OMG...

So someone who can't type an email address accurately is sending commercially sensitive data over an unencrypted communication medium...

Why on earth was there even a flat-file containing all this information laying about for this employee to accidentally send?!

I agree with A/C 02:45, Google should quarantine the email whilst waiting for confirmation, but I don't blame them for being careful, I'm sure there are 101 laws in the US about interfering with with the postal service which some lawyer or other would love to try to apply to email systems.

Errrr

Okay, so currently the phones are stolen and then shipped out to somewhere like Africa, or they have their IMEI number changed so they can still log onto UK networks.

So now with the new scanner, they well have to add "Scratch the barcode" label off. Sure it looks suspicious, but we still have innocent until proven guilty in this country... Or are they going to sneak that one out through the backdoor and give it a quick bullet between the ears at the same time?

I'm sure it won't be long before the naughty people can start producing convincing looking replacement labels.

On FB too...

Friendface has been taken over by gangsters and oddly enough farms recently.

I guess they need a source for the horses heads.

Ahhh...

Glad you made the comparison to the mp3 fines...

$14,500 must be such a huge sum to a company involved with oil exploration.

Puts fingers in ears...

CSI can't be wrong, I can't hear you lalalalalalalaaaaa

I'm amazed it's not already done...

Given how much ISPs over sell their bandwidth, I'm amazed they don't have anything which detects excessive SMTP traffic.

I know some ISPs have actually blocked outbound SMTP to anything except their provided mail servers, which is a good start.

@Henry Wertz 1

"or likely more since they are probably getting the flash below spot."

I should hope so... If they're pulling in that kind of volume and not getting a serious discount they shout shoot their procurements team!

Illogical religion...

It does always amaze/amuse/worry me...

People are involved in huge vehicle accidents, their entire family is wiped out, but they survive... Then they say something crazy like "God must have been saving me for a higher purpose"...

Errr, excuse me, he's just wiped out your spouse, child and parents.... So he's either trying to really ruin your life and plunge you into the pits of depression, or he was seriously trying to kill you and just didn't take the airbag into account!

I still remember when I heard Tony Blair prayed for guidance before deciding to be G Dubya's poodle and invade Iraq... Religion, the only time you can listen to voices in your head, not get given a nice white huggy jacket and still be left in control of a country!

Blunt object...

The problem is the UK law says it's illegal to use a phone whilst driving, and driving is defined as operating a motor vehicle... So far so good, but operating a motor vehicle also includes when you are sitting stationary.

I never text whilst I'm moving, but I will freely admit to sending texts when I'm stationary in traffic... They're usually something like "Stuck on the f****** again M25 again, I'll be a bit late". I'll also check my texts when sitting at red lights. I'm stationary, the hand brake is on. Sometimes on the M25 the engine is OFF! Where is the danger in that?

It's certainly safer than some of the cars I see driving on the road with kids playing up in the back and the parent who should be driving are spending more time looking over their shoulder than at the road ahead!

Perfect...

Perfect example of why you shouldn't go with one of these wonderful discount packages of mobile, broadband et al from one company. If they have a big problem with their network you're going to be screwed.

I might have an Orange mobile, and my broadband might be from the masters of cr*p, Tiscali, but hedging my bets across them and I've not been without my TCP/IP packet fix for years.

Stupid...

This is really not very bright... Even less so when the victims were described as a "couple"...

He really does have his animal magnetism overrated!

New advert tag line...

The new iPhone

You'll forget who actually owns it.

Tim tams...

What about the tim tam challenge, that's an instant scolding risk if ever I saw one!

@sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD - We can get them in Pomeland too... Along with the Polish jaffa cakes which I hate to say, are even more smashing orangey than the originals! Assuming you opt for the orange flavour of course, they have a choice!

Well if all the paranoid hype is to be believed...

...surely for an accurate ethnic make-up every house in the UK should have some straggly bearded suicide bomber hiding in the corner?

Only in Scotland...

Ah, that would be because that's where all the Labour hierarchy will be going back to when they loose the next election!

Errrr...

"cylinder block, cylinder head and exhaust manifold all part of a single casting"...

I won't ask what those curious bolt like lumps are on the exhaust manifold attaching it to the cylinder head are then...

"Applying an update might be a chore"...

Not if you've set up wordpress properly it isn't.

You click the "update" link, and it does it all for you in a few minutes.

(You do take a backup before of course)

WTF...

I thought it was bad enough that TFL (Transport for London) had systems levelled by Conficker earlier this year, but now approaching the 1 year anniversary of Microsoft's patch which prevented Conficker, local authorities have still not protected themselves against it.

Does anyone know of a vacancy in local authority IT admin, sounds like a cushy job, it's obvious they don't do f*ck all!

$300?

Given that you can buy a netbox for less than this, and then use the netbox as a thin client with a bit of linux, why would you want to buy one of these? Sure it's really small, but given the user will have a monitor of 17"+ on their desk, and several netbox manufacturer provide a mount to bolt the box onto the back of the monitor, I can't see where the benefit of the extra size reduction comes in.

As for no CPU... Of course it's got a processor! Silly sales spin. I can't see anyone implementing ethernet, USB and video without a processor or some sort!

Stranded in London...

Yes, it's the middle of nowhere, there's no US embassy you can go to for assistance, all you can do is use facebook (via some medium unknown) to beg for help.

As the saying goes, "A fool and his money are easily parted"

Hmmm...

If they had any sense, the government would not want to piss off 7 million people.

I'm sure that's more than the number who voted for them last time, so it would be a very good idea to make friends with them, and not enemies!

@Simon Banyard

If the American carriers had sorted out their interconnects like Europe did way back in the 90s, you too would have found what a useful technology the SMS system is, but because the US networks were so unreliable at SMS exchange, everyone resorted to email to send each other messages.

SMS and MMS are GSM standards, not Nokia/Ericsson or anyone else's.

A cross network, cross manufacturer, cross country message push system. If you have a mobile number, you can send them a message (with our without a picture). Most phone contracts include a few hundred of these a month, if not unlimited. So there is no cost.

This cultural difference is one of the reasons the iPhone took so much stick when it first arrived over here. Apple didn't even bother to look at how things were in Europe and only implemented the very basics (any less and they probably wouldn't be able to claim it was a GSM handset!). So when their new wonder phone arrived, couldn't do groups messages, or send picture messages, we all laughed.

They eventually fixed this, and now these features are revealing the cracks in the underlying US cell system.

Now wouldn't you like a system where you can send a message to any of your contacts without having to remember what kind of phone they have, or that Jim's iPhone has had to go back because it needs a new battery and he's using a 10 year old mobile he borrowed? A system that pushes a message onto the phone of anyone, anywhere on the planet (except the USA for previously stated reasons)? Oh, and it does handset delivery confirmation too.

Now tell me how this is backwards?

As for multitasking, are you trying to claim that as the iPhone doesn't do this, multitasking is bad? Good grief man, extract your head, Mr Jobs would like to sit down, and I think you could do with some fresh air.

Ah...

So they haven't patented the "bork bork" language version?

@Code Monkey

Agreed. The Germans are obviously not fully up to speed on the English girls who now drink pints during their binges, and therefore flow in quantities formerly only achieved by men.

Ahhh how sweet....

Dear America, welcome to the 21st century!

Unfortunatey...

These surveys only reflect the male and female habits of people who fill out surveys.

I don't know about the rest of you, but if the list of questions has a scroll bar on the side, or worse a "Next" button on the bottom, it's going to get skipped.

I'm a busy man, I have 126 individual passwords to change.

And....

What about the other useful performance information... Rate of fire...

Come to think of it, how long did they need to keep the beam trained on this dangerous unoccupied stationary vehicle. I guess we're all assuming the Sci-fi kind of pow-booom hit, but that's a bit of an assumption. For all we know it was slowly cooked over several seconds like beans in a microwave, not something which would be easy with a moving vehicle, especially when the driver notices things are getting warm and makes evasive moves.

Oh well... I guess in future all military movement will be carried out under cover of fog, or maybe all desert vehicles will just have a big dust blowing fan fitted to the top, or maybe just a mirror.

"Cloud" cuckoo land

As has been recently demonstrated by hordes of lost iPhone owners, who suddenly found their O2 provided data connection was no longer feeding them their google maps, anyone who puts their complete trust in systems which they have no control over, and no contact point to shout at, really does deserve what they get.

Always have a backup, take a paper map, and only use gmail as a front end to a real mail server which you can still pop/smtp with :-)

I wonder....

I wonder how they found this genius... I bet him and his wife were the only recent party members who weren't on the leaked list :-)

stalking the google car?

He'd have to be pretty damn quick on his feet to see the google car, get the van keys, run to the van, start it and get down his drive before the car has even finished passing his house!

Or do google cars "cruise" at <1mph?

So I vote for him using his van to go somewhere, what a novelty.

Tut tut...

Relying on a data connection for your maps has always struck me as far too much faith in technology. I'm far happier with Nokia maps' pre-loading ability.

I also have paper maps in the car in case of a terminal technology failure, and I'm also known to check routes before departing (shock horror!). Then again I'm one of those rare few who can still read road signs, and doesn't just blindly follow sat navs down rivers and over cliffs.

Security joke

Most of the card industry is a security joke.

Even when they're not getting data stolen en-mass, they impliment things like chip and pin which are inherently flawed.

It used to be that a shop would actually touch and look at the card and your signature.

Since chip and pin you don't even hand the card over. You stick it into the slot and punch in the numbers.

This means there is sod all chance of me, a white male, being spotted using the card of "Mrs Jones", "Mr Mohamed" or "Mr Singh". All of which might have been noticed in the past.

@Matt 89

"40% unemployment, 3rd world Education system

Endemic Corruption at all levels of government"

They're just following the model set by us in the UK!

@Annihilator

Unfortunately in my recent experience, 400 and 500gig RE2 drives, a lot *does* go wrong. I've had at least 50% of the 500gig drives fail, and all the 400gig drives failed. When they fail they just start going into the "spin up, click click click, spin down repeat until false" loop.

Luckily as they were all in raid configurations I was able to replace each drive before the next failure on all but one occasion when two failed within a day of each other, and I was out of spares. Due to the high death rate I had already experienced I had been very strict with my backup schedules, so I didn't loose anything important.

However it has made me very very wary of WD RE drives. Especially as there seems to have been little to no coverage of the problems in the eMedia, despite plenty of forum chatter. Maybe if they renamed themselves to Apple/Microsoft they might have picked up a grilling.

In comparison a test trial with cheap 1TB Samsung spinpoint drives has worked faultlessly for months. Maybe I should focus more on the "I" in RAID... Inexpensive

Pah!

"Unsurprisingly, he was held in custody pending an appearance before the beak."

Well actually as a brit I do find that quite astonishing. Over here he'd get a lift home, many chances to do a runner again, before finally being sentenced to 200 hours of community service and having 6 points put on the licence he doesn't have.

@SmallYellowFuzzyDuck - You're not wrong. When I lived out there for a while I discovered that the much repeated stricter DD limits are generally ignored by the population. I regularly saw people barely able to stand, driving down the mountain round after a night in a mountain side bar. Unfortunately I never saw any of them go over the sheer drop!

So...

Apple say an external force was applied to the screen?

You mean kinda like how a touch screen is used?!

I too know someone with a broken screen iPhone. He did say it was his fault as he dropped it. Not sure quite what he dropped it onto, or from how high. All I know is I've never broken a screen on any of my non-apple phones, even the one that flew out of the open window during a car accident was fine, and able to ring the recovery people once I'd found where it had landed!

Chortle...

@Rob 101 - Very good :-)

I think I'm going to go with the iPhone left on wooden decking surface.

Can someone explain to me...

What's the great fascination with wiping greasy fingerprints all over your screen?

I can see a vague advantage on a mobile phone where you don't have the option of a mouse, but on a real computer a mouse is always going to more accurate than stabbing your digital on the screen... Plus if course when your finger is on the screen, you can't actually see what is under it any more!

Oh sorry, I forgot, we all use a stylus, nobody pokes their finger on the screen do they.