Posts by Christopher Martin

Nintendo whacked with $5m Wii strap lawsuit

@jacob

I think "wiitard" is the obvious choice in this case.

Bullshit.

It's a tiny little piece of fabric/plastic. You'd have to be a fool to expect it to hold up to a lot of abuse. Nintendo never guaranteed that you could repeatedly to try throw the thing and expect it to hold. You're supposed to HOLD ON to the controller, and the strap is there in case you happen to drop it. My remote straps look like they're new. If they're worn... you're doing something wrong. And it's especially clear that you're an idiot if you manage to break it playing the bowling game. Bowling requires no fast-twitch motion. You'd have to deliberately drop the remote.

I think it would be safer not to include a strap at all - or perhaps they should include a metal wiihandcuff for wankers who can't remember that they're not really throwing a bowling ball.

Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over 'child porn' album cover

@Kanhef

The request wasn't rejected by the "server", though - it was intercepted by a third party. There's no error code for that.

I'm mostly bothered by the 404

.... because it's a lie. 4-- errors indicate a client error. We're going to need a new error code.

506: Server returned censored content.

McDonalds survey scam is super-size fraud

Why do I get the feeling...

... that this article was written for the sole purpose of the Fillet O'Phish pun.

UK.gov says extreme porn isn't illegal if you delete it...

"Realistic" seems easy to get around

Shoot your extreme porn in front of a green screen, and superimpose a perpetual motion machine in the background. Throw in some plot notes about the scene taking place on a space ship at light speed. etc, etc, ad nauseum.

US couple sue over McNudes

Very good point, Jim the Boss

I have a right to carry around pornography in public in private, damnit!

Teen discussed suicide plan online 12 hours before webcam death

Some people encouraging him...

... may have been under the nothing-on-the-Internet-is-real effect. Whatever pleasure you get from even pretending to egg on a suicidal person is sick, granted, but I can't quite blame people if they just didn't take the situation seriously. After you encounter enough trolling, you may learn that it's generally quite foolish to feel some serious emotional reaction to something you found online. This could easily have been made up - bigger and dumber pranks have happened. A big psuedo-anonymous environment does not foster trust, so it's a terrible place to turn when you need to be taken seriously - such as in the typical cry-out-for-help suicide.

eHarmony settles over same-sex dating

eHarmony does make a good point

Wikipedia quote: "Warren responds that he has not done the same amount of research on same-sex match-making as he has done on heterosexual match-making. He also notes that eHarmony is about marriage, and that same-sex marriage is illegal in most states."

Yep, that's right, gays. Inalienable right to dating sites, no right to a legally recognized union. My state held it to a public vote, and nearly unanimously voted against same-sex marriage. Nobody's allowed to be a bigot, except everybody :(

How to destroy the music business

Hmmmm

The initial notion of user-generated mp3s got me thinking. Surely there are enough people who want to put up free stuff, and some of it is probably listenable. What you haven't hit on is the second half of web-2.0ism: users provide the content, but they also *filter* the content. What about some sort of youtube-pandora hybrid for music? Use thumbs-up/thumbs-down feedback to help rate tracks and filter out the crap. And best of all, you can still play all of the copyrighted stuff, because the users will upload it, and it's up to the rights owners to send you a DMCA takedown notice (search for any song title on youtube to see how well that's working out for them). All you need is the bandwidth, and you can start... what? youtube doesn't make any money? Damn...

T-Mobile kicked for 'more minutes' ad

Who cares?

If you believe a single word of a TV advert, you deserve what you get.

Filesharing ambulance chasers get into the gay smut racket

Could be worse...

They could be outing people who listen to Metallica. How embarrassing would THAT filesharing letter be!

Linux weaktops poised for death by smartphone

Re: "fsck" ... John White

Great for data integrity, indeed, but it still doesn't help my pronunciation problem :|

What is this strange word "f*ck"...

... and how the fuck do you pronounce it?

This rant is ludicrous.

I wanted to be able to carry around a laptop that was smaller, lighter, and cheaper than average. I got an eee 901.

Sure, I fall into the description of people who are into gadgets and have $500 to burn. Obviously that's going to characterize the early adoption market (which I'm defining as mostly people who bought a netbook because they wanted one, and not because their old laptop crapped out). Most of the market has one working computer and doesn't need to own two. But when eventually, say, my sister needs a new computer, I'll recommend one of these.

"Weaktop" is a crap description. I'm running Eclipse... try doing that on a dumbphone (yeah, I can make up silly words too). Unless you're a gamer, I'm not sure how this machine could fail your expectations.

Chrysler: the future's bright, the future's electric

Why so much glass

Can someone explain why all of the electric car designs I've seen lately seem to have exteriors with way more glass than a normal vehicle? The Peapod has transparent doors, and the ZEO a transparent roof. If I recall correctly, that silly concept car with the "energy tree" was almost entirely transparent.

It appears to be a plot to ensure that electric drivers get blinded by the sun, smashed into the ground when their cute little electric toy rolls over, and are then thoroughly torn up by shattered glass. Is there an energy efficiency benefit too?

French record labels sue, um, SourceForge

Hilarity

I think the best part of this story is LimeWire and Morpheus. Has anyone used those particular programs since... 2005 or so?

Apple sued over Jesus Phone 'hairline cracks'

You can sue over this?

If it breaks quickly or doesn't work as advertised, couldn't he just return the damn thing? Surely Jesus Company provides some sort of warranty.

Caveat emptor... don't buy shoddy crap.

Online identity card scheme aims to remove password headaches

Yay!

If there's one source of fraud protection I know I can trust, it's the credit industry.

Judge: No cryptographic hash analysis without warrant

"each platter constitute[s] its own separate container"???

I thought this was a surprisingly sane ruling, until this came up at the last minute. Under what circumstance is a warrant ever going to be issued to search a particular platter of a hard drive, excluding others? Does she not realize that the construction of a magnetic disk has nothing to do with data organization?

Microsoft: Windows 7 ready for Christmas 2009

"Why so fast on Windows 7?"

Roughly 3 years between releases... Is that fast?

Barack Obama will be president

That's not the real question.

What does Paris have to say about all this?

The US election, live online from er... London

Obama or McCain?

I guess we know which two candidates El Reg supports :(

I voted for Barr.

Asus to phase out sub-10in Eee PCs, says CEO

What the fuck, Asus.

I thought we had something special.

Rigged e-voting machine snacks on Homer Simpson

Can we please give up the secret ballot?

I appreciate the Australian ballot to prevent vote buying, but I'm starting to think that transparency in the voting process is far more important (because if we don't know whether the tallies are correct, nothing else matters).

I want to see every vote and every voter's name published in a big list online. That way:

- I can look at my vote and ensure that it was counted correctly.

- I can count the results myself and verify that the official tally is correct.

- The public can scrutinize the list for fraud (make sure their dead relatives didn't vote, etc)

I don't think electronic voting is inherently scary. It has potential to empower the public. It may even let us do something sophisticated like an instant runoff later down the road. But it just can't be built inside a black box.

Bono bikini babe party pictures loose on Facebook

What do privacy settings have to do with anything?

Even if the photos had been limited to "friends only" - I'm sure their friends would have ended up copying them out to their blogs or something for public viewing anyway.

In fact, I don't even see any evidence that they WANTED the snaps to be private. The angle on this story is that Facebook somehow let them accidentally expose their data, but I don't see any evidence to substantiate that claim. As far as I can see, some girls took pictures of themselves with Bono, and put them on the web for all to see.

The only privacy aspect is the lesson that if you're a celebrity who doesn't want to be caught hanging out with young girls, you probably shouldn't let them photograph the party.

Where's the IT angle? This is just a story about Bono hanging out with some young girls. Some blogger padded it with some unrelated drivel about Facebook privacy, and El Reg seems to have picked up on it because it contains the word "Facebook".

Shuttleworth on Ubuntu: It ain't about the money

@Andus McCoatover

I actually did this before I posted to make sure that "firefox" was the package name, and did not touch my mouse.

- Launched Terminal with gnome-do (<home>+<space>, t, <enter>)

- sudo apt-get in<tab>firefox<tab><tab>

- Closed Terminal with alt+f4.

A grand total of 31 keystrokes (plus the length of my password if I were to press enter and do the install). I bet an install on Win2k would take more *clicks* than that to open IE, download the executable, launch it, run through the installer...

A bit more troll fodder for Gordon

I've never had to install firefox, because it ships with seemingly every distribution I've used. But, if I had to...

sudo apt-get install firefox

... 0 clicks required.

@angstiness

Where's the aggression coming from? The *nix world is fragmented, and the world largely ignores it. The popularity problems are partly Microsoft's fault. I don't care. My ubuntu systems work great :)

Maybe I'm missing the point, or maybe everyone else is, but I've always felt there's a big misunderstanding around the OSS mentality. Programming freetards aren't trying to take over the world. It's just an effort to have systems that run well. It's not entirely unlike an academic community publishing things just so the world can better understand maths and such.

The netbook newbie's guide to Linux

Stop pushing the Cloud

"As a netbook user, Google Docs should probably be your word processor of choice too. It's a Cloud application, and it also maintains your data out on the net, and this is ***how netbooks are meant to work***."

I suppose I can't speak for others, but my eee has 20 gigs of ssd (currently full of movies, but would surely fit plenty of "word processing"), and OpenOffice runs much more smoothly than the big pile of bloat that is Firefox 3 stumbling under loads of javascript. Even the limited read/write speed of the flash memory, which is the biggest bottleneck in the system, is faster than the Internet.

I can see conceptually why a netbook article is the perfect excuse to start pushing this Cloud thing, if you're a journo who thrives on buzzwords. But once you get your netbook, and start using it, the practical user will realize that tiny computers are computers too. They're a glorious revolution in form factor, not in software architecture.

The netbook newbie's guide to Linux

Killer app: the package manager

Getting quite offtopic now, but in response to the "killer app" question - for me, it's the package manager. Synaptic, apt-get, yum, whatever comes with your distro of choice. Saves me from having to download an installer, put up with its inane "install wizard" prompts, etc, etc. Dependencies are automatically installed. In a single command and a matter of minutes (possibly seconds), I can have virtually any application I'd want. And then Update Manager keeps them all patched. Uninstall/purge is just as easy, and unneeded dependencies are automatically removed. It all can be done through a gui if you'd like. It makes Windows/Mac systems look downright archaic.

Way more complicated than necessary?

I run ubuntu - and as I remember, acquiring full compatibility with Windows shares was just a matter of asking Synaptic nicely for the samba package, and then using Nautilus almost identically to how I would have with Windows Explorer back in those days.

I think either your chosen distro is seriously lacking some features, or you're actually Mr. Ballmer infiltrating El Reg to scare newbies away from linux on their netbooks.

US teen admits to 'Anonymous' DDoS attack on Scientology

$70k?

How can you do $70,000 worth of damage with a ddos? Obviously someone like Amazon loses a lot of money when their intertubes go down, but...

What damage did the Church of Scientology suffer? Perhaps they lost potential recruiting opportunities, and told the judge that they could have made $70k more in blackmails had the website been up.

US judge rejects lawsuit against God

Wasting the court's time is wasting MY money

Even wikitards have a rule against this kind of behavior:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:POINT#State_your_point.3B_do_not_prove_it_experimentally

Why does the law seem to put up with it? I recommend reprimand, disbarment, and castration.

OpenOffice.org overwhelmed by demand for version 3.0

Why is this so exciting?

I like OOo as much as the next guy... but I think I can stand to wait until the ubuntu repo picks up version 3.

Reg reader completely loses the plot

"you people need life's fucking retards"

Ah yes, we all need a few of life's fucking retards every now and then...

Reg can always make me smile on a Friday :)

Attention developers: Your SESSIONIDs are showing

Nice.

Good basic overview of common authentication pitfalls.

Damien Hirst buys Paris porn collage

Re: Porn College

Good to see I'm not the only one. I saw this article title multiple times since this morning (it's now well into tomorrow morning), while planning to read the article later... and I'm only now realizing (with some disappointment) that there is no porn college after all.

Labour minister says 14 year olds should get ID cards

People want ID cards

I was at my local DMV getting my driving permit renewed (in Georgia, US), and I noticed a child who couldn't have been older than 4 getting his photo taken. I commented that he seemed a bit short to drive, and a fellow citizen remarked that he was getting an id card - "just in case". In case of what, I can't imagine, but it tells me that the public does seem to think that having the state tag their children is a valid protective measure against some sort of threat.

Comcast reveals it is protocol agnostic

The bandwidth cap is a concern...

... when you share a Comcast account with roommates who all like to torrent.

I don't even understand the point of a monthly bandwidth limit. They claim that they've got traffic shaping under control, so that heavy bandwidth users won't slow other users down during peak usage times. So why bother counting my bits, if we've already established that I can't be slowing anyone else down? Both policies don't seem necessary.

Terminating a user's account for a year is just childish. Why not just make it impossible for a user to exceed the bandwidth cap - once the counter reached 250GB, terminate the account until the end of the month. Why not take the opportunity to let the users purchase more bandwidth? A company should rejoice in having customers who demand more service. It should mean that they get to sell more, not punish them like schoolchildren.

And can they now stop with all the bloody adverts telling us that the purpose of "Comcastic" Internet is to be able to download large files quickly? Because it's apparently only true for sufficiently small values of "large".

Did the width move for you, darling?

Too wide, and not wide enough. Also, who cares.

Most of the width complaints seem to be that it's too tiny on large monitors. But I find it funny that there's another problem - it's too wide to display on tiny netbooks, especially ironic because El Reg covers them so extensively.

All in all, though, I don't understand the complaining. Yes, I'd expect better from any "tech" oriented website. But really, this is a design flaw that the majority of the web exhibits. We're using to dealing with crap pages like New Reg. It's stupid, but not worth bitching about.

Japanese call on deities to discipline wayward PCs

Muhammad H. Christ

I can understand having supernatural beliefs about things humanity doesn't fully understand. The health of our bodies, for example. Maybe there's some kind of soul thing in there, who knows. But superstition in computing? We built these machines, for fuck's sake. We understand every bit (pun!) about what's going on inside the world's boxen.

This story is nothing but depressing.

World goes mad as Bill and Jerry eat churros

To whom are they selling?

As far as I'm aware, most Windows users are those whose PCs came with it preinstalled, those who have to use it at their office or school, and gamers who have no other choice. Mac has their clever "I'm a PC" ad campaign because they're trying to push kit on end users, particularly to get the new-laptop-for-college-freshman sale. But will Seinfeld really help Microsoft reach PC manufacturers and sysadmins?

MS beefs up WinXP Pro's anti-piracy nagware

What "metrics" are they using?

Does anyone know? I doubt Microsoft talks about it openly. I'd really like to see an investigative (do people do that?) report on how WGA is supposed to work, and why it fails so badly.

Before I switched my home machines to Linux, I had replaced my pre-installed XP systems with a copy of Win2k from Pirate Bay. WGA deemed it "genuine".

Cloud computing: A catchphrase in puberty

Fuck me, give that man a raise.

Funny, profane, and finally a reasonable explanation of all this cloud fuss. This is why I keep coming back to El Reg.

Windfall taxing big oil: how to make the gas crisis worse

Corporations don't pay taxes - People pay taxes.

This whole concept can be summed up in this one sentiment. Any tax that is leveraged upon a company is ultimately a burden of the individuals. It results in a profit loss which hurts investors (people), a price increase which hurts consumers (people), and maybe downsizing which hurts employees (people). Every corporate tax that the angry citizen wants due to his irrational hatred of large economic entities is ultimately money coming from his own pocket.

Rare Mac Trojan exploits Apple vuln

Why would you particularly care to root a Macintosh?

I'm sure the vast majority of the machines in question are personal desktops with one or two user accounts. I'm no hacker, but it seems to me that anything you would want to exploit - sending of spam, grabbing of keystrokes - could be done almost as easily in userspace, without needing to sudo at all.

So... while do I understand, on principle, why you don't want the sanctity of your root violated - If I owned a shiny white box, I'm not sure I could force myself to give two craps that it has a root vuln which requires me to execute it myself.

EU project scans air passengers for terrorist tendencies

Who do they plan to test it on?

Are we going to put out an ad in the paper, under the Terrorists Wanted section, to see if the system can detect them?

If they test it on actors pretending to be terrorists, they're just admitting that the system can be reliably tricked.

MySpace fraudster indicted in teen's suicide

Why does the "fraud" really matter?

If she had been male and legitimately interested in this girl, and then cruelly ditched her after a change of heart... do the feds throw you in lockup for being an asshole boyfriend? Or do the prosecutors just desperately want to cling to their illusion that people they meet online should be the same age and gender as they claim?

Good thing the girl never decided to send any sexually-themed pictures of herself - the perpetrator would have a lynch mob after her in a heartbeat.

Comcast mulls overage fees for bandwidth lovers

As a Comcast user, I say...

250 gig a month? Hah! That's 95 KB per second, if run constantly. Comcast is flattering themselves if they think their customers CAN consistently get much more downstream than that.

Nigerian duped gullible NASA employee

Jim Gaffigan

What do rocket scientists say when they want to say something's not hard?

Hey, it's not... like we're trying to talk to women.