Posts by Robin Szemeti

Jailbreaker alert: Apple TV runs iOS

Now way Jose!

Sorry, but Stevo has already shown himself to be unsuitable to be in charge of anything important.

It was bad enough when he suddenly took a jobsonian dislike to various apps on the iPhone/iPad and pulled them, or simply refused to allow them on in ht efirst place, for no other reason than "it wasnt to Stevo's liking" ...

And you want to let him loose with the same megolomanical power with your TV? .. "hey what happened to those scenes from the movie?" "sorry, Stevo doesnt approve of <insert his latest dislike here>" ... "hey, the news ... what happened to the item about <blah>" .. "sorry, Stevo doesn't support <whatever> so the item was pulled" etc.

Frankly, letting Steve Jobs loose with any sort fo control over what appears on the nations TV streams is about as terrifying as it gets. Maybe he missed the boat for a lead role in Orwells 1984, but he's catching up fast!

Google Instant – more searches, less thought

For maximum amusement

Try typing "is it wrong" into Google, and behold the suggested awesomeness of the auto-completion ... which i presume is (rather worryingly) based on popular searches ..

I'll get my coat [% insert auto-completed phrase here %]

Vital PARIS supplies jet in from US

but these are bigger!

@jasonw these straws go up to 10.5" long and .492" diameter!!

Already waxed?

I wouldn't rate your chances of gettign the PVA to stick very well. To work, PVA needs to penetrate the substrate, a waxed straw is designed to keep the moisture (and thus the glue) out. You would have done better with unwaxed ones.

Google's Wi-Fi snoop nabbed passwords and emails

Actually ... its very useful data

By correlating the density of open wifi networks with population density .. Google should be able to produce a map showing where to find the highest numbers of idiots ...

Oz customs search lappies and mobes for smut

Standard Aussie joke ..

Immigration official: "Good morning Sir, before entering Australia, I have to ask you some questions"

Tourist: "sure ... go ahead"

Immigration official: "Do you have a criminal record?"

Tourist: "I'm awfully sorry but I don't ... I didn't reallise it was still compulsory ..."

Matrix actor site stages defacement spat

Frontpage!

Its running Frontpage ... need I say more?

ZigBee searches for a new home

I just dont get this

Why put your Zigbee transceiver in the SIM? Sure, a zigbee enabled phone might be useful ... but why the SIM?

I suppose with the possibility of adding Zigbee to older phones simply by popping in the new SIM and installing new software on the phone, a suitable user interface could be created, but will phone manufacturers do that? or would they prefer to sell you a new phone?

You dont have to be a marketing genius to work that one out. If Zigbee is going to make its way onto phones, it will be by dedicted phone hardware, if Zigbee SIMS do start to appear I think it unlikely that older phones will get firmware upgrades to suit.

Also, dont forget the telecoms market is highly cost sensitive, a more expensive SIM is hardly likely to be snapped up with glee by the providers as a universal offering.

Sorry, sounds like a dead duck to me.

I can see Zigbee enabled handsets catching on right after Zigbee enabled smart appliances .... like .. not real soon now.

Muso turfed off train for 'suspicious' set list

Protecting his privacy?

Interesting that they were so concerned to ask him to step off the train to "protect his privacy" ...

If they were so concerend about his privacy they should not have been reading over his shoulder in the first place. Makes me seriously worried about travelling on trains at all .. what if im on my way to a meeting and the green-jacketed plastic plod decide they want to see whats on my laptop and I decline? Will I be thrown off? can they even ask to examine my laptop? what abut PACE etc?

Sounds like its time to buy a boat and get out of here ...

Apple yanks Wi-Fi detectors from iTunes

who wants one of those?

Here, buy this crappy phone and we'll let you know later what we will allow you to run on it?

No thanks. You can stuff that one where the squirrel keeps it's nuts.

This just puts me RIGHT off the iPhone and the rest of the Apple crap ... how long before you can only run Apple approved software on your laptop? oh wait ... ah yes, the iPad .. .the great sanitary-towel come notebook. Remind me not to get one.

Microsoft fluffs Feds with secure cloud

Syntax Error:

Error #232412 at line 1. Statement contains "Microsoft" and "secure" without required parameter "jokeLevel" or "jokeLevel" is zero.

Computer Engineer Barbie coming soon to a toy store near you

So what does it do then?

Presumably, you can't get out of ts box before 11am in the morning, the laptop is permanently attached to its hand and you can only order it by submitting a piece of Perl code less than 103 bytes long that prints out the order form in ASCII?

Paris, real life Barbie!

US gov's emptying of vast Texan helium-tank dome 'wrong'

You forgot lasers!

CO2 lasers actually use far more Helium than they do CO2 or Nitrogen ... I know the little tiny 100W sealed tubes dont use much .. but the big industrial multi-kilo-watt fast axial flow lasers happily chew through a bottle or two a week.

No more helium, no more invisible death rays!!

Windows 7 RC 'buy a copy' shut downs start next month

How is this news?

You are saying that its going to go off every two hours or so, losing all my work? This is Windows ... its been doing that for years!

Multi-million investment hints at UK battery swap shops

"Technology"

@fifi oh please stop referring to this as "technology" as if it was some cleverly researched process or technically advanced procedure.

Its dropping a flat battery out onto t a motorised pallet, hardly very "technical"

.. uh .. unless some idiot has been stupid enough to give them a patent on the idea ... oh,. I suppose I don't even need to check that one out do I?

I can see one good use for it though ... be an ideal way to swap out your almost-knackered old battery for an up-to-date one for the price of a recharge :) and that surely is where the problem lies ... who on earth is going to take their brand new leccy car to one of these places and watch as your 100-mile-old battery slides off to be replaced by a slightly cracked, 100,000 mile knacker? what are the options when the pack they fit to your car fails to get you home, expiring after 30% of the rated capacity?

Does this mean that Leccytech are going to take resposnibility for maintaining and replacing the batteries in their care? sounds like a big money loser.

Microsoft predicts Linux will fail mobile 'quality' test

Brand awareness

Brand awareness isn't Microsoft's problem ...

Microsoft's problem is that we are all too painfully aware of their brand and the values it represents especialy in the mobile market .. lets face it, Windows Mobile is crap ... their OSs struggle to run even on state-of-the-art desktop platforms, on a cut down resource limited OS, where locking up inthe middle of a call is a seen as a problem, its a major fail.

.. thats why people are jumping ship as fast as they can.

Tories swallow Web 2.0, spit out £1m crowdsource prize

"Wisdom of the crowd"?

Shurely you jest ...

we already know how to effectively calculate the IQ of a crowd, you just take the IQ of the dumbest member, and divide it by the number of people in the crowd ...

Still, hats off to the tories for trying to suggest that the people might actually have some input on policies ... someting thats not happened in any governement for many years ...

The truly savvy IT type bidding for this contract would do well to remember to mention "and this is the page where you can control the outcome of the poll .."

I'll get my caot .. its the one with the big list of IP addresses and voting tendencies in the pocket.

PGP disk encrypt approved by MoD for military use

Same level as BitLurker?

I'm somewhat suprised that PGP and BitLurker get the same rating ... it would be interesting to know what hoops PGP would have to jump through to get the next level.

personally, given the track record, I'd not trust a closed source disk encryption product, especially one from an outfit with repeated security fails like MS.

Panicky Plod apologises to Innocent Terror Techie

Process map?

The linked article on how to delete your DNA from the record says:

To avoid others having to go through this same situation, I shared these concerns with the SCD12 Senior Information Manager. The outcome: "An exceptional case process map will be available on the MPS Publication Scheme early 2008."

looking through the MPS Publication scheme documents, it doesnt appear they have published such a process map yet.

or maybe they did .. and someone deleted it?

Orange data users turning red as data dries up

I know their SMS service is working just fine

I phoned (yet again) to complain at the level of junk SMS's I'm getting from them,

and to threaten to take this to ICSTIS because I Just don;t want any more SMS

crap from them and ...

sure enough .. within an hour I get an SMS inviting me to take part in a customer satisfaction survey on my last interraction with their call center ... nice one.

Gits.

O2 just can't keep it up

Must be bad

The only plausible reason I can think of for not fessing up to whatever it was that went wrong is: Whatever went wrong is FAR more embarassing and damaging than keeping quiet about it. No one likes being left inthe dark, even "weasels ate the network" is better than silence.

ISP's normally are happy to tell you that the "Di-lithium crystal pod became magnetized and it took a while to sort out" or some other such guff, but refusing to say anything usually means "the boss got legless and was sick in the core router" or "we didn't pay our BOFH on time, the control room powered down and we dont have an access code."

Basically, it must be pretty bad.

LHC rushed back into service at 50% max power

As a general rule

Sound advice: never, ever let techies paint a red line on your knob.

I'll get me coat .. is the one with the packet of bosons in the pocket.

HP forces swingeing pay cuts on EDS staff

Thats awful

poor old EDS .. the company that would happily charge you a 4 digit sum to press the reset button is finally going to have to live inthe real world?

The company that charged <insert name of almost any government dpeartment> 10s of millions for yet another simple system that didnt actually work?

oh thats terrible.

Microsoft gets personal on Windows 7 "show stopper" bug

Hes telling the truth ...

Hes right, its is very unlikely MS would delay the release of W7 because of this ...

Since when has a bug that locks your PC up and causes it to crash prevented MS from releasing stuff?

OK, its minor, im still annoyed at what seem to be their plan .. "well, you insisted on sticking to XP because Vista was a pile of crap .. so, we've done what you asked and built a totally new OS for you, that is nto Vista SP3 no sireee, it all new is windows7 .... err, please don't look under the hood, thanks".

it just another attempt to railroad us into what is Vista by another name, so they desrve as much stick as they get :)

Microsoft under threat from Linux - it's official

some acceptance?

"Linux has gained some acceptance, especially in emerging markets"

Which is perfectly true if you define:

Some being "oh 80% or more"

and "emerging markets" being "all servers on the internet"

Cisco website down

@wtf where do you get the figures from

quote: (mysteriously typing ww.google.com takes me straight to google, go figure!)

not exacly difficult to figure. google have put cname records in their DNS for w.google.com and ww.google.com pointing to www.google.com ... interestingly they havent done wwww.google.com but still

PerlMonks suffers unholy hack

Unencrypted passwords?

Unbelievable. It would be forgivable of some 12 year old script kiddie ... but given the holier-than-thou attitude occasionally handed down from that site ... someone really does need taking out he back and shooting.

When you come to think of it .. any site that can mail you your password when you forget it is in the same boat. There is simply no good reason to ever store anything other than a suitable hash of a pw.

Massive fail on that one.

Remote IT support tool hijacks customer webserver

Well, if you will run a joke OS

Then you get what you pay for ;)

I still cant understand why it took anyone half an hour to figure that one out, or even why a "professional sysadmin" [sic] would be using teamviewer for anyting other than desktop support of lusers?

I mean, even without the huge clue of the "teamviewer" page appearing on port 80, don't you just look in the apache log, go "ooh, cant get hold of port 80, hmm ... netstat -tpl | grep 80 | less, ah there it is ... kill %1234, done" (I assume Windaz has some equivalent to netstat) if it takes you more than 5 minutes, then theres a clue it might be a good time to consider a career change or an OS change, depending on where the lack of clue is.

To be fair, teamviewer is a great tool for getting onto a users PC and giving it a poke, or helping your mum config her mail client, but it has no place on a production server, so they deserve all they got.

Actually, I'm still busy trying to come up with some way to parse a sentence with "production server" and "windows" in it.

Turkish hackers breach US Army servers, says report

*NOW* I see the problem

"used a technique called SQL injection to exploit a security vulnerability in Microsoft's SQL Server database "

ahh .. Windows.

the trouble with trying to find out what went wrong on a windows server is not finding a hole they climbed in through .. but more which of the many holes was it.

IPCC U-turn on Tomlinson CCTV

Police collecting the CCTV evidence? ...<blink>

So, you have a police force that was widely criticised for its tactics during the event, including unprovoked attacks that led to the death of an innocent member of the public ... and the IPCC is allowing them to go around London collecting private CCTV tapes that may be relevant to an investigation of the tactics used ??

Im sure its OK, they wont lose any tapes. No gaps .. and if they find any potentially damaging evidence, i have every confidence they will pass it over promptly and bring it to the attention of the IPCC.

I really do feel so much safer these days with the wonderful way our security services are run, and I for one welcome our new Taser-equipped overlords.

Kaminsky: MS security assessment tool is a 'game changer'

So .. this will help you how exactly?

mmm .... and this helps you because you can concentrate on the few "dangerous" crashes, and the other bunch where it just crashes without a vulenrability you can safely ignore?

Oh my ... well, there was me thinking that production code didn;t crash .. oh well.

And what about all the vulnerabilities where it doent crash the code? and just goes on to accept un-checked input etc?

OK. it sounds like a partially useful tool, but only on horrendusly crashy software, where you release it in a state where its crashing like a banshee, and you anly have time to nail the dangerous ones ..., and it will only find the buffer overflow style problems, which is probably about 10% of the vulns out there ...

Life hands Sun steaming sack of...

I recommend .. the opticians :)

"They have likely realized what they're up against, as evidenced by the JavaFX launch page. Is that a Flash video player I see?"

No, its a Java FX Mediaplayer, launced from some .jar file .. a quick scan of the page code would have told you that.

I'll get my coat, its the one with the glasses in the top pocket.

Microsoft delays first Windows 7 public beta

Call it by its proper name

Its not "Windows 7" its "Vista with a few GUI tweaks"

When you consider that what is putting many millions of small businesses off upgrading is the problem of supporting two architectures (XP and Vista) I cant see how adding a bunch of new GUI features that 99% of office workers will ever use addresses this.

Paris, she's dumb enough to install it.

Microsoft plague threatens 30GB Zune extinction

Color me stupid but ...

If the thing wont even boot, then it's not exactly going to be easy to issue a patch now is it?

Still. you could argue it was actually an improvement. I go with the earlier respondent, don't mess around, just return it from whence it came and cite the Sale of Goods Act, don't let them fob you off with "we are waiting for a patch" .. turn it on, show it doesn't work, hold out hand, ask for folding stuff.

Paris, she's dumb enough to have bought one.

Axl Rose may have undermined own case over Dr Pepper stunt

It would be worth bothering about if ...

Dr Pepper actually tasted pleasant. The stuff tastes like a mix of toothpaste and low grade cola to me.

Paris, 'cos she likes a drink.

Srizbi spam botnet in failed resurrection

Afford?

"FireEye researchers decided they could no longer afford to spend the money buying the domains." ..

What?

Surely ICANN could have simply locked registration on all the domains in the sequences for a suitable period around the time the botnet would go looking for them?

Oh wait, that wouold be ICANN acting for the good of the 'net, rather than just taking the $15 registration fee and laughing ... my mistake.

I'll get me coat, its the one with the IPSTAG in the pocket.

Rock-solid Fedora 10 brings salvation to Ubuntu weary

you sold it to me ..

so ....

"The absence of a flicker between when the boot screen exists and X loads is the result of Fedora's decision to move X from virtual terminal seven to virtual terminal one. It sounds like a small, unimportant change, but the results are worth it our opinion."

Well, that's sold it to me .. been keeping me awake at night that has. I reboot the laptop once every month or so (when I manage to let the battery go so flat it won't wake again) and that little jump in the display as it boots, ooh, so annoying, Certainly one of he key features Ive been looking for ...

I thought this was going to be a serious article until you got to the bit about the wonders of RPMs ... that kinda gave it away.

I'll stick with Debian, thanks.

Still sending naked email? Get your protection here

Oh dear lord ...

So ... after studying the basic principles of security, and considering RIPA and the rest you decided:

"The best idea is to save the key to a USB thumb drive and then stash it in a secure lockbox (along with your passphrase written out)."

Umm .. color me stupid ... but of all the possible things in the world you might want to store with a copy of your private key is your passphrase?

I was wondering if it was the worst possible thing to do, but, after a few moments thought, I decided storing the passphrase in a planintext file somewhere on disk would be dumber .. but 9/10 for finding the 2nd worst idea right off the bat :)

Paris. because only she would be dumb enought to write down her passphrase.

Vintage IBM tape drive in Apollo moon dust rescue

Surely this is rather easy ....

Far be it for me to suggest the "specialist data recovery firm" dont really know what they are doing, but .. I have a sneaky suspicion the specialist data recovery firm don't really know what they are doing.

A 729 drive is a fairly impressive beasty, vacuum columns for the tapes, complex stop.start pinch roller assemblies and a data interface to make your ears bleed ...

However ... reading these tapes could be relatively simple and easily accomplished on some rather hum-drum everyday equipment ... don't forget, the major complication of the 729 was its ability to stop and start the tape in a 3/4" length of tape space ... important if you are reading in records live to a program or executing from tape ... but all we need to do here is recover the data from the tape as it stands! ... a regular 1/2" audio tape deck (I could probably point them in the direction of few nice Studer A80's for minimal cash) with a custom head (£500 roughly, not that expensive to have made up) and you could replay he data at a constant rate ... digitize it and sort it out later. Once the data is recovered and digitized, recovering the information is relatively trivial.

I'll wager the 729, even if they get it goiong, will eat a few tapes during the replay process, using a modern deck to recover the raw signals and digiise them is a MUCH saner plan.

How an Italian judge made the internet illegal

Roman Law ... @madido

Roman Law (on which most of te continental systems are based) differs from the English Common Law in one basic respect, Roman law basically says you can;t do anyhting, unless it is specifically permitted, Common Law works the other way around, you can do anything that is not banned.

When maldido posted "Sad truth is we have not actual 'rights' as in any other place in the western world" he's not far wrong :(

Still, at least our Italian blogger only got fined, could have ended up with a much more mafia-like punishment if he wasn't careful.

Paris, because I know a horses head when I see one.

EMC blogger tears into HP and NetApp

@Fathoms Down

quote:

Its a bit like saying "because Windows 3.1 doesn't natively support IP, Exchange 2007 is unsuitable for a modern corporate deployment"! ;-)

Errrm, dude ... I hate to break the news to you but ...

Amazon sending Kindle to college

8.5 what?

8.5 by 11 inches? inches. is this some sort of dickensian throwback? will they be providing a quill and a dynamo driven by overhead belting to power it? And surely too goodness they aren't going to try and sustain that letter-sized none-sense that the rest of the A4 using world has got heartily sick of years ago?

Apart from all that, I'm still not sure why anyone would possibly want one of the things when it does a lot less than a laptop and a copy of some random PDF viewer ...

I'll get my coat, its the one with a metric tape measure for a belt ...

London man coughs to 172mph Porsche jaunt

Jail is likely

Other offeders caught st similar velocities in substantially lighter vehicles (ie motorbikes) have ende dup with prison terms ... I would hope he gets the same treatment.

"So ... you're the guy that did 172mph in a Porsche then"

"yep, thats me"

"well, Im pretty fast with my juggernaut, here I'll show you .. bend down and pick up that bar of soap would you?"

Beeb exterminates Tomorrow's World rumours

Tomorrows what?

I'm not suprised Tomorrows World is not coming back. The BBC should not even attempt to bring it back, it was, sadly, utterly crap.

Before you string me up and lynch me from the nearest solar-powered hovercraft let me explain. Tomorrows world USED to be brilliant, back in the days when it was presented by people with more brain-cells than fingers. Raymond Baxter ... great presenter, ex Spitfire pilot, intelligent and interested in what he was talking about. He presented a wide range of items without worrying too much whether its was comprehensible to people who couldn't add up. Items were presented to a high standard, the technical aspects might have left some viewers behind, but they also encouraged many to find out more about what must have been baffling subjects.

In later years, the quality of both the presenters and the subjects they were talking about went rapidly down hill.

"And next we have a really super item about some great new nail polish that is scented, its really clever, umm this is the nail polish and you put it on like, like, umm, well, thats a bit difficult, and err, yeah it smells of things, yeah."

Tomorows world went from a bit of fun for geeks, that was genuinely challenging for at least some of the population, to a dumbed-down mindless blathering by a series of dumbed down presenters. When the viewing figures plummeted, it was time to shut up shop and move on.

I can;t see it coming back, I doubt the BBC has enough confidence to put on a genuinley challenging program that doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator.