself with? Or do you protect your router with a password? Yeah, I thought so.
A lack of imagination abounds - I guess few ppl on El Reg have ever spent much time on the greyer side of security.
How's about a buffer overflow in the firmware, or rewriting it, adding code to look out for bank details etc in print jobs and then tunnelling out and reporting the info to a drop server?
Reverse shell?
Packet sniffing on old networks?
Spam relay?
Thinking that because it's a printer you can't do anything with it other than print because that's all it is meant to do is like thinking all anyone can do to IE is make you view a web page.
In other words, an insecure protocol that is endemic in millions of businesses *is* an IT issue. A lot of printer firmware is available for download so if ppl want to explore buffer overflows, undocumented functions etc then the resources are there.
Comment 1
[if she was able to afford a crystal meth addiction starting at the age of 13, I doubt very much that she "has not had a very easy life". ]
You seem to be inferring that drug users invariably have the financial means to abuse drugs? I am afraid it just doesn't work like that. It was unlikely she ever had the money to afford an addiction - she would have been given free drugs to get her addicted, and then used theft, drug dealing, prostitution etc to fund it. Unless your definition of "an easy life" includes one working as a child prostitute then I must disagree.
Comment 2
[OK if there was only one pharmacy to visit....
D'ohhhhh!!!!! Dullard of the week winner]
*sigh*
Did you read the comment it was in response to? I guess not. The (ridiculous) claim was that if this woman can sue her dealer for selling her illegal drugs which damage her then the poster must be able to sue his pharmacist for selling him paracetamol that he then goes on to OD on. See the difference?
In case you missed it, the pharmacist is acting perfectly legally and *responsibly*, and will tell you that you can't buy 200 paracetamol without a prescription (here in the UK anyway) if you try. If you ignore that advice, and the advice on the usage notes inside the packet and OD and need a new liver (best of luck) then the pharmacist has acted entirely reasonably and so you have no complaint.
Nobody is claiming paracetamol isn't dangerous - hell, too much of *anything* is dangerous (water poisoning anyone?) - we're examining the difference between an irresponsible seller interested only in making a sale, to hell with the clients health, and a responsible seller who is interested in making a legal sale if it is in the buyers interest.
Yes she seems messed up, no I don't necessarily agree with this particular case but those comments are just plain silly, and belong in a Polly Toynbee column.
I guess this was posted as an "only in America" story?
[And another whisper: the guy who understands what “sub ax,ax” means (and implies)]
It means you'd better hope you're in a 16 bit environment otherwise Murphys law says you're gonna have one difficult to trace bug next time you do anything with eax.
Personally I prefer bitwise operands like xor or and to do the same trick.
Back to the article, Java has its uses in teaching. It's a tool like any other language, and like any tool it can be used for the right reason and the wrong reason. For example I can use a hammer to put a screw in a baton on the wall, but it's an awful lot more hard work than using the right tool, and the result will be somewhat less elegant.
Java is good when you're teaching logic and methods etc - the student can focus on the task at hand rather than wondering why their 4 hours of work just threw a SIGSEV. It's crap for teaching ppl about the link between software and hardware as it purposely abstracts that.
Pick the right tool for the job at hand and you'll get a better result.
And whilst we're randomly ragging on various languages - C++ is an abomination unto the Lord and it's use should be punished with fire. *Lots* of fire. You may as well add PEEK and POKE to Javascript as add OO to C. Anyway, you can approximate classes with judicious use of structs, function pointers and void pointers (oh no he didn't just say that? He did?!)
[The article goes on to say that "solar [is] more expensive than burning coal or oil. That will change if Lonnie Johnson’s invention works..."
That's untrue, of course, as coal- or oil-burning generators also convert heat into electricity, with the same sort of low efficiency as solar-thermal does
]
Wow, so they "convert heat into electricity, with the same sort of low efficiency as solar-thermal does". Must be the same then! Do you understand how they do this? Solar and fuel burning generators are two entirely different beasts, and other than the fact they both produce electricity have no similarities.
There's no point retrofitting fuel burning stations with JTEC. That would be silly. One it's expensive to rip out the turnbines, generators and excitors etc, and secondly steam powered generators need super heated steam for safety reasons* which seems a bit of a waste in a JTEC system.
You could of course bolt JTEC onto the end of the LP stage, harvesting some more of the heat from the spent steam before you shove it through the cooling towers. That's where the massive efficiency losses lie in fuel burning plants so there are gains to be made there. You then have the problem of either matching the JTEC output to your steam generator, or building another national grid interface for it which won't come cheap.
Or, you could build new fuel burning stations specifically designed to drive JTEC generators.
Trouble is you also have the issue with the fact that FOSSIL FUELS ARE EXTREMELY FINITE.
Ergo substantially improving the viability of solar energy is a good thing and we should be very happy.
In the efficiency maths you should also remember that fuel burning generators are a bitch to get up to speed from cold, so unless you intend to take a generator off line for maintenance etc you need to keep them running (not at full bore mind) so they still use fuel even when the grid says "no ta, we're just taking the nukes power at the mo". Who cares if we're using up some extra sun light compared to coal? There's a few billion years more of that to come - you reckon coal's gonna last another 50?
* condensed water in a steam turbine is very, very bad news. The water droplets are like bullets and strip turbine blades like a farmer strips ears of corn. Then you have 2 issues - firstly white hot, razor sharp turbine blades flying out at random angles and great speed, and secondly, an unstable turbine weighing ~500 tonnes rotating at 3000 RPM. They balance them carefully for a reason you know.
Determining the speed of a dot like object in a rear view mirror is extremely hard. If you're doing 80MPH yourself and the law says you're already risking a speeding ticket then you can't be expected to think that the dot behind you has a closing speed of 100MPH+.
Speed is fine as long as everyone is on the same page. The problems arise when one idiot thinks the rules don't apply to them, whether that be a boy racer pushing two ton or an old biddy doing 25mph on the M6. Either way things can get real messy.
I agree that many roads could have their limits raised to 80-90MPH no problem. Cars and especially bikes have far superior braking capability than they used to. Until then tho ppl need to realise that not everyone else on the road has 20" discs and ABS and 20 years experience, and if you want to speed way over the legal limit (i.e. what everyone else is doing, give or take) then make sure your family know what colour box you wanna be buried in. *Especially* if you're doing it naked (on a bike) - kevlar stops bullets, it's not so good versus trucks.
To those folk that think it's entirely the fault of the OS :
If you download and run code whilst using administrative privileges then you can't blame the OS when the program subverts it. That's your own stupid fault.
If you download and run known malware code whilst running in userland and the the program exploits vulnerabilities in the OS to gain administrative or kernal level privileges and subverts it then you *still* can't blame the OS. That's your own stupid fault for not patching (if one is available) and running anti-virus to block the known malware.
If you download and run unknown malware code whilst running in userland and the the program exploits vulnerabilities in the OS to gain administrative or kernal level privileges and subverts it then you can blame the OS.
Personally I would like to try this little toy out - the article doesn't seem to mention that it encrypts your files, just "locks your desktop". I'm guessing Alt-F4, Alt-TAB, Start, Ctrl-Alt-Del, or as a last bash OFF should do the trick :o)
Lots of ideas for nicking gear here, but I think I would prefer to print out a bucket load of bar codes and stick them on the wrong - but identically priced - items. Think of the fallout - the supermarket get the right amount of money so they won't catch on, but you'll get some secretary going out to get some milk and a box of biscuits, and handing in a recipt for olive oil and a box of Durex on her petty cash claim. Oh the rumours!
Need to get thinking of good swaps...
Loving the logic. All the network traffic caused by the game patches having to be downloaded lagged the service out, so MS say "sorry, have a free game".
Very nice of them, however, you have to *download* the game. I wonder how much of their catalogue they'll give away to say sorry for the lack of network availability before they realise their mistake...
Where;s the actual issue here? I don't run Vista (although my lady does and *everything* seems slow to me so I can't tell if copying files is slow for any particular reason) so I don't know if the problem is :
a) Vista really does take 100 years to copy 80GB; or
b) more likely, the function that calculates the time to copy is sorely nadgered under certain conditions.
Given the screen shot showing ~25GB to go at 10MB/s it should be showing ~40mins to go, not X gazillion days which makes me think b) is the culprit.
Seriously. I have to avert mine eyes when I see people using computers on TV for anything other than searching for files otherwise I end up self harming to make the pain go away.
I will never forget the end of The Net (no matter how hard I try) when Sandra Bullock types in an IP address involving a number in the 300s. I mean Jesus ppl - if they wanted to make sure they weren't inadvertantly using someones actual IP address all they had to do was use an address from a private block. No need to worry about stories in the Daily Fail saying "Net flick directs little Johnny to porn site" when some kid points his browser at the address and his mommy catches him.
Ok, I'm calmer now.
As I was saying, computers on TV are bad. It's like medics watching Holby City. Prolly drives 'em crazy. Saying that I don't know if I even get Court TV. Sky channel anyone?
Ah, so the Japanese have *paid* the Americans for kit which will be used to defend *America* from possible North Korean missile attack? Obviously the actual missile they're buying is pretty much useless, but the tracking gear will do very nicely for the Yanks, sat between them and North Korea.
Does it concern anyone else that America see the rest of the world as just some real estate on which to plonk military hardware for their own protection?
Proof if it were needed that there ain't no crystals balls being used by the analysts. Predicting future trends is very hard. PC World got it wrong by stocking up on something they couldn't shift. Nintendo got it wrong the other way.
It could have been worse for them - they could have rolled out a few million units more than they could shift. At least this is a theoretical loss, if you can even call it a loss at all. It's like me claiming I lost £10mil 'cause I didn't put the winning lottery numbers on last week. Gotta love hindsight.
Now if someone could point me to the analyst reports from 12 months ago saying Nintendo should increase Wii production to a level that would meet current demand I will be impressed.
Another case of someone signing a contract without reading it. If he had bothered to read the contract in the first place it would have been clear what he could and cound not do as part of his plan. Instead he just did what he thought he should be able to do.
Tut tut.
Frankly the offer of $3k seems reasonable - they're giving him the best rate for the service he's used. It's not often you see that!
Todays lesson - either read the contract, get someone competent to read it for you, or walk away. I get *so* fed up with these whiney types that plain refuse to take responsibility for themselves...
[the issue with malaria is that you can't physically GET mosquito nets to everyone]
So how do you propose to get vaccines and the skilled ppl to administer them to folk if you can't get mozzy nets there?
I think the point is that whilst scientists burn through millions of dollars of money trying to make a name for themselves...errr I mean develop a vaccine for malaria nearly 3000 people a *day* die in the mean time.
It;s like having a tidal wave hit the Eastern Sea board wiping out all the infrastructure, cholera et al running rampant and the rest of the world saying "don't worry, we're not going to send you the help we've got right now, but in 10 years time we might have figured out how to put the sea back where it was. All the best in the mean time"
People need help *now* not some indeterminate time in the future. If help is iPods or mozzy nets then so be it, but sooner is generally preferred to later.
Do you forget so easily that the fine was set so high (by the jury I hasten to add - i.e. her peers, not "the man") because she tried to destroy evidence?
No it's not proportionate to the cost to the RIAA - it's punitive to both punish her and to disincline other folk to try the same.
I'm no fan of the RIAA, but anyone sharing or downloading copyrighted material without paying the rights holder has no complaint if they get caught and fined. You know you're doing wrong - don't act like a 6 year old and whine about it.
[So most of them died from the fever rather than the bleeding, so that's alright then!]
Yes, because usually when people catch and subsequently die from an Ebola infection they are liquidated by the virus. Their insides bleed out from *every* orifice, and that blood is teeming with Ebola. Contact with the blood is extremely unwise.
If however the sufferer dies from fever and either doesn't bleed or only bleeds in small quantities then other people are far less likely to become infected and die a quite horrific death.
The other advantage is that researches now have a new strain to look at. They can hopefully see which changes in its make up make it less dangerous and use that information to design a vaccine.
I bet the monkies are laughing at us now. We thought we had the upper hand, we could butcher them in their homes, but between Ebola and HIV the tables are starting to turn...
[...information security breaches cost $197 per compromised record, compared to $182 per record last year.]
Oh now I get it. The British Government are trying to reduce the cost of security breaches by using scale of economy. With 25 million records lost to the nether I bet we'll be seeing costs of a mere $100 per compromised record.
It all makes sense.
It's easy to forget how rife propaganda and misinformation is in warfare. Think of the ol' "carrots help the RAF see in the dark" stories etc.
Whilst Israel may (with the help of the USA) have perpetrated various network attacks, it may also be a ruse. The only evidence we seem to have that planes were used is a dumped fuel container on the Turkish border which may have been there a while, or possibly lied about.
Israel may have gotten itself a new midrange low profile missile, or stealth aircraft etc. By telling porkies about how you blew up some building or other you force your opponents to spend lots of money and resources on "fixing" that hole in their armour (i.e. network security), instead of looking at the actual problem.
Either way, for the time being Israel looks like it can act with impunity against Syria - look out for talk of talks between the two states. Israel will be wanting to push its advantage whilst it can. Syria will desperately be trying to figure out what the hell happened.
Is the story missing something or am I?
The guy seems to have proof that his wife has played online bowling on the Wii with some guy he doesn't know. And now he wants a divorce? Damn, I need to cancel my WoW subscription before my lady realises there are (admittedly only a handful) of women on there...
I am not au fait with the intracacies of the Wii so apologies if I missed something here.
Did you actually read the article?
Of course people will open and read the email, and probably open the attachment. These people are sitting behind a MessageLabs mail filter and never *ever* see spam, phishing emails or 419s hitting their inboxes at work. Then they get an email that addresses them by name (like all their other work email), and is grammatically indistinguishable from their normal work email. In short the email cannot easily be shown to be dangerous. Unless you are uber paranoid you will probably open it.
This isn't so much a user education issue as an IT department issue - why is the user able to run unvetted executables, and why can they do it with anything other than userland privileges?
Windows can be secured and is secured in some establishments - I can't even view CCTV footage here at work that's been sent up to me without getting IT to generate a hash and temporarily enable running of files on my PC that match that hash. It's a pain, but it means I (and IT) don't have to worry in the slightest about me running "readme.txt.exe"
As for the folks saying "oh but I live in the UK so why would I get an email from <insert US government department>?" Try reading the article once more - the emails are targetted so you *won't* get one from a US government department. You'll get one from a UK based organisation. I despair sometimes, I really do....
I choose the flame thingy 'cause I R annoyed.
I'd drink it if it saved me money but for the fact I can't stand it. I ordered something totally different in a noisy establishment and got that instead. Couldn't even finish half of it.
I might try that weird fruit cider stuff they sell tho - apparantly it's quite nice. Can't for the life of me think what it's called at the moment. Koppa something? Anyway, if it's cheaper than £2.80 I might give it a whirl.
As for inflation spiralling out of control - nah, the government only include prices that don't rise in the RPI. If we included the actual cost of everything we buy (houses for example) then our economy would not compare favourably to pre-revolutionary Argentina. The cost of beer etc will therefore rocket skywards, but the RPI will stay at a healthy 2.5% or thereabouts, letting the big boys give pay rises about 20% below the actual increase in cost of living.
And then of course we can't afford to drink our sorrows away, which is when the uprising will begin. If the government have much sense they'll have to keep an eye on the cost of beer....
The problem is (and always will be) training.
We had a couple at my kung fu school who were both trained police officers. We were doing locking and seizing drills and my word they were bad at them. They said they had extensive training and presumably they did, as they need to control all the various weirdos out there. It just wasn't very good.
We see the same problem here - people with insufficient training in the proper use and dangers of using a stun gun being let loose on the public. It used to be the case in the UK that only firemarms officers could carry them, so you had a small amount of people that are specifically trained and continually tested using them. If you let everyone have one you don't have the resources to train everyone as well, or to make sure they're all competant. This is the outcome.
The major problem with "non-lethal" weapons is that you are *much* more likely to deploy it, because you think you won't have to deal with all the paperwork that comes with dead bodies. Tasers aren't as non-lethal as they'd like us to believe which is unfortunate and is going to cause more dead people :o(
[Trezise admitted that if she wasn't allowed in by Xmas he might reconsider his decision to emigrate]
"Might reconsider"? I seriously hope for his sake that you've taken liberties with that turn of phrase. She's gonna be *really* unhappy with him if he actually considered leaving her to her own devices!
[And there was us thinking that it was up to the CPS to prove guilt, rather than the other way round]
A slight misunderstanding there - the CPS have to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt, and then you can raise a defence, although it is generally your job to prove the defence. The jury then ignores everything, breaks out the ouija board and channels the spirits of the dead to make a decision.
I don't see the defence being overly successful - it smacks of convenience (think of a hit and run and the owner saying "oh I keep the car open with the keys in it - could've been anyone") Whilst it could definitely create doubt, you have to avoid the mistake of confusing the law and the minds of the jury. The two rarely meet.
In short, secure that wifi port if you don't fancy being woken up (and possibly shot) by the Fuzz at 4am.
[URL removed by author due to local anti terror laws]
Does that mean what I thunk it means? If that was excised by El Reg in order to comply with UK laws then I am truly appalled. Not by the moderator removing it, but that the law would require that.
Surely that means the Guberment can say "oh there are millions of evil websites out there advocating death to us all, but no you can't go look at them to see if we're telling you the truth or a fat load of b******s"
That is very close to state control of the media in my ever so 'umble opinion. I need to move to a nice Scandinavian country, or maybe the Antipodes (sp?)
Don't microwaves have a tendancy to reflect off metal objects? And aren't most cars made of metal? Surely the electronics of the car are going to be pretty well protected from this, and even if that;s not the case, what happens if you're driving a car without engine management etc?
If we're talking about battle ship mounted tech on a police car I would much rather see a DF laser on the top of a jam sandwich. Much easier to stop a car when the back end got melted off.
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