Posts by Dillon Pyron

Whois database targeted for destruction

How do you deal with cyber squatters?

Here's the situation. Customer makes a mistake (not sure exactly what went on, but that's not the issue) and loses domain. Within minutes, it's registered by someone else. Now, the domain name uses a registered trademark. So our first step is to send a cease and desist letter. Without whois, how do we know who to contact? Not that I believe the contact information to be truthful, but that would make our case at URDP stronger.

But we need whois as a first step.

Man who urinated on dying woman for YouTube glory jailed

Prison code of conduct

At least in the US, there's a "code of conduct" amongst the convicts. Go in for killing a man, everybody gives you respect. Go in for peeing on a dying woman, BOHICA.

RIAA aims lawyers at usenet newsgroup service

alt.binary.

Many years ago I was working at a company that develops computer and computer peripheral chips. At one point, we turned off all the alt.binary groups. Only to have the group working on an audio chip come screaming to us, since they were both receiving and posting audio clips. Of course, that was back in the "good old days", when the only thing out there was home grown music and faked nudes of actresses. (I still have a nice one of Gates McFadden around some where :-)

I suspect that the RIAA will have a tough time of it. I hope they do.

And el Reg, you don't have a middle finger to choose from.

US Patent Office decimates Amazon's 1-Click Patent

Software patents should die

alt.software-patents.die.die.die

And soon. What's next, a patent on linked lists? (That's not a joke)

Teen accused of hacking emergency 911 system

Terrorist threat

I'm surprised the feebs haven't charged him with something. Yet. He may find himself in Yemen by week's end.

Met used 'dum-dum' ammo on de Menezes

JHPs

I carry Corbon 135s in .40 S&W in a 1911 compact. The Corbon has consistently had excellent ratings in one-shot stopping power. Very good expansion characteristics, and ideal penetration. These have been used by a number of police departments. It's been suggested that I switch to a .357 Sig, since that's what the Austin cops use.

JHPs are designed to stop, not kill. If you are only shooting to wound, then the question becomes, why were you using lethal force at all? A question you really don't want to hear the prosecutor asking you. All the police forces I know of tell you to shoot for center of mass. Hydrodynamic shock helps the stop by causing the perp to suffer sudden nervous system overload. An FMJ, on the other hand, overpenetrates, wasting huge amounts of energy. Why have all that muzzle energy if you're not going to use it?

.32s effective? Not really. They don't have the energy to do any effective damage. A 65 grain bullet going at 950 fpm just doesn't have any real penetrating power. If European police are actually using them, then they may find themselves seriously outgunned should a real criminal organization come along. Miami was the reason the FBI went from 9mm to 10mm and later the .40 S&W.

I've been shooting for over 40 years now, and competitively for 15.

Pentagon in orbital solar power plan for world peace

And the past shall be the future

Gerald O'Neil, "The High Frontier". It answers many of the criticisms posted here and elsewhere. The microwave farms would be huge. And if the beam drifted off course, the system would either correct or shut down.

Of course, for him this was the prime reason for building habitats in space. But we've become such cowards that this will never happen and we'll die in place.

Yahoo! Teams! With! eBay! And! PayPal! To! End! Phishing!

Yes, SPF

SPF has some issues, but minor, except for a few people. But incredibly workable. If more ISPs used it, the world would be a nicer place. Yes, spammers could register their own domains and set up their own MX records, but I wouldn't get an email from hsbc.co.uk (just saw that one in my junk file about 10 minutes ago).

My spam processor, part of Eudora, does a pretty good job. But something like SPF would be even better. And if I could get ISPs to actually do something about zombies on their network, things would get even better.

Spammers turn YouTube into spam relay channel

Web 2.0

Again, if this is Web 2.0, I'm waiting for the 2.1 release.

I hear so many people talk about how 2.0 is going to change the way we interact with each other and how the net works. So far, it seems like pretty much the same junk, with a little exhibitionism and voyeurism thrown in.

eBay boots off Skype rival

Restraint of trade?

IANAL, but this seems to smack of restraint of trade. eBay owns Skype, a VoIP provider, and they don't want another provider working. Whether or not eBay has taken advantage of its purchase of Skype is totally beyond the point.

But, most importantly, IANAL, I pay them lots of money. Too much money, it seems.

Farewell, Miss Moneypenny

Yes, Sir Sean

"Maxwell originated the Moneypenny role alongside Sir Sean Connery in 1962's Dr. No and continued in the part through 1985's A View To a Kill, the last with Sir Roger."

Right there in whatever colors your browser chooses to display text in.

Hospital's brand new '£1m' server room goes up in smoke

Radiographs

Probably by the end of next year, over 80% of the images shot in the US will be digital. Films are going the way of the dinosaur. And the quality of the images is increasing at a very high rate. Which means that the bit density is increasing, which means that storage requirements are going up. So those 6 TB (with RAID5) boxes will rapidly become too small. Medical imaging systems are about to go through a very, very painful stage.

Then there are those billions of films still out there. HIPPA requires that they be kept for 7 years or, for minor, for 7 years after they reach the age of majority.

Adopt this dog or we'll kill it

Rescue

I am on the board of a 501(c)3 charity that provides vet care for Corgis and Corgi mixes in rescue. Our goal is that no dog will be denied rescue because of health issues. Sometimes the problems are too severe.

Yes, there are a lot of high kill shelters. Austin has a medium kill, although several years ago they announced the goal of becoming a no-kill shelter. The problem is, the way that works is that they don't take in animals that are injured or sick or may not be adoptable. Everybody wants a puppy, nobody wants a 7 year old Lab.

Spay and neuter. And don't buy from puppy mills, like pet stores. Either adopt or buy from a reputable breeder.

And, interestingly, I used to throw the Morning Telegraph. 35 years ago.

Brazil braces for TV soap-induced blackout

The reverse also applies

My father-in-law is a retired power EE. One of the things he has always stressed is that power generation likes things to stay the same. Yes, they are worried about everybody suddenly turning on a couple of 100 watt lights. But what happens when everybody turns off their 200 watt TVs? The generators unload, which is a BAD THING. This can cause protection to switch and the next thing you know, it's the Eastern Seaboard, all over again. Some of that was due to overload, some of it was due to runaway.

But I really don't think anything will happen.

Two US computer engineers charged with espionage

They what??

They were running a criminal enterprise (just waiting for the RICO indictments to drop) and they didn't encrypt everything? Now, admittedly, the NSA would have it popped open before they were settled into their orange jumpsuits, but would the government really be willing to admit in open court that they could do that?

And, if you are working that closely with a foreign government (and remember, everybody is everybody's enemy, even your "friends"), they would have some sort of way to destruct the data on the storage medium that was network connected and stashed somewhere away from the target computer. I won't say that I know anyone that does that, but I will say that I need to rethink my network topology.

Released on bail? Do you really think that they're not a flight risk?

Hugo Chavez rails against teen Bulgarian airbags

OMG

I'm agreeing with the power mad megalomaniac! Of course, I just kind of feel like "augmentation" is a little extreme. Now, having been through the whole breast cancer issue in our house, I know some women who have done it, but they all started out with nothing.

Otherwise, ick. And 15? Double ick.

RFID chip implants linked to cancer in animals

My dogs

Bonnie had a chip for 8 years. Toby's 9 1/2 and was chipped when he was 12 weeks. Ruby's 3 1/2 and she was chipped at 8 weeks. The average lab rat lives to be about 3 and they are typically engineered to contract some specific and horrible disease.

If there were some high incidence of skin malignancies in chipped dogs, I'd certainly have heard about it. I personally know of about 1600 Corgi owners (Pems and Cardis) representing about 5500 dogs. Haven't heard of many cases.

You can see all the kids at http://www.pyron.org

Bluetooth comes to set-top boxes

Change the channel

So, every time I tap my headset to make a call, I'll change to channel 3? Or will it skip to the next disk? And when I turn up the volume, my Bluetooth printer will eject a page. Convergence at its very best.

AMD finally goes native with Barcelona

My stock?

I can't bear to look. How did my stock fare today? I still have many friends there. At least this is better than (gasp) the K5.

A US CERT reminder: The net is an insecure place

Horsepower???

"It's also true that cloaking an entire site behind SSL would require significantly more processing power and would also slow many users' browsing experience by a considerable measure."

You mean a 3 GHz dual core machine isn't big enough to do that? Has software gotten so bloated it will chew up a machine that wasn't around two years ago?

And yes, Raheim, security is way over hyped. Turn off your firewall and I'll show you. Or, post your email address and I'll email you yesterday's Snort logs. You'll see that there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. And I'll use your machine to make sure the world knows about my amazing penis patch, all while using your credit card to buy my new iPhone.

Y2K was not a fiasco, perhaps if you had actually had a job in the IT industry at the time you'd know better.

BBC confirms Doctor Who series five

Kylie who?

Who is she? Anybody I should know or just some obscure Brit actor?

Germany floats Trojan for terror suspects

@Dave Murray

Oh great, Dave. Expect your door to come crashing down in about a week. Assuming you don't get black bagged on the way home from the pub.

Nokia seeks Qualcomm import ban

Lawyers not to hire

I would suggest that Qualcomm not hire SCO's now likely unemployed lawyers.

OTOH, they could be headed down the Vonage path.

Sad. I have several friends who work there.

Chinese couple give birth to @ symbol

My new name

I'm changing my name to Tianamen Square and go to the Olympics.

Do the Chinese have bail?

Click here for the UK's highest-paid IT post

Reged

Well, I've seen sites slash dotted, but this is the first one I've seen that's been Reged.

We're sorry. This posting has been removed and is no longer available for viewing.

I'll take it

I probably wouldn't last a week before they figured out I was a poser, but I think I could survive on the pay for a couple more weeks. Say 780 of them (until I turn 66 1/2).

Ooops, that's pounds, not dollars. Make that 1560 weeks (until I'm 81, or dead, whichever comes first).

Dell accountants spank themselves

How much????

$150 M out of $12 B? That's a little more that .1% Michael can pull out his wallet and cover that much. Dell stock up 31 cents at 11:13 am CDT. Yup, they're being punished.

"managing to use the words "accounting" and "ethics" in the same sentence."

"There's no such thing as ethics in accounting" There, it's easy enough.

Motorcycle News in shot M40 biker ad gaffe

Ads like that happen all the time

Any specialty magazine, particularly online, is going to have gaffe's like that all the time. It's an unfortunate matter of the separation of editorial and advertising staff.

Just below his helmet? Was he wearing one of those stupid half helmets? Anything more and the round would have been in his neck. Of course, any quality firearm would have easily penetrated the helmet.

I hope police capture the perps soon. There's probably a whole lot more to this story. Unless some newspaper takes an interest to it when/if they finally get busted, tried, convicted and sentenced, it'll be up to the MN to keep the story alive.

No intelligent motorcyclist in the US would wear colors. Even for fun. Particularly for fun.

Chinese firm claims World of Warcraft stole its fonts

Copyrights?

I'll have to spend some time researching this (hmm, just the thing to take on my vacation next week. Black's). But I'm pretty certain you can't copyright individual characters. Perhaps this is a job for Outlaw Radio.

How many of them are gold farmers and how many are real players?

Foxy Brown cuffed on Blackberry assault rap

You or I

You or I would be buried in the deep recesses of the jail, being brought sunlight and fresh air in small milk cartons.

"I'm frankly amazed that the world of journalism (particularly El Reg) hasn't seen the possibility of renaming PH as "Bangkok Hilton"."

You misspelled (misspelt) Bang cock.

Dominos trns 2 txt

Crap

Dominos, Pizza Hut, Pizza Inn, Gatti's. All crap. I buy local. Mangia and Austin Pizza Garden. Mangia will even deliver to Windy Point or Mansfield Dam, although it has to be a big order and they charge $20 for delivery.

"20bonghits" = 4 large with everything you have in the kitchen

"alittleextra" = 1 large with pepperoni and some of that special oregano

Oh, wait, "20bonghits" is 1 lb of Oreos and a gallon of milk.

Travelocity accidentally books 1,458 trips between US and Cuba

Americans to Cuba?

Sure, I could do it if I wanted to take the chance. It's really pretty easy, takes a little extra work and requires lots of cash. And that might be the sticking point. You can sneak into Cuba, but sneaking out of the US with more than $10,000 is a little harder to do, and even more frowned upon.

Reports from my Canadian friends are that the diving isn't what it was even 5 years ago.

Second security breach hits Pfizer

This is plain and simple idiocy

Another STUPID company that lets employees put confidential information on laptops. I really don't care whether or not it was encrypted, the simple matter is that CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION NEEDS TO BE ON SECURE SERVERS!!!

Yes, even a supposedly "secure" installation can have leaks. But if you do things right ...

We need data security laws that really and truly punish these kinds of things.

Password protected? Bah, I'm an incompetent hardware hack and it would take me six, maybe seven minutes.

Designer breaks up trad PC design

Venture capital

"Unfortunately, Uni is still a concept at the moment, but we would be very interested to see it working, if it ever gets to that stage."

Translation: "Let's get about $12M in VC funding, piss it away on houses and Ferraris and then say it didn't really work out."

Is VMware too close to Linux?

The rules are the rules

Either VMware is making money selling other people's work or it's not. It's as simple as that. If they are using GPLed code, then they are in violation. It's not as if they are actually giving people Linux to run, most of their customers don't have the foggiest idea what's on the base. But if it is the Linux kernel, then they agreed to certain rules when they used it.

UK private eyes invite public into forum

Number of PIs

"Historically, many private investigators were ex-forces or former policemen, but this is changing. The total number of people working in the sector is unclear."

By "the sector" do you mean the IT investigators or are you talking about private investigation as a whole? If the latter, the question is, does the UK not license them? I can tell you exactly how many there are in Tejas. And name names.

After all, isn't Media Sentry being sued in Tejas because they aren't licensed to operate here?

China jails 'subversive' net dissident

The Olympics

There was a recent editorial published in the Statesman (originally elsewhere) about the trouble that China was going to have when they are swarmed with journalists during the Olympics. They recently had a meeting where they laid down "ground rules" for what could and could not be published. Interestingly, she noted, "the Tianemen Square massacre was so taboo that it could not be listed as a taboo". Among the items was anything to do with Darfur. She also said that she suspected that there would be a lot of people deported during the Olympics, assuming they didn't get arrested outright.

If I was going, I'd get a t-shirt printed in Chinese that said "Only China can save Darfur". Ten minutes? Twelve? Not much more than that.

Google and Sun tag team MS Office

MS, I've gone as far as I'm going to go

I've been running XP Pro and MSO 2000 Pro for 5 years now. I just bought the Office 2003 Pro upgrade (student discount, gotta love grad school one class at a time). That's about it for me. I'll keep the laptop along just for the Windows apps, but the next machine will get Ubuntu loaded on it posthaste.

I used to like MS products, especailly 2000. But they've really gone down hill. XP is okay, but I'm tempted to buy a machine that will come from a vendor that will sell it to me with XP. I'm even tempted to buy a Dell, particularly if I can get it with an AMD processor.

I'm a Eudora user. I'm waiting to see what happens with Penelope. With the recent changes at Mo, though, that wait may be long.

Google gags Facebook code leaker

Copyright notice

I don't see any copyright notice in the posted code. One of two things happened. Either the poster removed the copyright notice, which is illegal. Or there was none. In the later case, the Berne Convention applies. Which applies a copyright to the code. So the poster is screwed, either way.

But I certainly admire him for doing it, even if I wouldn't do it myself. Now, in the words of my father (and every father on the face of the planet) "Don't let me ever catch you doing that again". Which, of course, means you have to be stealthier.

FTC: Web scam artists pilfered $24.7m from American businesses

Common criminals

"Using a phone bill or a glass cutter or a deft hand in the back pocket: theft is theft."

Not true. The first is a white collar criminal, who does no real damage, while the latter two are just common criminals who must pay society for their wrongs.

Ooops, I was out walking in a pasture and just stepped in something brown, mushy and stinky.

I hope they get sued by the victims. Maybe they say they can't afford it, but I'd make sure they can't afford anything.

If the FTC was really serious about this, they'd take away their passports, too. There are dozens of Caribbean countries with rather liberal banking laws and pretty good privacy.

AT&T's race car logo lawsuit crashes and burns

Sprint are ...

"As Sprint Nextel say they can't have an AT&T logo on the car, can they put a Sprint Nextel logo on it, with the words "are Shit" underneath?"

No, that wouldn't pass the FCC censors, nor would it likely fly well in a libel suit.

"Frack Sprint" would work. It's not profanity, but almost everybody would know exactly what they were saying. You know what v1a6ra is in those spam that you likely don't see because you have better spam filters that the average <your countrymen>.

Oh yeah

When I worked for Paranet, which was bought by Sprint, most of us had AT&T (which became Cingular and is now AT&T) as Sprint didn't work in our offices. Shortly after I left, Sprint required everybody to have a Sprint phone, but at least they paid for them.

A few years later, Sprint sold "Paranet" to the guys they bought it from, at about 30% what they paid for it.

Anti competitive?

One would think they could argue along the lines of anti-competitive.

Of course, I've always wondered what localized value Orange got out their banners at Indy. Although I guess that the world wide audience was a little more than the 120,000 people at the track.

OTOH, I haven't watch a NASCAR race in 3 or 4 years. Even with JPM racing.

Bandwidth crunch to squeeze carriers

Meanwhile

At the very same time the carriers are whining (this is the US, not the UK where it would be whinging), they are getting ready to roll out their very own IPTV product. Which the other content providers will graciously subsidize.

Cynical? Naw, it's pouring here (Tropical Storm Erin came in about 5 minutes before I left the house) and I'm soaked to the knees, wearing wet shoes and sitting over an air vent.

US airforce in $500m push for better jet turbines

F-22 performance?

Doesn't the F-22 already do Mach without burners? Although I don't know what their fuel consumption is for loiter. It's not as if the Air Force is going to publish these numbers.

Vectored thrust is an awesome thing to behold.

'Grim reaper' dog senses nursing home deaths

I've seen it

Sort of. My neighbor was dying of brain cancer. His dogs were laying in the living room when they suddenly jumped up and went into his bed room and started whining. The family ran in there and five minutes later he died.

As far as celebrities are concerned, this is more like Lindsay Lohan jumping on the (this is going to get me flamed) Paris Hilton "I'm going to jail" bandwagon. Only without the iPhone.

Google-funded startup to offer free Wi-Fi in San Francisco

Trackin

"reserves the right to track users' domain and host names, IP addresses, browser software and operating system types, "clickstream patterns" and dates and times of access."

Who do they think they are, Google?

Looks like a good reason for Tor.

Down with secular ringtones

Arms race

And soon we'll hear recitations from the Torah or Koran (or however you want to spell it) or Buddhist chanting. And for the radicals, perhaps "White Power" or "Allah Akbar".

I'll settle for the Woody Woodpecker theme or that cute little ditty from Benny Hill. You know, the one where everybody runs around doing something silly, usually involving attractive women in knickers and suspenders.

Tesla electric supercar may be delayed

Moeller

I assume Arhnold has a deposit down with Moeller, too.

Rescue crews are frightened enough of Priuses (Pria?). Imagine how they'll treat the Tesla.

Clarins' electromagnetic-blocking cream ad blocked

Damage from electromagnetic waves

If they tested this against, say, 1500 watts at 2.9GHz, I might start to believe them.

Meanwhile I'm making a new tinfoil hat to protect my brain from my WiFi. And I'm using my Bluetooth headset to avoid putting my phone against my head and getting all those nasty radio waves. The phone will stay securely on my hip. Where I am safe from radiation.