Posts by Edward Miles

Opera Mobile 9.7 beta lands

Wait...

"The Norwegian open source browser maker said new features in Opera Mobile 9.7 include faster surfing using the firm’s Opera Turbo technology."

Opera is open source? Did I miss the memo on that one?

Data-sniffing trojans burrow into Eastern European ATMs

obligatory xkcd reference...

http://xkcd.com/463/

just $_~s/Voting Machine/ATM/;

Tories, LibDems under election day cyberattack?

Damn.

I am, unexpectedly, 250 miles from my polling station today :(

New I shoulda gone for a postal vote!

Google eyeballs planted on 92% of top websites

Is it hypocritical...

...to run google analytics on your own site, but have it blocked by NoScript on every computer you use?

Gordon 'to sacky' Wacky Jacqui

Not...

...that I expect the next one to be any better but:

DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD! Which witch? THE WICKED WITCH!

BOFH: Snout, meet trough

A fine, proper BOFH

Good old fashioned no-nonsense scam. No need to kill the boss, just empty his bank account :D

Cobol hits fifty

BURN IT!

BURN IT WITH FIRE!

'Supermodel' glow-in-the-dark pocket monkeys created

May I be the 1st/2nd/3rd to say...

Without pictures, this artical is useless.

Google accused of selling free clicks

Whut.

Malware can be used for click fraud: More on this story at 11...

This is Google's problem.... how?

Asus to slash retail Eee PC line-up

*Stokes his 701*

My Precious...

Seriously, good little machine (perhaps could have benifited from uping the screen to 8") but with a nice memory card it's a good machine. MORE LIKE THIS PLS :D

Herschel and Planck safely away

hehehehe.

"Herschel, the upper passenger, was the first to separate from the upper stage of the Ariane 5 at 13:37 GMT"

Somethimes, the comment writes itself.

France says 'Oui!' to three strikes for music pirates

Brilliant plan!

Now all we need to do is create some malware that attacks unpatched PCs and preforms illegal filesharing on them! Then they'll get cut off, and over night huge swathes of botnets will disappear! Woo!

Pirate-pursuing lawyers get DDo$ money transfer slap

OK...

Fun idea for a prank, but I suspect the bank and the business will come to some arrangement to stop this, so a little pointless overall!

Taiwanese rat snake bites Taiwanese trouser snake

I've heard of Penis enlargement pills...

...but this is just ridiculous! :P

OpenOffice 3.1 ready to lick Microsoft's suite?

One question...

Can you insert columns into merged cells yet? If not, I'll have to stick with Excel in my VM :(

US Forces 'black' budget = 2nd biggest military on Earth

@Blitz

Fine. But would they stop trting to pretned they're the worlds moral authority? If your willing to use torture and murder then stop trying to pretend your the worlds most free nation!

Oompa-Loompa v Tinky Winky: Shock scrap pic

It's so beautiful...

I may just kill myself now (It being a bit sunny and all), I don't think I will ever see a more awesome image ever :D

Mozilla mauls Microsoft on IE, Windows 7 bundle

Goddamnit people!

The solution is simple: 1. Make it so you *can* remove IE

2. Make it so the OEM version shipped to manufacturers comes without a browser, and let the OEMs choose which browser to put on it

Then it's simple. Those of us who are knowledgeable users will buy the full version, uninstall IE and add firefox/Opera/chrome/Lynx/w3c/<insert browser here> whilst the less knowledgeable users will get whatever the OEMs choose to bundle with it - be it IE, chrome, firefox or any other browser they choose. The same principle *can* (not necessarily should) be applied to any other component of the OS, from Media Player to Calculator.

Then (Theoretically) the playing field is levelled. N00bs are not confused by having to choose from several browsers, and all the browsers should be competing on a level playing field to get themselves bundled on the OEM machines. Businesses can still come with IE if they need it, but it may well lead to an increase in the number of FF installs.

Note: The same principle can be applied to Apple and linux as well, but as apple doesn't have OEMs, there'd be no change there, and as most linuxes don't ship a browser made by the same company, the issue is not the same.

2060: Humvee-sized, bulletproof meat-eating spiders attack

Yeah...

...But think of the advances in Weaponry in that same 50 year period! sholder launched nukes anyone?

Or maybe I'll just jump on its back, machine gun a hole in its armour and throw a HE grenade in. :D

SCO threatened with Chapter 7 destruction

Hmm... but are they really dead?

I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure!

Home Office to keep innocent DNA samples

As much as I hate it...

...its quite clever. Comply with the requirements of European judgement, while completely ignoring the spirit of the judgement. Fiendish.

Google data center takes leak on God's green earth

Heh.

"In accordance with SEC rules, Google has noted that the EPA probe could lead to fines of $100,000 or more. "

So that's what? About 10 minutes earnings for them?

Conservative US shock-jock to sue Wacky Jacqui

@Anonymous Coward (15:35)

No such luck - she'd just appeal to the home secretary to block the extradition!

"Hello me. Please block the extradition" "ermm, well it's highly irregualr... but OK!)

T-Mobile getting out of blighty?

They were good for value for money...

...but shocking for signal. There is no reason I should have been losing signal in the centre of Birmingham, it's the second city of the UK for goodness sake! Moved to O2. Not as great price, but their 2g signal is unsurpassed in my experience. Still need a little work on their 3g network though :)

Satellite to offer 10Mbit broadband to entire UK

Useful, but...

...how badly capped/throttled will this be? With is serving the whole of Europe I suspect the answer is "Significantly"

Google Chocolate Factory patents Data Center Navy

Ready?

IN THE NAVVVVVVVVVVVVVY, YOU CAN JOIN YOUR FELLOW MAN!

Yeah, good luck getting that out of your heads today, suckers!

LoTR fan film set for net premiere

This is a title... or is it?

I've been following this film for a while now. Really looking forward to seeing the finished result :)

OpenOfficers pitch Oracle on life after Sun

I <3 OOo...

Apart from one bloody thing: Calc will not insert columns if it would be in the middle of a merged cell, something Excel has been able to do since at least Office XP (The oldest version I remember performing this task on!) My Ubuntu box has a virtual XP machine running office '07 on it for just this reason (and for the odd OpenXML file it malforms. Oh, and to play Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri ;))

Evil Jobs for no reason other than I havn't used that icon before :)

Koreans cook up glow-in-the-dark beagles

@Osiris

Already been done. http://www.glofish.com/

Not allowed for export, alas.

Microsoft answers EU antitrust charges

Read it people!

It's not hard! It's not the bundeling per say they're complaining about, or even the integration (as bad as that is).

It's the fact they bundled a *standards incompatible* browser with there near-monopoly OS. This encouraged designers to write sites that would show up well in IE, but which would look like a dead dog in browsers which followed the standards. Thusly, they were disadvantaging any other browser that was released onto the market, unless they spent hundreds of hours working to break its rendering as badly as IEs was.

Web 0.2 archivists save Geocities from deletion

AGH MY EYES!

ZE GOGGLES! ZEY DO NOTHING!

Pig plague 2.0: Can't spell 'pandemic' without 'panic'

But...

...what happens when ManBearPig gets the swine flu?

Firefox devs ask navels when to curtail Mac OS support

OK the desicion sucks...

But if you don't like it, fork it! It's OSS after all.

What's less clear and that I feel needs clearing up: When they say "drop support" for the older OS, does that just mean that the newer versions wont work on it, or that they'll stop patching the old ones? If the former, big deal. Run an old system, don't get full features. If the latter then it's a bigger issue that may need addressing. Dropping patching for a 4 year old os, is not a good plan!

UK agent leaves secret drugs info on bus

Bloody Hell...

Have we learnt nothing from the movies? I believe even "Mission Impossible"'s NOC list was split in two so that the loss of one half wouldn't burn the agents...

Swine flu apocalypse: Batten down the hatches

Brilliant...

...that should get me through Monday afternoon :)

US lawmakers to de-silence electric cars

This is a brilliant idea...

...as long as I can make mine sound like a Tie Fighter :D

Microsoft records first ever revenue drop

I'm going to feel dirty...

...But a slight defence of Microsoft.

Yes, you are only going to be allowed three apps running at a time, but:

This does not include: antivirus, cmd, tskmgr, "Widgets" or (most importantly imo) explorer windows.

You can have as many copies of one program open as you want. e.g. 5 MSN windows, Three firefox windows and Microsoft office.

I'd still never use it, especially not with the plethora of designed-for-netbook Linux distros being released. But I feel people should not laugh at Microsoft's idiocy without knowing the facts. They should learn the facts THEN laugh at MSs idiocy!

Ireland scraps e-voting in favour of 'stupid old pencils'

@AC 11:28

1. In the event that a machine breaks (And printing incorrect slips counts as breaking!), this is reported to the officials *without* revealing your vote, and you are given a paper ballot. All ballots at this polling station are then manually counted. As everyone has voted by paper as well as electronically, all votes are still counted. Yes you could force a manual count, but the result would be the same.

2. So what if you do? If that ballot box isn't checked, your vote will be counted. If it is checked, a manual count will be performed, and you will have lost your vote. The only effect, apart from causing mass-recounting is to hinder your own agenda.

3. Tampering is irrelevant. If any large scale tampering is performed, it will be caught by the random sweeps, and the election would be reverted to a paper count. (This is not to say stringent methods shouldn't be put in place to protect them, there are several possible methods which would achieve this, but tampering would not affect the outcome.)

4. See above.

5. You can still follow the 10% ballot checking. If the random sample tallies up 100% with the electronic result, then the likelihood of tampering is low. Add in a rule that any party can force a full manual count if they are willing to pay for it (with a full refund being offered if any discrepancy is found) and the loss of accounting is low to none.

None of your examples above have a decent chance of affecting the outcome of an election, apart from removing your ballot paper. Apart from the fact the only person hindered there is yourself, you can already do this in the manual system today, throwing the result into doubt because the vote count is off.

Yes an organised campaign can cast doubt on the veracity of the software, but under the current paper and pen system an organised campaign can cast doubt on the result of an election! The only difference is the speed you find out the campaign has occurred.

Bloody Hell...

Secure E-voting is NOT hard to set-up.

Place your vote on the machine, it prints out a slip with your vote on that you check, then put in a ballot box outside. End of the day, electronic results are printed. THEN 10% of the ballot boxes are randomly selected, and manually counted. Any discrepancy between any of those boxes and the printed results, and a FULL recount of the paper votes is performed. As everyone is assumed to have checked their paper slip, the manually count takes precedence over the electronic count.

Couple the above with releasing the software's source code for inspection, no access to the machines internals (For preference, the machine should be situated where the voter can't get at it, with just the touch-screen and printer in the booth with him/her)

Whether or not this is cost-effective is, of course, an entirely different matter.

What on earth do you think you are doing, Darling?

@AC 10:22

And how much use is that extra £300 gonna be when the economy which those pounds are based on bellies up?

Oh and yes, I've checked. As a student I will be worse off straight away, but mostly from non-essentials such as beer and petrol!

Germany approves strengthened child abuse law

Better than most similar schemes...

...because: "The law... will display a 'Stop' sign to anyone who tries to access websites included on a list prepared by the police."

At least by telling you when something is blocked, it gives people a small ability to keep an eye on what is and isn't being blocked!

Budget reaction: Credit insurance good, all else bad

Err...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this will do nothing to the second hand market. Why? The scheme says you have to have owned the banger for a year. And the scheme only runs until March. Ergo, you can't buy a banger now and get the discount, and those of us already driving one are doubtful to be able to afford a new car. So this will achieve exactly what the government were after: Free headlines.

Google splits with Mozilla on 3D interwebs

Yet another thing...

...I'll ignore thanks to NoScript.

Spy chiefs size up net snoop gear

@Surprised

As I understand it, SSL is only as secure as the root key of the signing company. If the government has that, they can Man-in-the-middle your @ss off, and you'd never know. So. How much do you trust verisign et al to keep it secret?

Start-up Bee pledges 'affordable' British e-car

100 miles at 80MPH?

Add in some battery replacing stations, and (depending on swap costs, needs to beat petrol on price!) you might have yourself a decent runner there....

Google boffins unveil 'What's Up?' CAPTCHA

One major problem...

Your going to fall foul of diability legislation. How the hell is a blind person supposed to tell which image is the correct way up?

Also: What is picture C supposed to be? O_o

Google accused of UK tax dodge

@David

"France charges way less tax on alcohol etc than the UK, which drives people over the channel to go on booze cruises, should the French be forced to increase their drink excise levels ?"

Nope! The government will just trash the value of the pound to negate any possible savings!

Ask.com rehires butler Jeeves

Pah...

...Is it just me, or does the new Jeeves look more like a banker than a butler? Not the image they want I'm sure!

Mac and Linux Bastilles assaulted by new attacks

And we return to the 10 "laws"...

1. If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer anymore.

2. If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it's not your computer anymore.

3. If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.

4. If you allow a bad guy to upload programs to your Web site, it's not your Web site any more.

5. Weak passwords trump strong security.

6. A machine is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy.

7. Encrypted data is only as secure as the decryption key.

8. An out-of-date virus scanner is only marginally better than no virus scanner at all.

9. Absolute anonymity isn't practical, in real life or on the Web.

10. Technology is not a panacea.

And these exploits violate either rule one or three, so it's no suprise they lead to problems.

Pirate Bay co-founder claims 'we lost'

Interesting...

So, can someone with knowlege of the Swedish legal system tell me how many times they/the IFPP can appeal? How many months/years is it gonna take for a final verdict, is what I'm really after :)