Posts by Ed Blackshaw

Google: Street View spycars did slurp your Wi-Fi

Further security options

When setting up a router (wireless or otherwise) it is also a good idea to set the following options if possible:

- disallow admin access from the interwebs (e.g. LAN access only)

- disable telenet access

- change the default password for the admin account on the router. Some devices also allow you to change the user name, if they allow this do so.

- Use WPA, not WEP, and change the key to something long and complicated. Write this down and stick it somewhere safe, e.g. to the bottom of the router - if someone has physical access to the router then and obscure password is likely to be a moot point anyway.

- if possible, set all devices that will be attached to the router to have a static IP address, and disable DHCP on the device, if possible limit the range and number of IP addresses the router handles to those you have assigned.

Not all routers will necessarily support all of the above configuration options but in my experience, most will.

I would ahve thought that it is more akin...

...to saying if you don't wear any clothes in the street, it's okay for others to point and laugh at your genitals.

'Martin Mills you are a LEGEND!'

Good point

The one professional musician I know is a session guitarist, who makes his money from teaching and, unsurprisingly, session work. Although he has done work for bands signed to big labels, I'm pretty dure he has no sort of contract with the labels himself, and wouldn't have trouble finding work without them.

Odd

I'll have to reply to my own post, rather than yours, as your server seems to think your post has 'gone'. That may be a bug related to the deleted post below - if so, might be worth looking into...

Anyway, I'd agree with you that there are artists who want that kind of fame. The question is, whether the big record labels are the ones to give it to them. It seems that RW in particular has been quite active in promoting himself, it would be interesting to find out how much of his success is down to his own activites, and how much is down to his 'representation' as it were.

Really?

"Just one quibble: I think the existence of (say) Robbie Williams demonstrates that the major's promise isn't entirely a false one. There will be a global market for global entertainers, that's fair enough. But there aren't too many Robbie Williamses."

I would argue the opposite. I think there are far too many derivative 'artists' out there, or are you about to claim that Williams is, in fact, some sort of musical genius with originality seeping from his very pores? I don't see it...

Facebook ID theft Mr Big just a sprat, says social network

Who's to say that he isn't ex-KGB himself

or in their (I s'pose FSB now) employ?

Boffins demo one-molecule DNA 'walker' nano-bot

Quite right

We should refer to them as 'greybeards' or 'Tefal men'.

ConLibs to outlaw kiddyprinting without permission

How about:

Parent or Local Authority pays for child's meals in advance, either weekly, monthly, termly, whatever.

Child receives toke, e.g. card with name and expiry date to receive said meals.

Child presents card at lunch queue.

If child forgets card, responsible adult, i.e. teacher, has list of children entitled to said meals and checks them off.

You could even have this system without the cards, although that slows things down.

The card system does open it up to abuse, i.e. child giving card to other child to get free lunch then saying they forgot theirs.

Any system of checking the cards should also check for duplicate lunches. i.e. when teacher later checks whether the child without the card had lunch, they didn't also get lunch using the card system. This creates an admin overhead but only spot-checks would be necessary, since any child cheating the system in this way would know that they stood the chance of being found out and getting into serious trouble.

Why do you need the fingerprints again?

And when you've eaten your lunch

You can make a fetching hat from the foil

The problem is...

...that even if it is only hashing the fingerprints, it gets children used to the idea of giving their biometrics to officials without questioning it. Read 1984 if you don't understand why this is a bad thing. Pay particular attention to the last couple of chapters.

It may be an overreaction, but do you really want your children to have nothing to look forward to in life, except for the eventual bullet in the back of the neck?

German Wi-Fi networks liable for 3rd party piracy

Nice Acronymn

narf!

Facebook convenes privacy 'crisis' meeting

Easy solution

Don't put anything on Facebook that you would screw you up if it were made public. The same goes for any website, or indeed any device that is connected to the internet. It may be nominally secure, but ther is no way of knowing if or when a security flaw will be found that exposes your information to anyone.

German net crippled by top level glitch

Assuming that you are German yourself

I don't think you're doing your fellow countrymen any favours in terms of their rumoured sense of humour, or lack thereof...

I like that you didn't pick up on the fact that 'verkrumpen' was a comedy nelogism, whilst letting 'intertuben' whizz right past you...

Woman loses Bebo privacy case against lad mag

Re: Nope

I haven't read the small print, but I strongly suspect that the Bebo terms of use will include words to the effect that anything posted to Bebo becomes the property of Bebo.

Norks 'have answer to humanity's greatest problem'

I think the clue here is in the word 'controlled'

Uncontrolled nuclear fusion is relatively easy to achieve, compared to controlled nuclear fusion. What with not having issues of containment, radiation, etc. to deal with. I mean, you _could_ use fusion bombs to generate power, if you didn't mind being a cloud of radioactive gas.

US Navy's plane-hurling mass driver in tech hiccup

I'll watch this with interest

Not least because the idea of propelling a metallic object quickly along an axis by the use of electromagnetic force is the basic principle behind a railgun. If they perfect one application, expect the other to follow shortly - slinging a heavy object at high speed is not too dissimilar in principle to slinging a much lighter object at much higher speeds.

Biometric passport 2.0 scrapped alongside ID cards, NIR

RE: Algorithm?

It doesn't need to be a collision-free algorithm, since presumably, each passport would also have a unique (unhashed) identifier - it would be a matter of doing a lookup against that key and comparing the hashes. What it would require is a hashing algorithm that has a _very low_ collision rate, so that the hashing algorithm could not be reverse-engineered to produce two meaningful sets of data that produce the same hash. I don't think you'd need to worry too much about a collision between the hashes for 'John Smith' and 'kd£g8*sd #n o759"$@384n5' for instance.

Osborne to 'get Britain working' - except for ID contractors

Hmmm

I think maybe that the person who downvoted my comment may have read more into the metaphor than was intended. I suspect Vince will manage to do a better job than 'the badger'.

I had to google that one

Sounds like an ideal candidate for chopping some heads at HMRC.

Brings to mind an image

of what happens when you 'unbind' a cable which is under tension - it tends to whip around rapidly slicing through things.

Exam board deletes C and PHP from CompSci A-levels

W T F ?

Dropping C, and C# in favour of Pascal, Delphi and VB?

Seriously, it may be easier to _teach_ those languages, but it's hardly going to be of any value to the student once they have their A-level, unless they want to go into a career where their job involves maintaining spreadsheets, and software written 40 years ago.

If anything, they should drop the obsolete and 'toy' languages in favour of languages like C#. It might be harder for the students, and they might not all get A-grades, but they'd get an employable skill.

UK hot-swaps leaders - Brown out, Cameron in

Obviously!

Having read some of your above posts, I think you may be posting in the wrong place. The site you want is here:

http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/the-twat-o-tron/

Mention the Bankers?

Maybe the reason there is that it isn't _technically_ their fault.

The banking system was bailed out because of a number of dodgy practices. However, the bankers working within that system were doing their jobs, within the rules. If they hadn't been following the rules and making money for the banks that employed them, then they would hav been out of jobs.

The issue is, that the rules themselves (contributed to in part by Gordo) were at fault. Compare and contrast what happened with banks in the UK, and banks in Spain, where rules on lending practices are much stricter. For example, how is Banco Santander doing, compared with Northern Rock?

The people you can probably blame are those at the high level, who put political pressure on our leaders to not legislate against dodgy lending practices for the sake of rapid, profitable, unsustainable growth in the earlier part of this decade. Good luck getting any money out of them.

If you have been involved in the project, then you are unlikely to hold a dispassionate viewpoint

Some of the criticisms levelled against this particular monstrosity can be found on the associated wikipedia page (yes I know that Wikipedia is not a primary source...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactpoint#Criticism

Pay particular attention to the following sentence:

On 27 June 2006, a child protection conference, 'Children: Over Surveilled, Under Protected', held at the London School of Economics, reached the conclusion that the database will do nothing to prevent child abuse, and that it will undermine parents' ability to look after their children.

Although

It has been entertaining to watch him, and Campbell spinning like dervishes over the last couple of days...

Actually...

nearly 60% of the 65% turnout of the roughly 75% portion of the population registered to vote, gives you around 30% of the population that they 'represent'.

Isn't the point

that he wasn't elected by the Parliamentary Labour Party either? He was 'appointed', as it were, by Blair, IIRC, since there were no other candidates for the position, at the time...

I wish that it were

but the man is a (sith?) lord, so will never be out of 'power' as it were.

Capita faces strike, gov uncertainty

So if Crapita go on strike

will that mean we don't have to pay our TV tax, err I mean licence fee?

City Police still using Terror Act to bother photographers

Re: Re: Please run a poll

Funny, that's the exact opposite of how I read it. Maybe your internal dictionary is lacking a definition for the word 'irony'?

Doctors aim to have Chief Medical Officer struck off

I really wish that people would stop referring to them as things like 'NuLieBore'

That lot are bad enough without giving them ammunition.

That said, I believe the word you are looking for is 'doubleplusungood'.

BB icon, obviously.

The internet, as imagined in 1965

Or

Colossus: the Forbin Project.

Or War Games

Or any of the Terminator Films

etc.

Scammers attempt to cash in on volcanic ash travel chaos

Sweet Zombie Jesus!

Goodbye, cruel world. Goodbye, cruel lamp. Goodbye, cruel velvet drapes, lined with what would appear to be some sort of cruel muslin and the cute little pom-pom curtain pull cords. Cruel though they may be...

Vote Lib Dem, doom humanity to extinction

Correct me if I'm wrong

but isn't Germany, a rather successful and well known country by many metrics, run by a coalition government? A case of picking your examples to suit your agenda perhaps?

Nope, almonds.

The flavour of almonds actually comes from hydrocyanic acid, which is what you get when you dissolve hydrogen cyanide in water.

Vote Tory much Lewis?

I've noticed a certain blue leaning in El Reg's reporting over the last month or two. Not a problem, per so, but it would be nice if, when straying into the realm of politics, you were to be up-front about your allegiances. Personally, I'd prefer it if the Register remained a news source, rather than a mouthpiece for political ramblings.

That said, you go to great lengths to suggest that not having Trident would leave us as a massive nuclear target. My question is; to whom? The need for a rapid response strike seems a rather outdated idea. I can't think of any nuclear armed nation that is likely to attack us.

Trident was a weapon designed to be used against the USSR, and lets face it, if we ever got into a war with USSR (or modern day Russia for that matter), we'd be pretty much screwed anyway, regardless of how much of Siberia we could make radiactive in retaliation.

With modern world politics, the most likely source of a nuclear attack would be either a 'terrorist' faction that somehow manages to get hold of an ex-cold war warhead, or a country such as North Korea, which has a very limited nuclear capability, and for whom such an attack would be suicidal anyway, as our response, even with cruise missiles, would be catastrophic for them.

Judge de-ASBOes yoof's low-slung kecks

What a smeeeeee....

....heeeeeeeee

Re: Intimidating?

Are you seriously comparing the colour of a person's skin, which they have no choice about (famous dead pop starts aside), to hanging around on a street corner with a hood on, looking shifty?

The whole question of whether the latter should be legislated against aside, well, the best word I can think of to describe your argument is 'meh'.

Election 2010: The sillier options

I'm voting for the Adder Party, lest I accidently brutally stab myself in the stomach while shaving

I now announce the number of votes cast as follows:

Brigadier General Horace Bolsom... Cheap-Royalty-White-Rat-Catching-And-Safe-Sewage Residents Party...

No votes.

Ivor `Jest-ye-not-madam' Biggun... Standing-At-The-Back-Dressed-Stupidly-And-Looking-Stupid Party...

No votes.

Pitt, the Even Younger... Whig...

No votes.

Oh, there's a shock.

Mr. S. Baldrick... Adder Party...

Sixteen thousand, four hundred, and seventy-two.

Hello shill.

Unlike you, it seems, I actually bothered to take a look at the Pirate Party's manifesto.

http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/wiki/Manifesto

Whilst I can't say I agree entirely with their proposals, what you are saying severely misrepresents them. Maybe you should buy yourself a fire extinguisher for your undergarments?

US netwar-force Cyber Wings badge unveiled

Oh Dear

Has somebody at USAF been reading William Gibson books again?

NFC/Bluetooth sticker goes into production

Isnt' this the sort of thing...

...that would work better stuck in a SIM card, or would being inside the phone cause shielding issues, particularly for those phones with metal cases?

Just a thought...

SCO: jurors too busy Facebooking to rule on Unix claim

Errrrm...

Syntax error?

'Phantasmal' bioweapon drug-sweat microfrogs bred in UK

Not only deadly...

...but a bargain at 2 for a euro!

US boffins fashion quantum-computing bit out of SQUID

Crysis?

Sounds more like Pong to me.

"The researchers watch this photon slosh back and forth at a rate they can now adjust with a knob."

Reverse-engineering artist busts face detection tech

Who fails now?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27_proof_of_Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem

BOFH: Forgive and forget

Welcome back Simon

Managed to get back from your holidays despite the volcanic ash clouds...

US X-37B robot minishuttle: 'Secret space warplane'?

How would you know though?

I would have thought that the whole point of a 'secret space warplane' would be the secret part...

Cybercrooks befuddled by Icelandic volcano name

Dunno,

but there is a cheryl cole one...

Johnson: ID cards will pay for themselves

Hello Chris

The issue at question here is not the card, but the database. You ask why is would be different to the NHS databse?

The answer is access. The NHS database itself is not a good idea IMHO, but I can understand the need for doctors to have access to patient's records for the purposes of emergency treatment. The point is this: only medical staff would ahve access to your information, it would only be your medical information (and rest assured any ID database would hold more, and LINK to the NHS data too), and any access to that information would be logged and audited. The NHS are quite hot on data security don't you know?

An ID database, on the other hand, would by necessity be open to all sorts of people. With an increased amount of access, the opportunity for criminal use increases, and the ability to secure the DB decreases.

And then there's the elephant in the room - there is no NEED for an ID database. We don't have one now (officially), and there is no discernable problem that the existence of such a DB would solve.