Posts by Tony Green

Because of course...

...none of the wildlife in the area has ever pissed or shat into the reservoir.

Potentially malign?

I'd say Google Analytics IS malign. Too many times I'm sitting waiting for a page to load and I see Firefox telling me it's waiting for Google Analytics.

Funnily enough, since I put dummy addresses for their servers in my /etc/hosts file, an awful lot of pages load faster...

Out of character for the Daily Hate

No immigrants / muslims / other-minorities to blame it on.

Could cause some entertainment...

...once Nokia start installing it on their 'phones.

Free's still great though

Of course not everybody who's downloaded books for free has been stealing them. With hundreds of thousands of legitimately free books available for download at gutenberg.org there's enough to keep us going for a while. Or at least until the book industry finally stops DRMing what it makes available so we can't read the books without an "approved" reader.

ICO - chocolate teapots?

-- a crap cliche I know, but the most appropriate I can come up with.

All my dealings with the ICO have convinced me that they exist rather like the Advertising Standards Authority and the Press Complaints Commission, to give the impression there's some proper regulation going on, while allowing companies to flout the law and what everybody else would consider ethical behaviour.

I've made numerous complaints to the ICO about UK companies spamming me. Even when they've investigated the complaint and concluded that I WAS illegally spammed, the all that happened was "we told them to stop, but we can't do anything about it if they don't".

Even when companies like Think Pink Cartridges didn't bother replying to the ICO's enquiries about their activities, they've been left to it with no action taken against them.

One way they use it against you

A publican friend of mine recently rang the plods to report a drunk who was staggering past his boozer, wandering on and off the road and generally causing mayhem.

He was not a little pissed off at a subsequent pubwatch meeting to be told that because he'd reported it, the incident had been recorded as trouble caused by his pub. Oddly enough, his inclination to report problems that are nothing to do with his pub has somewhat diminished.

This would probably let them into other distros/OSes

'Chris Wysopal, CTO of application security tools firm Veracode and former high profile member of hacker collective L0pht Heavy Industries, said that the issue of potential backdoors doesn't stop with OpenBSD: "If OpenBSD w/all their auditing was backdoored where does that leave Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, OS X. Who thinks they stopd at smallest dist?"'

Since OpenSSH is intimately tied-in with OpenBSD, my guess would be that this is the cryptographical code they'll have hit. So no need to specifically target the rest of us, since most of us will be using OpenSSH anyway.

Another good reason not to trust the bloody Yanks.

They haven't taken up my challenge

I told them that they were welcome to park a detector van outside my house for as long as they wanted and to apply for a search warrant if they found evidence of me watching a TV.

Funnily enough, they just keep sending threatening letters (which go straight back into the post box marked "return to sender").

Maybe I shouldn't have told them that if they presented evidence of a non-existent television, I'd do my damnedest to have whoever presented that evidence sent down for perjury, since it would have to be a lie.

Perhaps...

They've actually found intelligent life in the US?

If it's in the Daily Mail...

... then it's reasonable to assume it's a lie.

Pathetic!

And the plods wonder why the public don't have any confidence in them.

We had some similar stupidity here in Suffolk recently when they launched a huge enquiry to track down someone who'd reportedly cycled through a village naked. To charge him with "outraging public decency". Because after all, even though everybody in the village thought it was hilarious rather than disgusting, plod had nothing more serious to deal with. Apparently.

Another advantage of laser over inkjet...

...just try reading inkjet prints after they get water splashed on them; no such problem with laser prints.

Internet Explorer support

Probably by about 2020?

Red lights?

"Maybe it'll encourage London cyclists to obey traffic lights, but , cynical pedestrians that we are, we doubt it."

Because, of course, you never get a motorist ignoring traffic lights do you?

...oh hang on a moment though, for every cyclist who flies past me while I'm waiting for the lights to turn green, I probably get a dozen or more motorists who do the same. But of course that doesn't make a good anti-cyclist rant, does it?

Religion, eh?

Just got to love these religious nutters, haven't you?