No point complaining if you don't plan for this

Shit happens, it shouldn't, but it does. If online payments are mission critical to your business then why put all your eggs in the same payment gateway's basket. At least have a fallback payment processor for the day the sky falls in.

Apple are just good at refining and packaging, a bit like the Japanese with cameras, cars and motorbikes.

I sorely dislike "fantasy"...but

GoT is bloody good. I caught the telly series last year after a couple of mates recommended it. I'm now reading the first book which is a real pleasure. When I'm finished I'm going to watch series one all over again.

It's been a long time since I felt quite so immersed in a story of this genre.

I'd probably have ignored Instagram but...

...I just had to install it on my grubby old HTC Desire, if only to annoy and enrage the elitist twats even more.

SSL is mostly money for old rope

The non-EV/domain verified SSL business is a right old rip off and a big cartel designed to allow a few heavy weights to roll in the cash.

If I can buy a basic SSL certificate for any domain name that has a registrar published owner name, address and postcode and have it in my paws inside 10 minutes, with bugger all checks, why do we need to pay Verisign et al for the pleasure of renewing it every year. It's a joke.

If all you want is a secure channel and don't give a crap about verification then why should users have to pay for something as basic as that? Surely that should be a basic function of the web these days now without having to pay for it. I don't pay anything for SSH why should I pay for basic HTTP encryption.

I can understand paying for EV SSL's, you need to have humans (hopefully) involved in the screening process, but then how good is the screening process?

Also when average Joe happens to look up at the green EV indicator next to the address bar does he even comprehend what it means?

I think it's time to re-think the whole SSL infrastructure because it's rotten to the core.

Meanwhile the "Femail" link panel on the right salivates over Emily Scott's (whoever the hell she is) booby revealing swimsuit:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2063987/Im-A-Celebrity-2011-Mark-Dougie-make-breast-effort--eyes-Emily-jungle.html

Will fail due to pompous and high-falutin' name

Yet another open source project with identity/name fail. If you want to encourage non-techies and your mum and dad to leave Facebook then they'll need to come up with a better name.

I doubt that 70% of Facebook users even know what the word Diaspora means.

I agree, this is what cults do

Like Scientology, even from beyond the grave the cult's aims and ambitions still march relentlessly on to L. Ron's drum.

The BBC are crap at bug fixing generally

For a long time, when playing "Listen Again" radio programmes, the (browser based) BBC iPlayer would play fine for ~10mins, then start playing a second stream of the same programme in the background which was between 1 and 10 minutes behind.

This happened regardless of browser or Windows version. Despite many complaints about this problem on the iPlayer message board the problem just seemed to be ignored because it only affected a "small number" of users. The problem lasted for ~5 months and got to the point I gave up on the iPlayer.

The BBC iPlayer development group are utterly shite when it comes to listening to users reporting bugs. There's virtually no useful communication from their staff on the support message boards. Much as I love the BBC's content, sadly we're stuck with this crap level of support. Maybe it's time the iPlayer lot were hived off into a performance driven business environment where their jobs relied on looking into these issues and communicating with users in a timeous fashion instead of the bollocks support we get at the moment.

I wonder if....

...they threw the book at him.

Why would you put sensitive stuff on a thing like dropbox anyway?

I use dropbox but would never entertain dropping anything of any importance or sensitivity in there. That just seemed like asking for trouble. I'm just waiting for the BBC report about some civil servant who's been sharing confidential excel spreadsheets with colleagues via drop box. It'll be the new "USB-stick-lost-on-a-train" story template.

However given this latest performance I'm ditching it. Who knows what other little "flaw" is awaiting users such as whole machine pwning through some undocumented backdoor they've been asked to secretly add by the security services.

That's me grabbing my tin foil hat and jacket.

Lets face it.....

Yes it's shite, but it's not any worse than the other auto-tuned shite that prevails over the current popular music charts and our wireless's.

Thank god for Stuart Maconie's Freak & Freakier Zones on Radio 6.

Right I'm off to listen to some bloke breaking cups to white noise and train noises whilst screaming obscenities at his cat :)

ps: what is up with the line breaks?

That's why...

....I never go anywhere "interesting" with a mobile phone.

BBC News 24 morons

On the day of the earthquake, just before they got word that the Tsunami was going to hit, one of the simpering idiots that present News 24 referred to the recent Christchurch earthquake and asked some expert who was in the studio "why are we seeing so much seismic activity now?".

I no longer watch News 24 for the purposes of gaining facts or news.

Unreliable, untrustworthy, lazy

Those are my impressions of all of the "respected" news outlets (BBC, Sky, etc). It's shame that you can no longer believe a word they say anymore just because they have to keep the critical mass of excitement going to keep viewers hooked during their ridiculously short 20-30min news (re-) cycling.

I wonder if they bothered to follow up the resultant long term health risks that were posed by the Buncefield oil fire from the toxic cocktail of chemicals that spewed into the atmosphere for days on end.

But sadly it's not nuclear so no salacious headlines to be grabbed off the back of radiation poisoning which is way more exciting apparently than a dose of lethal organic chemicals.

Security fixes, really?

And there was me under the impression that Apple products didn't have any security flaws.

Big deal....I'm more disgusted at....

...the fact that the teacher had to bring her own AV kit to school presumably because the school either won't spend the money or this is fallout from Camerons new age of austerity.

Meanwhile some layabout royals probably spent a teacher's annual salary on security just because they fancied a night out at the theatre.

Looks...

It looks quite nice to me, reminds me of Data Generals 'brown and gold' phase.

Nothing in life is perfect....

You generally don't hear bad things about EasyNet so I guess like everyone else they were maybe due to take a bite from the big green banana.

But as always, if your business is heavily reliant on internet connectivity then you should be employing the services of more than one connectivity provider....I have three different services here just for working from home, two of which I pay for (ADSL, WiMAX and if the worst comes to the worst I can even use 3G).

Paris because she enjoys a nice firm banana every now and again.

Nothing to do with .NET's cryptographic strength...

"The vulnerability stems from a cryptographic weakness, specifically involving improper error handling during encryption padding verification.".

I wish the IT press would get it's facts straight instead of bandying around sensationalist crap like this .

This has nothing to do with a cryptographic weakness, this is about ASP.NET revealing too much useful information when a CryptographicException is thrown.

Darwin in action....

People just seem to get more stupid every day.

What happened to the green cross code?

Who and who?

...nuff said.

Get informed before posting

Looks like some of the commentards need to go read some history as to why Iran is such a prickly customer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Shah's_Men

Of course the usual suspects are at the root cause, the UK & the US, all in the name of oil and colonialism.

It also doesn't help that the US applies one set of rules to Israel and another set for the rest of the arab middle east when it comes to conflict settling.

Blame the airline's admin team

Lots of yelling and bitching about Windows again which is a big yawn, if indeed the airlines "central computer" was actually running windows). But the problem here isn't Windows, it's the folks maintaining the systems who are to blame. Why weren't they ensuring the highest levels of platform hygiene in such a critical system. i.e. patching and ongoing detection.

We run a load of Windows and Unix boxes, these machines are internet facing and so baring their arses to all sorts of break in attempts 24hrs a day.

Over the past five years we've had two machine hijackings, neither of these were on the Windows platform. The machines involved were running Linux and the cause was that the boxes weren't being patched correctly. This is human error, not the fault of the OS.

Yes MS have had a lot to answer for over the past 15 years, but since 2003-2004 they've pulled their finger out and Windows 2003 and 2008 are pretty secure operating systems and as a hoster I should know.

It truly grips my shit when I see some of the ill-informed crap spewed by some of the anti-Windows league. Sorry guys, go get a real job running a real platform that has to weather the endless storms of saboteurs trying to breach your security before opening your mouths with all that crap.

More stupid names

If they chose more sensible names then I might take them a bit more seriously.

I installed Ubuntu 10.4 the other day on my old Vostro 1700, works a treat. But it's embarrassing having to explain to people what it's running. And it makes me feel like I'm running a toy OS.

In Search of Stupidity

I wonder if they'll get a chapter all to themselves in the next edition?

http://www.insearchofstupidity.com/

Well worth a read; how the mighty have fallen over the years.

There's one in Fife

There's one almost identical to this in Fife operated as a visitor attraction:

http://www.secretbunker.co.uk/explore_the_bunker.asp

It's worth a visit.

Just like lipstick on a turd?

Mines the flameproof jacket.....

I wondered what happened to all these notification mails

<aol>

The last one I got was around June the 10th as well.

</aol>

Please can I have a prize?

Jings...how about a keyring or a nice mug for filling all that out?

Paris, because she needs to fill out a bit.