Posts by Chris Cheale

oil isn't just fuel

remember folks - this wonderful oil stuff ain't just used for fuel, but plastics as well. As plastics are in virtually everything, rising oil prices mean that virtually everything becomes more expensive.

It's just we're uber-shafted at the petrol pumps because of the huge amount of tax there - there's about as much tax on petrol as there is on fags [cigarettes for our US counterparts] and booze. Personally I'd love it if all the smokers (myself included) simultaneously quit... watch the petrol prices soar as the gov finds a £13billion tax shortage.

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I wouldn't mind but I doubt any of the people posting have done anything remotely political in their lives.

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yes - because doing something political in this country makes soooo much difference; apart from possibly getting you a criminal record for participating in an "illegal gathering".

This country needs a radical political shake-up, the quasi-democracy we have just isn't working. People only vote on two things, self-interest and spin. Unfortunately, sometimes that which benefits the country/society/environment as a whole will be universally unpopular and will therefore not feature into the policies of any political party.

If only benevolent dictatorship wasn't a practical contradiction in terms.

statistically

... there's less than 2000 Pandas and more than 1.3 billion people - from a purely statistical viewpoint the loss of one Panda in China is equivalent (as a percentage) to approximately 826,000 people.

So yes, do save the fluffy ones (and the not fluffy, I'd be of a similar viewpoint if it was say Manatee vs People). In the last 40 years or so there has been a 60% increase in the number of humans; we've out-competed almost every other species (rats, cockroaches and bacteria possibly exempt) leading to the biggest loss of species diversity since the K-T extinction event 65 million years ago.

cheeeeekens and eegs

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If 75-90% of TV/Film/Music is rubbish, stop downloading it, by your own arguments, it is rubbish, therefore not worth watching/listening to.

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How do you know it's rubbish if you've not downloaded it to watch in the first place?

I've no objections to renting films via filmflex (on cable); pay a couple of quid to download the movie to your tv for 24 hours - fine by me. If it's any cop, buy the DVD otherwise what have you lost? Couple of quid for a couple of hours entertainment (unless the film's REALLY bad)...

I _would_ object to paying £2 - £3 to rent "Anaconda" mind... thankfully "Carnasaur 2" isn't even on there.

get on a bus

... and you'll hear wonderful conversations like:

"and he was like..."

"yeah, and she was like, what?"

"yeah, whatever"

So tha's, like, y'know, how peeps talk like, innit?

Give me LOL any day of the week, it's a word in it's own right now (like w00t); you can even pluralise it, "lolz!".

Oddly enough...

I actually read it as 'faeces' at first glance as well...

Maybe it goes to show many reg-readers are, in fact, shitheads (myself included obviously)?

zzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

PHP based forum... roll your own; PHPBB is only a forum with some user-centric bolt ons... or alternatively, as it's open source just tweak it and bolt in something like HTML Purifier [htmlpurifier.org] to help with sanitising any form data.

There's nothing wrong with PHP (per-se) but there's a LOT wrong in the world of web development... there's just so much god-awful code out there that gets by because "it works in Internet Explorer" - irrespective of the fact that the back-end code (PHP, ASP, Ruby, Java, C#, Perl etc) doesn't really have a whole lot to do with the display layer.

I work on the theory that if the code you CAN see (client-side) is sloppy then the server-side code will be just as sloppy. It's the eye-candy that sells the site unfortunately - clients are sold on "shiny shiny" not on how well something actually performs in the wild.

Sooo...

If I was to control a botnet and I got all the infected clients to send out an attack at the US military via distributed anonymous proxies, or better yet through compromised clients within the US military network itself would I be able to get the US mil. to launch friendly fire attacks?

Would this then leave me free to use the other half of the botnet to lauch further attacks at the US military?

I clog their downstream and get them to clog their own upstream - bonus.

mIRC at the ready, aim... FIRE!

*blinks*

wow... and I thought I was cynical.

Bingo

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web site owners allow google to profile their websites as google give something back (visitors) phorm does nothing for the site unless you are part of THEIR OIX adware ring. for no gain to me why should i allow these parasites to profit from me and visitor to my site(s)

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And that's it exactly - now, would it work if EVERY website owner explicitly forbade the use of their data in Phorm profiling, specifically the copying of any intellectual property contained on their sites?

Would this mean that Phorm would not be able to legally create any profile because they'd not be able to legally obtain the data required to make that profile?

If the news corp in Belgium could get google to remove headlines from google news on the grounds of copyright infringement, could we not all do the same thing to Phorm?

lmfao

it must be Friday w00t!

jobsagoodun

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That Manynard is a guy and the Mars Volta are guys too. Could you put an example of a female artist comparable to Amy right now?

This would include a beatiful voice, interesting lyrics and equally original band members.

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Emilie Autumn is the one that immediately jumps to mind.

PHP

Actually in PHP it's more like

strip_tags(mysql_real_escape_string($strInput, $dbConn))

Of course in reality you'll do something a little more sophisticated than that and bolt it into your database query object, make the methods of that object protected and only call them through pre-defined extensions ensuring that users cannot directly interface with your database layer at all.

In this case Mr O'Connor should have no problems - so long as you remember to stripslashes on any data you're retrieving from the database.

It's Comcast's service...

surely they can just say, "Hey, THIS is the service we're providing - take it or leave it" - as long as they make it clear that they're not providing anything like a comprehensive service? Might be commercial suicide, but that's up to them really.

If ISPs charged per GB transferred this wouldn't be an issue as people would suddenly find transferring pirated DVDs a _LOT_ more expensive. Most users would be, at most, nominally affected (hell, might even see the price for their connection come down) since most software, including games patches, is comparitively small.

About 110MB for Open Office, maybe 70MB - 250MB for a games patch (depending on the game), <80MB for most applications including web browsers, dev software (Apache, PostGRES, MySQL), the Gimp and even Apple stuff like Quicktime and iTunes.

I've never yet worked out how, without watching a lot of video streams (or downloading the equivalent files), anyone manages to exceed 2GB worth of data download a month - I've done it once with a full game beta which I was testing (that was a 2.3GB download).

RIPA is our friend

Remember folks it's under RIPA legislation that Phorm is illegal. It's a duel edged sword - while it allows for some forms of surveillance under certain circumstances it ALSO legislates under what circumstances that surveillance is legal or called for.

This instance comes under the Covert (Directed) Surveillance part of the RIPA legislation. The only important question here is - is it a crime to try to get your child into a primary school of which you're NOT in the catchment area?

This is important because the RIPA directive states:

"Directed surveillance can be lawfully undertaken to obtain private information about a person if public authorities reasonably suspect that a person has committed, or intends to commit, A CRIME." (my emphasis)

If the parents were NOT commiting a CRIMINAL offence then the council was in breach of the legislation and in so doing WERE comitting a criminal offence and should be "hoisted by their own petard".

vested intrest

Hint:

"James Hansen, chief of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies..."

Did you spot it?

NASA - the people behind the space program.

In other words:

The world's screwed, give us a tonne of cash and we'll find another world for everyone to live on?

If age was measured in world-weary cynicism, I'd give Yoda a run for his money.

bunch of cnuts

That was the lamest most weak and watery piece of shite reporting I've ever seen on BBC brekky before work this morning - I was practically spitting blood by the time I left the house.

It was more a concillatory whitewash than any kind of reporting - "but everyone is doing it and it's completely anonymous, what's the problem?" ... what a load of utter tosh; but because it was on Aunty people are going to believe it - bastards.

awwww

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it would appear Rockstar know their audience.

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I like GTA and I'm in the over 30 bracket... granted I only really play Vice City - lovin' that cheesy 80s crap on the radio, big ol' grin on my face hooning around listening to "Blondie". Mind I do that in my real car as well, just without doing a ton in city streets, weilding guns, kerb crawling or running anyone down.

"Doo do doo Doooooo - Atomic"

BS

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as most isps buy bandwith from bt, with the large increase in internet traffic seen over the last few years they need a better way of making money. this can either be passed directly onto the consumer in increased fees...

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Bollocks, basically.

ISPs are charged for data transfer in the same way that web hosting companies are charged for data transfer - it's exactly the same thing but in the other direction.

That being the case VirginMedia charges me £25 a month - with fair usage and traffic shaping policies (300 meg in "primetime" before shaping) - and that's cable not DSL.

My web host charges me on data transfer - a 2 gig limit a month, go over that and they just roll the additional charge over. Totally painless, totally simple - I pay for what I use (or rather what my visitors use). As long as I'm within 2 gigs a month this service costs me £15 a YEAR; 1/20th the price.

The ONLY reason ISPs charge the amount they do per month is so that those of us who don't transfer a whole lot of data (don't use iTunes, BBC iPlayer nor transfer movies/music over p2p) subsidise those that do. About the most data intensive website I visit is YouTube, other than that it's software and games patches.

Bring on price-per-gig billing, I could potentially save a fortune and not only that, it could get rid of all these crappy "fair use" policies and idiotic moneyspinning ideas like Phorm. If I was on DSL I'd just switch suppliers, but I'm not losing cable TV/Internet to switch to Freeview/DSL (I'm in a flat - satellite dishes are a no no).

Oh, and it'd make the movie industry happy because p2p-ing movies would probably cost as much as buying the physical media; especially for older moves as you can pick them up for £3 - £5 in sales.

@AC Response from Virgin

I've got exactly the same letter in my inbox at home - so I sent a detailed reply about Phorm, the Data Protection Act, RIPA legislation and AOL's bungle with displaying search results (and how people were identifiable through that very limited amount of data - nothing like the amount Phorm will harvest).

I had a phone call yesterday - unfortunately it was a customer care rep who was in over his head within the first 20 seconds - but he said he'd escalate it (we'll see).

well...

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Seriously... how hard can it be to make an icon set that doesn't look like it was designed in 1995?

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Well make some then? That's sorta the point of Open Source; if you can improve it then do so and submit the improvements.

Want new shiny icons?

http://contributing.openoffice.org/art.html

Anything else:

http://contributing.openoffice.org/

BINGO!

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If I walk into a shop to look at games they all have U,PG,12,15,18 BBFC ratings on them. I thought that the BBFC rate games in the same way they rate films i.e. Manhunt 2 couldn't be released because the BBFC refused to give it a rating.

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And yes - they ARE BBFC ratings, and yes, they are just as legally binding as the same ratings on movies (not allowed to be sold to persons under the marked age) so we've already got a working, legally binding, perfectly sensible system in place - unlike Italy for example.

The issue (as is actually pointed out by the report) is that parents buy these games for their kids... mind there's probably people out there who'll buy ciggies for their u18 offspring as well.

I continually wonder why a license isn't required to breed. Intelligence is an evolutionary dead end it seems.

hmmm smells like BS

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Real web developers write sites for IE whereas Comp Sci students who are doing some free work for their uncle 'designing' a web site tend to go overboard on the standards compliance, it's that simple.

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What total and utter unremitting bollocks - damn - I just bit a troll.

If you go by the way in which a browser renders a page rather than by the name of that browser, IE doesn't really have market share.

IE 6 and 7 render differently so that's 2 different categories.

Opera 8+, FF2+, Konqueror and Safari render basically the same. On some sites this could quite easily get something like 25% IE 6, 35% IE 7, 39% stuff that's W3C compliant (give or take) and 1% other... meaning "IE" is not dominant.

It gets better - in most instances IE7 actually renders more like Firefox or Opera than it does IE6 - look at padding in the box model for instance - so unless you're accessing the JS DOM you could say that IE7, Firefox, Opera and so on all render approximately the same. Even giving IE6 the generous market share of 30% it's still a minority browser these days - any web developer working in the "real world" will only worry about it as a secondary consideration.

IE7 only really becomes an issue when coding web2.0 shinies using the JS DOM - and you can get around those problems by using a JS wrapper "class" and providing noscript alternatives.

The whole point of coding to W3C standards is that if YOU follow the standard, every browser on every operating system following the same standard will display your code the same - even those you've not tested. I've not tested my work site with Safari on OSX (as I don't have access to a Mac) but I've been informed it works fine with my standards compliant code (oki - I put an onresize in the body tag that's not compliant).

emphasis

Just to add emphasis to the general sentiment...

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"We have been working hard to improve customer service and listening to what our customers say..."

Does that mean they'll be kicking Phorm out as well then?

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Amen

actually....

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why not just charge more per advert and keep the same frequency

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That's actually a really good idea - it might price the low-budget, badly dubbed, piss awful (if I ever meet "Barry Scott" I'm going to force him to drink that shit) ads out of the market and leave us with those ads that, really, we don't really mind watching.

Sony Bravia (plasticine bunnines) for instance, or just about anything by Guiness, Carling or WKD (hmm booze seems to get the best ads) - the Hamlet cigar ads would be illegal now of course =( Sometimes the ads are better than the programs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXVTjYTYcJo

Capacitor

A couple of thoughts occurred to me...

If you don't need this thing to fire rapidly then I guess you could use a really big capacitor to store energy generated from the engines, directly or whilst the vehicle is in motion. It's a laser, the shot travels at the speed of light in a straight line (as long as there are no black holes nearby) so it _should_ be pretty accurate and have a good range.

This wouldn't work against cluster bombs or other multiple munition types of course, but it might be useful for nerfing high payload ballistic missiles (or ICBMs).

The other this is the role this might take. I could see this more in the role of "tank protector" rather than as a battlefield tank in it's own right - useful for taking out helicopter gunships or other anti-tank aircraft.

A "mach 2" fighter bomber whizzing along at 680 m/s is hardly a match for the speed of light at nearly 300 million m/s.

Orange -> O2

Something funny going on there as I, and a work colleague, both on Orange get calls from O2 offering a cheaper monthly subscription - despite us both being on PAYG and never having been with O2.

Looks like these two companies are sharing data of some sort.

Advertising does not a free service make.

You have to connect to the ad-server and download the additional data - time, as they say is money. Even the fraction of a second it takes to download that additional data, glance at the ad and realise it's an ad and you don't care, is time. Get enough of them and that's how you're paying. Nothing is free.

Personally I actually PAY for my email addresses; well I pay for my "generic" address independantly - I've got 5 other mailboxes with my web server which I also pay for. With my paid-for service I don't have to log into a webmail system if I don't want to (it's got pop and smtp), nor do I need to look at the adverts funding said "free" webmail sytem.

I also get black, white and grey list filtering - and how much does this service cost me? $15 (US) - which converts to about £7.80 or something - A YEAR. More than worth it I think.

I've got nothing against online advertising, per say, with the possible exception of the intrusive "float over content" ads that El Reg indulges in; they get right on my tits. There is a HUGE flaw, however, in the assumptions made by the Phorm people - personally I have no objections to adverts being served up that are relevant to the site I'm visitng what I REALLY object to is ad-servers trying to make their ads "relevant" to me by tracking my web usage (I use Firefox's cookie exception list to allow certain specific cookies at home, everything else is blocked).

If the ISPs can't fund their own services from their subscriptions, then their business model is broken. I've actually got to the point where I'd much rather my ISP (VM) charged per-GB transferred (in the same way I am charged for hosting my website) than the crappy "fair usage" policy, traffic management and now this... and since I transfer <2GB per month, I think I deserve a fucking rebate!

hmmmm....

Maybe we should start funding terrorists - on provision that we get a say on the targets? No. 10 Downing Street for starters - then we could start the FoI requests to find out where the rest of the buggers live?

Damnit

I just checked on Wikipedia's entry for "earth" and nowhere does it say "mostly harmless" - any wikipedians out there who can be bothered to do an edit?

And you very nearly had my hopes up there...

a "purer" IE8 standards mode

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I was all full of hope for a brief moment then when I read the title - I thought maybe, just maybe, MS are finally putting some time/effort into their neglected hunkajunk web browser - maybe actually making a genunie attempt at meeting the W3C standards they help define.

But no, IE8 "standard" mode... just "purer".

How much purer? Will there be a usable JS DOM? How about CSS2 being finally implemented properly (forget CSS3 for now)? Will the box model actually render correctly (width+padding = actual width)?

Are they going to be moving forward, trying to get it ready for HTML5 (or better yet XHTML2 + xForms + CSS3) or will it simply be an effort to catch up with Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Firefox, SeaMonkey... ?

five bucks - less after conversion

Blimey - £2.60ish - as soon as I get home tonight then - hell, at that price I'll probably order the CD from MNS as well (I like having the physical). Saw NIN live when they played the Wolves civic - even in a fairly small venue like that their stage show was fantastic - one of the best bands I've seen live, not _quite_ as good as Rammstein, but hey they were in a bigger venue - would definitely see NIN again and will definitely buy this album.

Most of what I listen to these days has been found through places like Farcebook (iLike) or CNET (download.com); lots of unsigned/indie bands in one big repository. Then I find similar music (recomendations normally) and buy albums here and there, normally through smaller specialist record shops.

You really, really DO NOT need the record companies to get known - it used to be people like John Peel (RIP) or Tommy Vance (again RIP) - late night slots on the radio where they had a bit of leeway. Hell, lots of unsigned bands sent them demo tapes, some got airplay. What you used to need the record companies for was dealing with volume distribution once people started to find out about you - in the pre-"Stock, Aitken & Waterman" era anyway.

When the distribution channels attempt to create "artists" to sell, it all goes horribly wrong, which is what's happened.

sounds like X3

I installed X3 before I'd heard about the StarForce fiasco - and had to replace my DVD drive a couple of months later; could be coincidence but it could equally well have ben tar build-up on the lens ("smoking in front of your PC seriously damages the health of your optical drives").

Not played X3 since though - just in case.

Simplest solution is to uninstall the whole kaboodle (especially StarForce), download X3 via Steam and write off £30.

Opera... shiny

Just a thought - Mozilla gave Opera the heads up 1 day before releasing the patch on Firefox (and presumably Seamonkey) but they'd known about it for yonks... what exactly stops Opera from keeping an eye on FF's bugzilla? Had they done that they'd have known about the vuln as well.

Both browsers render in a similar manner, they're both pretty well standards compliant - they're solving the same problems using the same "rules", it's not exactly unthinkable that they both _might_ occasionally make the same mistakes; the programmers are only human after all.

My tuppence worth, as a browser Opera (9) is the best out there - better than Safari, Firefox and IE (although to be fair I'd rather use Lynx than IE for the most part) - that is, from a "normal" user perspective. Mouse gestures, magic wands, quick dial and even some of the silly widgets are quite nice.

From a developer point of view I tend towards Firefox; WebDev toolbar, Optimoz tweaks (inc. mouse gestures), Venkman JS debugger, Tidy, Table2Clipboard (one of the most useful extensions ever when you need to deliver reports in a spreadsheet) and well... Bork Borkl Bork! You can "translate" any webpage into Swedish Chef speak - utterly pointless but fun for maybe 20 minutes.

why?

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Why get so excited? They're only elected representatives, we can always choose some others.

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Because the alternatives are all so much better - execute the 700+ useless numpties in parliament currently and start again. I reckon amanfromMars should be the first benevolent dictator of the UK - talks less bs than the tossers doing the job currently.

The old anarchist adage still holds true, "no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in."

Card over email

Hmmmm... maybe ask them to send you their bank account details so that you can verify who they are before sending them your information... and maybe they'd be interested in helping transfer $50,000,000 (FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS US) from a secure account in Nigeria that your great uncle Sigmund left upon his death, you'd cut them in for a small percentage of course.

Normally even asking someone where you can download their public GPG/PGP key results in a "youwha?" type response.

The difference with snail and electronic mail is where liability rests - you post someone sensitive documents and the postie (or anyone else) gets caught opening it and they're in trouble - you email someone sensitive documents in an unencrypted format and you'll probably just get told it was your fault for being a plonker.

two tier auth

In most instances you need to identify which parts of your server are "harmless" - nothing very serious is trasmitted around, and which parts are "potentially dangerous" - user logins, names, addresses, credit cards numbers and so on.

Amazon does this fairly well - they have an innocuous session which follows you around in the address bar which just maintains your shopping basket and a few other odds and sods, nothing incredibly harmful if someone hijacks it... hmmm unless you don't want someone to see that "butt plug" in your recent purchases list of course - I guess that could give a whole new meaning to "sensitive data".

Anyway, once you need to access any (genuinely) sensitive data you hit the SSL login and your session is migrated to a secure one - a secure cookie is used to maintain your session (one of the properties of cookies is that they can be set to be read ONLY under SSL).

The reason people don't generally wrap their entire site in SSL is not the overhead on the server, but the slowdown the users will experience. Everything being downloaded is encrypted on the server and decrypted on the client and vice versa for uploads (such as form data)... all this takes a little time and makes the site seem slower.

For something like email, really, if you can use SSL, it's probably better to do so - generally it's only fairly small amounts of data being encrypted/decrypted - all of which is "potentially dangerous" (forgotten your password? click here to have it emailed). Google, at least, seems to have a reasonable turnaround time from discovery to fix.

I think...

> Google's business model isn't "being a charity"? Who could ever have guessed?

I kinda think that's the point he was making - with all the uber-fuzzy good feeling that seems to surround the Googleplex and their "do no evil" motto - some people seem to overlook the fact that Google is the biggest, most successful online advertisement broker in the world.

I'm no Gates fanboi - but really, GW Bush or Billy G? Unfortunately Bill Gates is smart enough not to take the demotion to presiding over only one single country - he's "retiring" instead.

Wouldn't happen in Japan

I can 'sort of' see where the ASA is coming from - you'd not visit a website about "sexy school children" and not expect to be stalked by the paedo-hunter general, caught, hung, drawn, quartered and burnt at the stake.

But, really, the whole "sexy schoolgirl" thing is nothing new, see:

Just about any Manga film (the Japanese are big into their schoolgirl fantasies)

Music videos - including Britney Spears and Aerosmith

St. Trinians

Not to mention the old Chilli's song "Catholic schoolgirls rule" and I wouldn't risk a Google search on "school girls".

It's...

It's "Couldn't give a tinkers cuss" - a really old English expression all he's done is "Franglaisised" it. pffff kids today.

And who's to blame

> To the outside world, (well from the UK,) the US gun laws seem crazy!

The American take on guns comes from a time when they were fighting a war of freedom from oppression against a vastly superior military force; better trained and equipped.

The only option was to give every person the right to bear arms - thus transforming every farmer and smallholder into an instant militiaman and providing a large enough military force to defeat their imperialist overlords.

That was the War of Independance.

Try looking at the law in a historical context and it makes perfect sense - just like it's legal to (use a bow and arrow to) shoot a Scotsman in York. The only difference is that the US has a defined constitution which gives certain rights to it's citizens which can be amended but never revoked.

And yes, I'm English and no, I don't *love* America, the country scares the living shit out of me these days.

What throttle?

Not hit it yet, oh yeah, whenever I've ever needed to download anything big (couple of gigs worth of beta software for instance), I do it really late. Fire up a download manager just before bed and leave it.

It's not like I'd actually want to sit there and watch 2 gigs worth of data downloading when I could be playing TF2. Throttling could be seen as a good thing - bad press about it means less subscribers which, in turn, means better contention for the rest of us - huzzah! [mind cable contention is only 20:1 anyway rather than 50:1 on DSL]

You just know...

... however, that the game is going to be complete and utter tosh. All the BBFC will have managed to do is provide free publicity for a game which would otherwise be in the bargain buckets by now.

Actually...

Look up Batman & Dracula: Red Rain.

If memory serves, at the end, despite beating "Dracula", Batman himself has become a vampire - so he's already dead. Vampire Batman gets my vote - just like Batman but just every so slightly more evil, stronger and harder to kill... Wayne Industries would have to invest in some serious sun block research however.

*blinks*

What an astonishingly apt analogy:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/24/h20_sewer_rollout/