Google employing fleshies to talk to other fleshies? It's not April 1st is it?

Next you'll be telling us that Nexus One owners are making voice calls instead of simply plugging the device into the USB port behind their left ears for direct brain to brain digital communication! Preposterous!

...but since when did Bhorat have an interest in Open Document Standards??

It seems that not only did I sleep through the iPad launch but the whole experience left me so underwhelmed that I've been comatose all through Feb and March...

p.s. Lester: surely there are some photos from Prof Macbucks?

...and possibly not in the nicest manner, BUT...

They are simply acting on behalf of media corps or trade associations who have a short-sighted view of how to monetise their (client's) copyrighted material. Perhaps El Reg can dig out who these companies are so that we can, if we so choose, withdraw our business from them.

...rock-on Flight of the Levitated Dipoles!

...let's face it David Lammy's boss is Lord of Darkness...erm...I mean Mandelson, he would never cozy-up to big business and freeze-out our democratically elected representatives! And he's part of a Labour cabinet who are so big on open government, preposterous!

C'mon Lester - have you been at the sauce early today??

As this is clearly a story of international significance to those of us in the IT professions I took it upon myself to...erm...uncover the particulars of this story: it would appear that the pair of "traffic cones" in question were 100% natural. And all the better for that IMHO.

</perv>

...8 hours on a 61Wh battery? Hard to believe that even at idle this notnetbook only burns 7W. Shurley shome mishtake...

...our new Magnetic Devil Particle Overlords

It's beginning! Just as predicted in the prescient work "Doom: the LHC Chronicles" by that great luminary Prof. I D Software! Run for your lives!

Nick: maybe you should have checked what else was available right now. How about this little Samsung *writer* (inc. dual layer and DVD-RAM) for less than forty notes:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Samsung-SE-S084C-PSBN-8xDVDR-6x-DVDDL-5xRam-USB-BUS-Powered-Slimline-DVDRW-TRU-Direct

This has the added advantage of being shiny "piano" black which, as any geek knows, makes it go faster (as long as you polish off grubby fingerprints). If the Lite-On had a worthwhile USP for this market segment, e.g. ultra-low power consumption (solar powered?) or possibly a UV-reactive luminous blue paint job, it might be worth considering. As it is it's just a big fat fail.

Looks like clever stuff, though I can't claim to be competent to judge the real-world significance of this. Presumably this is aimed at Ubuntu servers, are these rootkits responsible for a significant proportion of servers that are compromised?

On another note, interesting to see M$ researchers so concerned about Linux security. I guess they must be twiddling their thumbs because the new versions of Windoze are so secure... *cough*

C'mon Gavin - we know you're only a hack but you're a hack on El Reg: engage brain before uttering such nonsense! Anyone who has *worked* in a production environment and is responsible for maintaining the delivery of a service for more then five minutes knows that the last thing you do is download and install the latest version of anything as soon as it's released - except in a *test* environment.

Yes it appears that there are a few issues with Karmic and those that have been burned are those "must have" jockeys whose jaw drops at the paint job rather than kicking the tyres and looking under the hood. The "most technical of the technical" know that when the soft and smelly hits the rotating and blowy on a live system one's time appreciating one's favourite hop-flavoured beverage at the local hostelry can be severely curtailed.

<smug>

I'm certainly not the most technical but I only moved from 8.04/SuSE 10.1 to 9.04 Desktop & Server a couple of weeks ago. When the dust settles on Krazy Koala in a month or so I might stick it on a test box to see if the tyres squeal and the suspension is improved when I take it for a spin. Or I might be in the pub entirely undisturbed by anxieties about long evenings at the CLI resuscitating X.

</smug>

Happy Tuxing!

Difficult to get excited about these things any more unless they mark a significant improvement over other things on the market. OK, this device is quite cheap and quite fast but not the sort of thing anyone is going to get excited about.

Anyone supporting end lu$3rZ knows that the main problem presented by the EBKAC brigade is that they have physically damaged the device AND failed to make backup copies of any important data thereon. Common stories being: "I didn't have a spoon to stir my coffee so I thought this would do", "The step ladder was rocking so I put this under one of the legs to fix it so I could safely lick the live light fittings on the ceiling", etc..

How about testing some of the ruggedised USB devices like the Corsair Survivor to destruction?

And that's news how?

However, £64k (presumably more for being Top Twat) for a turd-spurt of ten twats an hour? As Yosser used to say: "I can do dat! Gissa job!"

...the world did not implode as a result of the generalised outage of Web 2-pointless-oh sites. Human beings have been witnessed vectorising atomic vibrations at one another in co-incidental relativistic space-time (i.e. talking).

Cynical old anti-imperialist peacenik git that I am, I can't help being awed by these low-res images of the Apollo landing sites.

Even though it was a waste of money, people-years and resources first time around (and will be an even more scandalous waste if they go again when we face far more pressing problems now) the little kid in me who remembers watching this open-mouthed on a b&w telly when it happened comes to the surface. I can't help acknowledging that it was still an amazing thing to do.

Don't you just hate having mixed emotions about all things US? So much easier when you can shout with every fibre of your being: "YANKEES GO HOME!" :-)

This is interesting in light of Saturday's other article on El Reg about the M$/Asus puff-piece/FUD website www.itsbetterwithwindows.com for netbooks (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/30/its_better_with_windows/).

Netbooks with Linux are one of the IT industry's best efforts at producing secure on-line appliances for Jo/Jill Public to use with relative confidence that they won't be pWn3d. All the more so with so many legit websites compromised in this way. Just a shame to see a decent company like Asus get muscled into M$'s monopolistic attempts to crush all that is Open Source.

Looks like a very nice and reasonably priced bit of kit with an optical drive.

Being a Linux user on desktop, laptop and server I'd say it's likely that a little extra work might need to be done to get everything working, dependent on how standard the hardware is. For example a number of 802.11n wireless adapters are not natively supported within everyone's favourite fluffy distro, Umbongo. It can involve compiling and installing drivers from source supplied by the manufacturer or using an NDIS wrapper.

<M$-Sideswipe-Mode>

Having said that, even if a bit of tweaking is involved to get it all working with Umbongo, it will run like the proverbial hot poo off of a shovel compared to Fistula. And do you really want an OS that isn't sure which CPU is still plugged in? *titter*

</M$-Sideswipe-Mode>

Red-hot Swedish chopper chicks knicks not up to the jub?

No surprises here - whether it's Brazillian carpenters on the tube, G20 protests or dealing with awkard people who provide evidence for the defence, plod will wade in with size 10s, batons and, if they think they can get away with it, semi-automatic weapons.

Just as well we don't have a Home Secretary who wants to give plod even more powers...

<rant>

What's that? Oh...it's just Paul Barnfather, Andy and Mike Powers chirping out of their butts about what they can't fill a postage stamp with regarding browser security *yawn*

Yes of course this is a stupid little spat between OSS developers, but who the fuck are you lot to judge? Both NoScript and AdBlock have a long record of producing quality (as judged by the community, not some bean counter in Redmond) plug-ins that make a mass-market browser even more superior in comparison to its main (proprietory and standards-busting) competitor. In other words they've actually done something worthwhile for the rest of us. So: STFU.

</rant>

To the matter in hand...I'm not really interested much in who did what when - nobody's perfect - the fact is that as one of the biggest (and fastest growing) on-line threats is legitimate websites that have been compromised, NoScript is important while AdBlock is just nice (yes I know - ad streams can be poisoned before some pedant points it out - but that's a less significant threat). So let's hope these two patch things up, but if they don't AdBlock is on a loser as it's just not as important as NoScript.

...nope - but that was my first thought, I mean, "Mastering the Internet"! (Presumably on completion of the project Wacky Jacqui - not to be confused with her husband, Whack-off Dickie - will henceforth be known as the Internet Dominatrix - she's topped you there Ms Bee!)

My next thought was that this was madness, only a government so stupid and arrogant that it would do things like:

(i) lie to justify invading foreign countries;

(ii) propose locking people up without trial for months on end, perhaps for reading something on a DoJ website;

(iii) remove the 10p tax rate for poorer people to pay for their foreign and security extravaganzas;

(iv) spend £30bn on new and just as unusable nuclear weapons;

(v) steal from the public purse to pay for second homes just around the corner from their first home...oh...how silly of me!

So what do we do? I seem to remember that when the "black boxes in ISPs machine rooms" (Echelon?) were first mooted someone came up with an e-mail signature that contained all the trigger words. These ones here parhaps: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/31/what_are_those_words/

Maybe it's time to revive mass virtual civil disobedience.

Yeah it seems like you've won the IP lottery now, you'll be handing out IP addresses to your family and friends, work colleagues and neighbours, everything in the virtual garden will seem rosy.

Then you'll start getting the e-mails from needy causes, people with a plan to good things if only they had a few IP addresses, and you'll be generous, you're giving a bit back and helping to make the world a better place.

You'll feel so good that you'll barely notice the subtle change in tone of those e-mails, the people around you, even your closest friends: they're becoming greedy for what you've got that they don't have, they simply MUST HAVE more of your address space!

That's when you'll start to find it hard to sleep at night, you'll keep a copy of a hardened linux kernel on a memory stick by your pillow and no matter how many sacks of IP addresses you stash under your bed you still won't feel secure.

Before you know you'll be down to your last ten million trillion addresses and you'll be staring IP oblivion in face...

HTTP Error 404: Not found

...you can do better than simply making a rather rough summary of a Grauniad web article. Last time I looked you were a journalist!

Leave aside the merits or otherwise of Windows 7, the fact is that M$ is bound by its very nature to behave this way over a new release. And when I say its nature I do not mean that it is institutionally evil or the spawn of Satan (though I'm also not ruling this possibility out...) - it is a huge multinational capitalist enterprise with a dominant or monopolistic position in several of its markets whose inherent logic is maximising shareholder value.

How else can it do this with a product like Windows 7 other than by spending almost as much time and money on roll-out and marketing as on engineering the product itself? So M$ is not only keen to claim that the latest Windows kicks the competition in the pants but is also a "must have" if you're using an older version of Windows. Witness the way M$ has been dragged kicking and screaming into extending the life of XP time and again (thereby eating into Vista sales) because it does the job well enough for most institutions and individuals and probably better and/or more cheaply than Vista does. M$ wants sales, not customers content (enough) with a seven year old OS.

Compare this with Canonical and Ubuntu. Yes Mr Shuttleworth can be heard around release time singing the praises of Wacky Waterbuffalo but Canonical's shareholders do not benefit directly from increased downloads or even installations of Umbongo. However there's no shareholder value to be had in fewer installations or short-term installations, only in more widespread and long-term use of the OS. Hence like other mainstream Linux distros it stands or falls on quality engineering: stability, security, usability, longevity, scalability and the like.

No-one is suggesting that *only* OSS is used in schools and education, but that it *should be* used. The fact is that the opposite is largely the case at the moment: *only* propietary software is used.

And the point Diana Artemis made (if you had actually bothered to read what she wrote) was that free (as in freedom) software can be examined, modified and improved by students so they learn, as opposed to M$ free (yeah we'll let you download it and use it in strictly defined ways and if you do something we don't like we'll see you in court) software.

As for your point about using software that is most commonly subject to attack, that is a red herring in this case: for students it is more important to learn *why* a bit of software is crap, not just that it *is* crap.

I confess I did not know this - it is truly amazing how language evolves so rapidly (or should that be vapidly) in the world of web-two-point(less)-oh :-)

...I believe that someone who Tweets on Twitter is, in fact, a Twat. And if they Tweet at least once a day they are a Total Twat.

The spokesperson for Amazon clearly stated: "We f****d up", in the absence of any other actual evidence, as opposed to lots of people with too much time on their hands (oo-er!) virtually frothing at the mouth (again...oo-er!) on Web 2.oh-my-god, that's that.

A quick search reveals that it's easy to find Jeanette Winterson's excellent "Oranges are not the only fruit" and a plethora of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographic work. Both of these people have been notorious in their own way for their sexuality and as such a likely target for right-wing/religious homophobes intent on mischief at Amazon.

Move along, nothing to see here. No, really!

...have they tried parking that thing at Sainsbury's? And even if you could find three consecutive spaces you can bet some chav will drive his Nova over your wheel strut!

...as any fule kno (who's seen Blade Runner) clones only last for six years at best. And that's if you don't have some psychotic ex-cop running around after you trying either shag you or blow holes in you (or possibly both, it's all very Freudian)

That's my reading of it too - as the researchers say you essentially require admin access to a vulnerable machine to exploit this. However if this payload (in the form of a rootkit) was piggy-backed on some plain vanilla malware it could be very nasty.

The ability to conceal itself no-holds-barred is precisely the point: that after the regular malware is removed and the vulnerability patched the machine is still pWn3d.

Presumably if a fix is possible it will be a BIOS update for mainboards like the Intel DQ35 and, as this board will be the basis of many thousands of OEM machines, it is rather shocking that Intel haven't moved faster to fix it.

But what about mainboards based on the 965/945/915 chipsets? There's still plenty of those around - are they vulnerable too? And third-party chipsets?

It's on the Beeb so it must be true: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00h6sbt/What_Darwin_Didnt_Know/

It's a hittopotowhale or perhaps a whaleopotomi, as any fule kno

Let's hope the plucky Spaniards haven't seen Stingray, otherwise they may spot our fish-borne reptilian invasion fleet for what it is!

Altogether now...

STINGRAAYYYYY-STINGRAY!! Dadalada-da-da!!

...providing a service that is worth what we pay for it. I've been with VM (and Telewest before them) for a long time and apart from the *advertised* speed of their service things have by and large only got worse.

Yes they finally listened to the torrent (no pun intended) of customer feedback about premium-rate phone support but you're still very lucky if you get to speak to someone who is capable of hearing that there is a problem with the service rather than just taking you through the Fisher-Price script telling you to make sure you're not wearing odd socks or metallic glasses that may interfere with the broadband signal.

And their mail service has been selling itself with the line: "Fed up with puny mailboxes? With Virgin Media you get five 30MB mailboxes" ever since I signed-up with Telewest. Every now and then I get the urge to collect a few old 40GB drives and send them off to VM to upgrade the mail server capacity.

/rant

...no browsers running on Linux - too tough? Would have been nice to see at least.

Nice to see that Dell will ship this with Ubuntu as an alternative to Windoze and it will save you a few quid on the base spec (£329 compared to £379) but as usual you get a lower spec machine: not just a smaller HDD but also a slower Atom CPU.

Indeed if you opt for an 80GB HDD (same as the XP model) you'll pay £419! So your Dell Mini 12 with a slower CPU and free OS/software costs more than a Dell Mini 12 with pay-for OS/software. Go figure.

http://www.ivell.com/inter.html:

"Labour Standards, norms and rules that govern working conditions and industrial relations are regarded as basic labour rights. As such, they are considered inviolable and universally applicable. They form together with the core Conventions of the Internal Labour Organisation (ILO), an agency of the United Nations, the basis of our corporate responsibility and are manifested in a Social Accountability Code of Conduct. It is a requirement that our factory partners display a copy in a factory area which is freely accessibly to the workforce."

The term "hypocritical to$$ers" comes to mind.