Posts by James Condron

BOFH: The Cloud Committee Calamity

Wait... What?

I'm not sure I would go as far as calling the world of TV dramas plausible.

A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7

Hmm..

Just tested, didn't seem to work for me

Anti-gay bus baron rages at being stuffed in Google closet

Funnily enough...

I was in a bar in Victoria a few months ago and I overheard some furry toothers talking about Scotland, Homophobia, and "That bastard Souter".

Never really thought about t until now

Anonymous and TeaMp0isoN promise songs but no Facebook hack

Deja Vu

Didn't CDC do this years and years and *so on ago?

Its been done kiddies, go outside and play with a ball, maybe meet some other kids.

Tech 'tecs quiz Yorkshireman in Facebook hack probe

Scotland Yard?

Why do the colonials insist on likening the building 'Scotland Yard' (New or otherwise) to their FBI? Gets on me tits that, lad

Mum arrested for seducing teen on Xbox Live

Kids Today

Way to kill the golden goose- what was he thinking?

Apple crushes Quattro as RIM hot-wires own ads vehicle

snigger

iAds; making dyslexics chuckle since 2010

El Reg insults 'millions of Irish Catholics'

Didn't Know...

So many Irishmen lived in the States. Surely we're not talking about those irritating Yanks who claim to be this/that/other bloodline/ nationality? All those Irishmen who have never been to any Ireland, and whatever?

Tossers.

Gambling boss gets three years

Wait a minute....

If I get this fully, then whilst Carruthers isn't a US citizen and his business wasn't based in the states, because Americans were able to use betonsports, he is culpable? That doesn't really make any sense at all; I must admit I'm a little surprised there isn't more attention here from the Government.... retrospective laws must be against the law ;)

Zuckerberg: 'I am a prophet'

Behave

The guy read a Ben Elton novel, Orwell being a tad too heavy, and decided in favour of the totalitarian caricatures he was supposed to laugh at. Maybe he can do similar to what Todd Davis of LifeLock infamy did and have someone release photos of him covered in vomit from the night before, passed out on the toilet, and try to get them removed.

Or maybe he can go fuck himself.

Gervais pic used in amusingly rubbish failed bank fraud

If it is in The Scum..

...Chances are it didn't really happen. I'm shocked el reg; when did we start believing anything Dominic 'Dunnit for the boobs' Mohan shat on out on our doorsteps?

Potty-mouths charged for Comcast hijack

Jesus

But you know there is a forum full of people somewhere laughing at how they got some idiots to attack comcast, while 'forgetting' to teach the importance of, oh I don't know, everything important about wiping your tracks, not ringing comcast up, not leaving your handles and screen names everywhere.

What is this, 19-fucking-98? These skiddies don't deserve punishment; they deserve an education. And all references to 'metasploit' removed from their boxes.

BOFH: Baitin' switch

Excellent

Shove in the BOFH teaching students 'rm' and you have the ultimate old school. Truly excellent stuff; the oldest is the funniest. And the messiest.

Clever attack exploits fully-patched Linux kernel

Source Code

You should have just printed the 300 lines of comment as the article, very funny, though perhaps in places not intended.

Fair play though, not a bad piece of code, but this is why we don't use brand spanking kernels. That being said, it is a bit of a non-issue, there are some very specific circumstances and dependencies needed here, and the exploit is a tad flimsy in places- though hey, if it works...

Students Union reps vote to ban cheap booze for students

Bloody Facists

Still, if nothing else gets the students off their arses, it'll surely be to fight for the right to get bladdered on a meagre student loan... Keeping in mind the number of students applying for emergency hardship loans to cover a cost of living rise are probably realising that whilst the Inflation Index/CPI includes prices for a bottle or Rose wine and rotisserie chicken, it does nothing for the price of take aways or lots of drink, which I figure to be more expensive.

Cheap drink is all the poor buggers have left, take that away and more hardship loans are going to be need. That, or higher government grants- think about it, who, whilst a student, didn't drink their livers dead? Taking that away is surely not an option. Otherwise we're breeding a group of monsters all on Wacky Jacquie's wavelength, by 2020 we'll have government databases to monitor everything, from Deodorant usage, to toilet visits in the night per capita.

It'll be bleeding Ben Elton's DegSep computer.

Daily Telegraph hit by SQL hack attack

Oh Sheeeyugah

I bought a copy of that paper earlier (All out of the Daily Sport at Scunthorpe train station) and now feel ill... Is that Scunthorpe or was my newspaper carrying some sort of viral payload? Should I consult an undertaker?

Ryanair trades blows with 'idiot blogger'

@Les

Bloody idiot commenters can't even use English now.

"If you would be a serious programmer" Is perfectly correct English, albeit slightly archaic. Look it up.

Mr. and Mrs. Boring lose Google Street View tilt

Hang On

Aren't they the ones with an utter dump for a house? I mean, mine is no masterpiece but come on, lets be sensible and all admit it- if my house looked like that, I'd have it stricken from the internet.

Man robs convenience store with Klingon sword

@Graham Lockley

Fictional. Fictional. Fictional.

As in, to do with fiction. Fictitious means fake, false or a lie. This is to do with fiction- this makes it fictional.

Well done, though, for using a word to sound cool in your anti Star Trek/ Star Wars crusade, I think we know the true hit with the ladies....

Now piss off and read BBC News where the big bad comment button can't tempt you.

Father of Playmobil dies at 79

@ Sarah Bee

Damn straight.

Cheers Gareth; ruined a period of mourning- black armbands all round, though yeah, a reconstruction of the funeral, or some sort of moment would be great

US lawmaker wants health warnings on video games

What!!!

I'll kick the shit out of anyone who says my playing games has made me any more violent than the alter-serving, chorister of the year, little angel I was. Violent? I'll show them f*cking violence!

mines the cassock

Wrath of Spielberg smites Welsh uni leaflet

Speilberg...

...What a twat... What an absolute twat. Not to mention the lawyers. Yeah, if they'd put his face on a poster or leaflet with something offensive on, you could maybe see why someone would complain, or maybe (if you let your mind go slack) why a cease-and-desist would be needed, but under the title 'Film Maker'?

What a twat.

Paris, because we all know where ET *really* wants to stick his glowing finger

Internet gambling mogul surrenders $300m in guilty plea

Wait a sec...

An Indian national, UK/Gibraltar based company, and yet picked up by the merkins? Thats bollocks, that is.

Top UK cybercop dreams of PC breathalysers

yep

'..that bank would have something that they can plug their system in to and that connects to this central forensic server," she said.'

Now we just need that internet thign to be invented, eh?

Mario and Eee PC Girl bust Best Buy profits

@Solomon Grundy

Fuck off and look at the eeepc model

OMFG, what have you done?

Uh-huh, but...

I understand about missing stories, and the time zone thing, hell, it really is an improvement this way, but why make it so damn ugly? The front page may have been everchanging, and cluttered but at least you could see what was going on, albeit after some marginal practice.

Seems like deisgn for the sake of design. Hell, this new comment form too, why did that need changing? I'll give you a fiver to bring the old way back, if only as an opt-in thing.

Ivan O'Toole? That's nothing, snorts Hugh Jass

My Name...

During a (very boring) few weeks off with a broken wrist, and after exhausting the impulse buying possibilities of the internet, I added 'Superfly' as my middle name. I even shelled out for the extra legal copies in case I lose the original.

Ubuntu zoo preps for new arrival

P..

I can't wait for version whatever-the-fuck-counting-is-not-a-string-point-at-this-time-of-the-night which will begin with a 'P'

Obviously the animal will be Penguin for the obvious linux reasons, maybe we'll see a hairy chested Tux with a Ron Jeremy 'tasche.

Porno Penguin

Though the extreme pornography connotations.. hmm, going across US borders could be fun

Red rag, meet bull: The software resilience gamble

@ Keith T

"The quickly decreasing status and slowly decreasing responsibilities of programmers is driving down the intellectual level of programming departments."

Not to mention the idiots our Universities and Schools are churning out; over heard on a programming class (java) on a software dev. degree:

"Okay, so I want to change some stuff... can't I just decompile and do that? Its taking me ages to rewrite my code"

Or that guy's friend, he wrote a class to test text for certain things, anagrams and palindromes, few other bits. He called it 'String'... whats more his String class was using java.lang.String, he spent three days on this code before he asked a lecturer, trying to work out why it wouldn't compile.

BOFH: Burying the hatchet

@ jim the boss

Thanks for showing how many people should just give up, stop swimming and sink to the bottom to drown; a special thanks to those, also, who left comments about Jim's apparent lack of humour (humor?)... It was you who made me shudder the most.

Can we get lifetime el reg bans for these muppets?

HP shatters excessive packaging world record

@josh

The DC will have more large boxes than small, for obvious reasons. The DC's racking won't contain loose sheets of paper for other obvious reasons. Yes, any experienced picker/packer in the DC should have opened the boxes and compressed the packaging into one single box, but as it is summer (allegedly, I have seen the weather..) and many DCs take on Tax-Dodgers I'd guess yours was packed by one of the unwashed summer staff.

Ideally, contact HP; lets lose the little bastard his job, what a waste of cardboard... although if you got a big box and any pages were creased, I'm sure theres not a single one of us who wouldn't complain more

Beeb's online music stations get rewind button

Mashed 08

I knew that the beeb ran Mashed/ Hack Day for a reason, My friend and I ran a project doing the same thing at the weekend, as did a few other people...

Would quite like the royalties

Cardiff 'copter coppers give chase to UFO

Face it

They were pissed... like when you get pulled over serving whilst driving drunk

"It was a URA, an Unidentified Running Animal... Cat shaped, tried to follow it and thats when I hit the living room window."

Climate supremo deploys knitwear in war on patio heaters

Ah, Good

An excuse to wear my favourite cricket jumper... Can you get more English than pulling on your best jumper and sitting on the decking in the garden, sipping pimms and eating an under-cooked burger which someone will say made them feel ill the next day, not the copious amounts of lager consumed?

Gotta love it

Firefox 3: now available bug-free, say devs

@ Steve Pettifer

Try:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Hello World!";

Seems bug free to me: perhaps you mean code thats complex and written by multiple people? Are you even sure then that its impossible for anything to be written well from the off?

Or maybe you felt like a big man in some sort of pseudo-selfesteem driven 'higher intelligence' sort of way?

Phlashing attack thrashes embedded systems

ah, ph

Just as I was about to complain about the idiotic over use oph 'ph', i realised everyone else has... Why must everything with an 'ph' now be spelt with a phuking ph?

it gets to the stage where the use oph 'ph' and 'ph' is too diphphicult to diphpherentiate between

'F**k the Country Channel', says the Country Channel

haha!

But i'm more interested in who the fuck found it in the first place, bloody country channel?

I'd hope it was from a throw-away account, through a proxy, from an internet cafe or somewhere away from home...

<fan boy alert *snigger*> bet it was a mac user</..>

Activist coders aim to deafen Phorm with white noise

Perl

C'mon... this is what, three or four lines in perl? Using LWP?

IM represents 'new linguistic renaissance'

Like... y'know.. Whatever

Seriously, when was this compiled? 1987? Or did the New Scientist guys forget to do the research and base it on Ferris Fucking Bueller?

"While linguistically-slack young 'uns are, for example, more likely to say "He was like, 'What's up?'" than "He said, 'What's up?'" "

Yeah, thats exaaaaactly how people talk. Genius. Pure Genius.

Taser gun usage soaring among UK cops

Two Units?

That seems a waste of tax payer's money, having two different units who use them, presumably with different training methods too. They should merge Special Training Units (STUs) and Authorised Firearms Officers (AFOs) into a new single unit; Specially Trained Firearms Units, or STFUs.

Mines the one with mittens pinned to the back and tomato sauce on the front...

Phorm in phormulaic logo phorm storm

Music..

Nah.. see its like changing the odd note in a song here- they cut out the odd part of the letter to make it different.. Not very subtle, they could have at least changed the font, but fuck it- they'll have a new name soon anyway

MySpace stripped of myspace.co.uk domain victory

So Hang On...

I can register a domain and yet some big-bastard-company can come along and say "Yes our company started $YEARS years after them, yet the domain belongs to us because..."

and that works? Well great- i clearly started thregister.co.uk ( i choose to ignore the amerikkkans because they all have sex with goats ) in 2008 and the current setup, well, thats clearly to pike my future revenue. Works for me.

France's €4.9bn rogue trader gets IT job

So What?

See a fair few comments saying the guy shouldn't be allowed etc., but clearly the guy has the knowledge and the insight into the way not only these systems work, but how someone would attack them- Best guy for the job, i'd say.

El Reg celebrates 10th birthday

umm

Is ashlee vance wearing odd shoes? What kind of lady boy would wear odd shoes? surely anybody, be they male, female or *ahem* somewhere in between, would notice that?

The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons

Re: Stop spreading Windows FUD.

Felt I should add my own tuppence worth:

>Driver incompatibility

I assume you mean between driver and hardware? Well, I've never had a problem, neither on simpler distros such as U-bunny-poo or Foresight- no haver I had a problem with drivers on Gentoo... i remember more problems on XP and whether or not a driver was up-to-date, set to work on XP or if a win2000 version was installed, whether a user put even the right driver on from an install disk.

>recompiling the kernel

If you have to recompile the kernel its because you're a moron and didn't build support for everything you need... then its your own fault. It should be noted that if you don't know how to build your kernel, then get a distro you don't have to build one on... or take your fist out of your arse and use it to tighten the noose.

>office suite

Yep, its everyone else at fault here- lets ignore the fact that only MS Office opens files like this, every other conforms to standards... Standards, you know them? They're pretty much standard across the board- Sorta like why IE gets knocked for not using standards and needing stuff coded a different way.

>Firefox that can't auto update

Ah, I see your problem- yeah; thats not a computer, thats a cardboard box, uh-huh- thats why your response times are shit and *nothing* updates for you... Until we get some cool-as Harry Potter style moving pictures that old computer box of yours won't do a thing

>The difficulty of installing apps that aren't in repositories

./configure

make

make install

or add them to the repository? U-bunny-poo is simple at doing this, conary is better. No experience of other package managers that you may like to use at a simpler level. See, in this case, Google is your best friend... Try it today- its not too bad.

>Horrible hibernation support

See, maybe you're doing that wrong too- if you can't get it working you're a bit slow, think about how animals (particularly squirrels) hibernate and use this as a basis- then it all falls into place. Right, ready? Get lots of nuts and stuff them into the machine- we need to fatten it up for winter. Now goto your garden, dig and big hole and leave some nuts around it. Bury the computer- seriously, bury it- we don't need to worry about breathing room.. Now go back in the Spring and yeah- one succesfullh hibernated box.

>A PDF viewer that can't display PDFs correctly,

evince works perfectly for me- maybe you should use

cat <some pdf> and see what that does... maybe you can't read normal chars and this is easier for you

>A major release every 6 months with a new kernel (that breaks apps and drivers compatibility)

Shit! Not updates and upgrades? Fuck me how ever will you cope? But hang on, some confusion here- I thought there was no driver compatibility? Now there is but it breaks? Now my head hurts... So you're the expert here, how does an upgrade break an app? Now I think you're the confused... Its not the machine thats broken, its your head.

Aw crap, sorry Verity- that was a mainly serious response...

Swedish lag's wooden todgers fail to impress

Sexual Molestation

But if they didn't use them.... and wouldn't it be the prisoners using them? not him? Can you molest your self? Bloody Swedes

Craigslist and eBay: Terrorist arms bazaars of DEATH

Brilliant!

That was the best thing to sort my head out on a sunday morning, reverse engineering body armour? (Or shoot the shit out of it, see what punctures it), Combat Uniform? Genius- I'll go down to millets for mine.. Lets not get started on those night vision goggles- who cares about trying to get faulty equipment back? Friendly fire my arse....

The rise of the Malware Mafia

@Peter Leech

Theres a shit load more than three bookcases full, don't forget that the majority of law in England comes from the whole precedent thing, then theres all the aids to interpretting the law.

Most modern laws are rushed through as a response to some problem or loophole, as it were- anyone remember the Dangerous Dogs Act? The public wants a prompt response to an issue and the gutter press jump on it, think of the tabloids wanting vigilante justice against released paedophiles etc- if the govt. don't make laws quickly on this then they get slammed... best to try and get it right dead quick and hope you don't get slammed later.

But yeah, new laws are basically in response to growing tabloid concern.. a red-top prints the word 'Hacker' and suddenly the commons are in session.

No sense of humour? Avoid Bootnotes

Ah yes,

Another piece where Lester Haines gets in a mood and decides to use the new El Reg blog service to go after critics. Soon Haines will do a Dawkins and release a book slamming everyone who disagreed over the last so many years... the IT Delusion perhaps? Not as snappy a title, of course, but I'm no writer.

Move over Storm - there's a bigger, stealthier botnet in town

Isn't it simpler still?

These boxes are sending out spam mail, so presumably its a case of them port25'ing to whichever mail server they're sending to (I don't buy that it is coming from the user's own email addresses, that'd be too easy to fix). Why don't these companies do what many others do? A simple and seperate mail server with a web front end so you can block outbound port 25 traffic from the file server without affecting the mail server? That'll at least stop the worm working, then its merely a case of disinfecting.

Hell.... after that, disinfecting should be simpler after all the failed connections a box is trying to make? nuke the box, rebuild. Time consuming possibly, better idea? Nope