Posts by Steve Evans
2190 posts • joined Tuesday 17th April 2007 15:29 GMT
Page:
Film?
Film? What is this film you speak of granddad?
Shoooorely...
...this would already be covered by harassment laws...
However, congrats to Scotland for making a bonkers law, without thinking about the technology involved...
What happens if the receiver is in Scotland, and the sender in England? Or vice versa?
What if the receiver is in Scotland, but happens to be logged onto a cell on the other side of the border in England? Or in England and happens to be logged on to a cell in Scotland?
What about if both parties are English and are on the English side of the border, but happen to both be logged onto Scottish cells? I know the whole of the UK is pretty much run by Scots these days (second only to when James I was on the throne), but surely we need to keep their daft laws behind the little wall!
I can see lawyers making lots of money, but bugger all convictions!
Mines the one with the emigration papers in the pocket.
I'm thinking...
About putting a blue tarp out on my back lawn... Anyone know when the next Google plane is due over?
@John Robson
Exactly what I thought...
It's got "My new firewall" written all over it...
@Rich
I think you're a little confused. I can't think of any home router that routes anything inwards by default.
The only way data is allowed in from the internet to your home PC is when you have initiated the connection yourself from the PC, then the router knows to let a reply come back through. When you drop the connection to that port the router clears the entry and you're closed off again.
I think the big problem is people who are not behind a NAT router, but actually have the public IP on their machine, i.e. dialup modem, USB broadband adapter. Plus of course those who don't bother with even free antivirus and execute any old attachment they receive in email or IM, no amount of firewall will safe you from basic stupidity.
@Craig
So why do you bother putting a suit and tie on everyday?
Who's to say that the red paint isn't their uniform for hunters? Maybe the red is actually some mud from the river which helps stop the insects biting them? It could all be perfectly logical.
Personally I find some of the views here a little worrying. Who are we to impose our so-called advances on them? You're judging them using our standards and beliefs, they are a completely different culture.
Sit back and look at what our so called culture has given us... 1001 excellent ways to kill people and things including the planet. How nice.
@Mike Plunkett
They're probably stupid enough to, yes!
So let me get this right...
If I don't quickly dig through my hotmail inbox and deleted the rude Simpsons cartoon, I'll end up on the sex offenders register?
Hmmm..
Doubtful... I've tried turning on my GPS on a plane before, cos budget flights never have the fun "What the toilet will currently flush on" tracking displayed for us cattle... I've never managed to get a satellite lock, and I've tried with 2 different units.
Then of course there's the matter of batteries, as has been mentioned a few times, and of course the odds on a UPS package correctly making that many trips without an extended stay in Germany via Heathrow terminal 5... They're so low they rival our Eurovision odds!
So add one vote to the "it's a 5 minute job with paint"
@David Shepherd
The liquid metal isn't that much of a problem, it's the vapours it gives off, very nasty.
As for the sodium, I remember one lad at school who would always drop some down the sink to watch it go. One lesson the teacher said "Today we're going to be using sodium, I don't want any of it going down the sink, Fred Bloggs do you hear me?!" (name changed of course).
About 2 minutes into the experiment that was a huge boom from the back of the room, we all turned to see Fred standing there, white faced. Sure enough he'd chucked some sodium down the sink, but hadn't thought to rinse the sink out first... Whoever had used it last had just tipped acid down it, and not rinsed it either!
He didn't do that again!
Posted in CPS apologises for DNA disc blunder
"No evidence that the disk was copied or left the office...."
I pick up disk, I place disk in laptop cd/dvd drive, I image it onto hard drive as an iso file with one of 100 programs, I place disk back in case on put it back on the desk under a pile of bits of paper.
Pick up laptop, walk out of office.
Now tell me, look at your disk, the one you lost for a year, and tell me if you can tell it's been copied.
Given that it was lost, and therefore out of sight for a year, I could have taken it home and copied the ones and zeros off it by hand in that time, still without anyone knowing!
Muppets the lot of them!
Black helicopter cos these idiots would forget to mask the windows before applying the stealth black paint coat.
Posted in Nokia shows an Orange face to the world
Oh good...
Another reason to avoid Orange branded phones.
Once branded you are tied to getting firmware updates when the operator decides you can, which is usually months/years after they have come out for generic phones as they have to sit on their arses for ages, and then crowbar in all their custom bits you didn't really want in the first place.
Only saving grace I have found so far is at least on the current Nokia N series you can change the model number to a generic one (warranty void of course) and then flash it with generic firmware from the Nokia website.
Well...
Or maybe he could stop putting quite so much tax on it... He must be laughing all the way to the bank...
Has anyone else wondered how the price of UK fuel kept going up even when oil is priced in dollars, and the dollar is currently worth only slightly more than the paper it's printed on... Hmmm...
Easier solution...
In some of the seedier parts of town, especially after dark when the attendants lock themselves away behind the bullet proof glass, and the interchange of money is done though a metal draw, insisting on pre-pay is pretty much the norm. Especially if you happen to ride a motorbike and can't be arsed to take your crash helmet off.
However I have to wonder about forecourt layout, I know plenty of garages that are just surrounded by a curb with a bit of grass... so avoiding the spikes is just a simple matter of driving slowly up the curb, over the grass, and then away to freedom. If you happen to be in a 4x4, you wouldn't even need to do it slowly.
Maybe I should set up a business just making "Warning! Anti-thief spike strips in operation" signs.
@Senor Beavis
Inc(vote_count);
Nope...
"or buy from another country - if you can..." put up with a keyboard lacking a £ symbol and @ and " swapped... etc etc...
Good grief...
He posts evidence of his law breaking on youtube, and just get's an ASBO preventing him from posting on youtube?
He's obviously a complete tw*t, and I pity those who have to live anywhere near him.
Why don't the authorities just download the clips, and haul the moron into court and hit him with all the charges. (vixy.net does a good line in youtube downloading).
The authorities are obviously complete tw*ts and I pity those who have to live with them.
One condition...
Given the wibbly wobbly nature of these bl**dy things, all people using them should have insurance to pay for the damage they are going to do as they bounce down between the lanes of stationary London traffic, and a number plate for we can identify them.
@Sam
"Wasn't there a design where two lots of rotors intermeshed?"
Do you mean tandem rotors, one on each end and a body slung between? These are more common than you realise. They have feature in designs dating from the late 40s.
They're used in heavy lifting helos like the CH-47 Chinook (aka the Prince Willy taxi).
Jobs cos that's not a halo, they're supersonic rotor tips!
Posted in Cornish lingo gets standard written form
@Lyndon Hills
Don't be silly, he's from another planet entirely.
It's the one with the radio active granite in the pocket.
but...
Think of all the fun you can have zooming down the hills of SF completely silently, scaring the crap out of pedestrians, whilst at the same time recharging your batteries! Although given the weight of the batteries, I doubt we'll be seeing much of the bullet-esq flying going on!
Oh good..
Another package format, just what we need!
Why can't he just put his constructive comments to good use with an already established distro? I bet I can answer that, he did and they disagreed... Ego kicks in, I must be right, I'll make my own, and the Linux fractures open a little wider.
Expect...
Standard issue camo netting to be replaced with huge mirrors very soon!
Mines the one with the reflective patches sewn onto the elbows.
Hmmm...
Distancing themselves from nasty tracking systems, but not brave enough to name the two shopping centres using it.
I'll have a guess though... Lakeside in Essex and Bluewater in Kent.
I bet I'm right on at least one of those.
And if you were watching me at the weekend, I went to Optomatix, then Jessups, saw Jessups price was a bit steep so I went back to Optomatix and shopped there... OKAY?!
Weeeeeeeee
Now that looks like fun!
Certainly would beat waiting for the ferry/chunnel on a cross channel trip... How much cheap booze and fags can you carry?
Posted in BT profits nothing to phone home about
It must be hard...
Keeping a straight face when billing people for that same old pair of copper (or aluminium) cables every month/quarter for 50 years!
I'm frightened....
What's the point in having a glorified fishing boat running on veggi oil if it means I've got nothing to cook my chips in?!
Mines the one with the greasy marks on it.
Posted in O2 XDA Orbit 2 smartphone
Yee gods...
Flat battery in just over 2 hours... I remember the roasting the N95 got when it first came out, I even had my carrier trying to talk me out of it as an upgrade option because the battery life was supposedly so poor, but not even on the early firmware which was a bit juice hungry, could you murder it that fast!
Guess that's the joy of windows... So can Windows Mobile join botnets?
Oh gawd...
So since the arms limitation treaties won't let him have any new bigger nukes to play with, he needs to find another huge weapon he can have that is bigger and better than the rest of the world. (Is it compulsory for all US military men to have micro-penises or do they have them done surgically to render them safe from female double agents?).
So whilst the US of A declares war on 1,000,000 home PCs across the globe, anyone from outside the US of A will wonder why they seem to be having problems visiting any US hosted website as the pipes coming out are all clogged up with Uncle Sam's cyber-nuke fest.
I'm sure the ISPs will love that!
@Captain Jamie
It's okay, I found some gloves :-D
IDDQD IDKFA at the ready...
I'm already loving the idea of a Wii chainsaw... Please do a Wii version!
More questioning required...
This guy must be one of our secret robot masters.
Think about it... He's holding a laser pointed in his hand, and tracking a moving helicopter accurately enough to dazzle the pilot...
There can be no other explanation!
I say....
...they do a random drug test on the contents of the house... Although they'd have to pick a suitable day with a high turnout.
How about when they are all voting for this new bill...
Everyone that votes for the reclassification, go through the green door, roll up your sleeves, then a publicly published hypocrite list comes out the other side.
Ummm...
"Try tackling the "serious crime" of charging long-suffering passengers three quid to travel 200 yards packed like veal calves en route to a French slaughterhouse"
Errr...
1) Get an oyster card...
2) Look at an A-Z occasionally and learn how to walk from Leicester Square and Piccadilly circus the old fashioned way!
I've heard of some people who have even gone as far as walking from Leicester Square to Embankment before, but I think that's just crazy talk.
Posted in Freesat launches in UK
@bluesxman
Exactly... No DAVE and no UK History...
Ummm... I think they're the only non terrestrial (analogue) channels I bother watching.
@Stuart Van Onselen
It always amuses me... In the US being called a liberal is an insult...
Odd really, as in the UK it generally means you are middle of the road and quite balanced (well they'd have to be given the previous leaders alcohol intake!).
Ummm
But they use clubs on seal pups, not hammers...
Mines the white fur one with blood stains.
Hmmmm
Last time I dialled 999 in the UK, they asked me the address... Or has Canada gone all IVR now...
Press 1 for Police, 2 for Ambulance... I seem to remember a Simpsons sketch about this...
Eurovision is always amusing...
You can sum up the entire politics of Europe just by watching.
For example, Ireland and UK are generally nice to each other.
France will never give the UK any meaningful votes, and vice-versa.
All the ex-Russian states are so terrified of upsetting their big red neighbour, they always give it lots of votes, even if the song is purely the sound of a Yak breaking wind process by a Vocoder. At the rate Russia is crumbling round the edges, there will soon be so many ex-Russian states that Russia will win every year!
There is of course one remaining question... How exactly does Israel qualify as being in Europe?
Posted in How to destroy 60 hard drives an hour
Hehe...
Not as much fun as my method... For years I've been destroying old hard drives for work... I used to take them apart and use the platters to make wind chimes. Given that most drives stripe data across multiple platters, once they're removed from the spindles and strung together (also involved having some small holes drilled in them), you'd really be hard pushed to get any sense out of them.
However, recently I had a big batch of them which the boss insisted I destroyed completely without any chance of data being recovered, he even asked for proof... Easy... Line the drives up and slice them in half (case and all) with an oxyacetylene cutting torch. Much fun... I took half a drive back to the office and asked if he'd like me to plug it in!
I'll admit thermite would be more spectacular, but with a torch you can be far more creative... I'll see what I can do...
The icon, well come one, it's gotta be hasn't it!
This act is rather concerning...
I, and I'm sure many of you out there in techie land, have files that are encrypted lurking on your harddrive, which we do not have the key too... Many items of software, especially shareware, send you a licence key file which you have to either copy into a specific directory.
So how exactly do the feds determine which files are encrypted and known by you, and which are nothing to do with you really, and you don't have any idea what the key is?
The stupid thing is if you really want to encrypt and hide things, there are many encryption tools available (truecrypt for example) which can create an encrypted volume with multiple keys, which means you can conform to the law and provide the cops with a key, which will open the volume. What they don't realise is there is another key, which will open another volume from the same file where you can hide whatever you like. From the encrypted volume file it is impossible to tell if it contains only the one encrypted collection of files, or if there is a second one hidden in there too.
Posted in Lenovo ThinkPad X300 sub-notebook
Awwww
That's techy pr0n and no mistake!
Funny how everyone is snotty about "only" 60Gb of storage, only a couple of years ago that would have been generous on a laptop!
I would love on, but at the moment my trusty R52 is working fine, so I can't justify it... The X300 just makes me all misty eyed over what is bound to come in a year or two when it does get to upgrade time... *drool*
Only thing I would complain about is the screen. The reviewer seems to think having a widescreen is a plus point... To me they're annoying. I have 1400x1050 of real estate here on the R52, and I like having 1050 vertical. To me laptop with widescreens feel like I'm operating it from inside a post box.
20 a minute?
Wow, I'm impressed by the capacity of his pipe!
It's the one with the Ben Dover film Co logo on the back.
Posted in No-fly list grounds US Air Marshals
Isn't it amazing...
...that in this day and age, they are still matching people on name only.
Given that it isn't hard to get a fake ID, and therefore a passport, matching on someone's name is pointless to put it mildly. Come to think of it, changing your name by legal methods would probably fox them completely anyway.
Result, the list is pointless.
Needless to say, as I possess a pretty common name, I don't intend on going anywhere near the US of A.
You're
...Back from the pub a tad early today... Or are they wifi enabled?
@Ishkandar
Does it matter if you change the value by looking at it? At least you know the original value, so you can look at the other side and change it back.
@Lee Sexton, just because something has been developed longer, it doesn't mean it will be cheaper. Mr Rolls and Mr Royce have been making cars longer than Mr Lada....
Ahhh...
Of course, silly me... Thanks for pointing that out Mr Vaz, computer games and movies are the cause of all violence in society...
The crusades and Jack the Ripper were caused by a particularly violent Punch and Judy act.
Tw*t.
Mr Vaz, the problem is that some people in society have no respect for others. These people have always existed. Maybe if your government hadn't made parents punishing their children for being bad a legal tightrope, the little oiks might have learnt a little respect early on in life.
@AC
There's something very important you need to know about mobiles in the UK.
First we have things called NIMBYs, these are moaning characters (usually retired - Think Victor Meldew, assuming you know who he is). They complain that the view from their telescope over the trees at the back have been blighted by an ugly phone mast.
Interestingly they're also the first to complain about lack of signal on their mobile phone.
Personally I'd be more impressed to see some phone coverage provided in the underground, it's damn annoying getting messages delivered 2 hours late (the retry period on some networks seems to be based on geological time) just because you happened to be stuck in a packed tube carriage when someone tried to send it to you... Then again, ringing phones could get annoying... How about just have SMS work?
Annoying...
There is a simple solution to most of this.
Most botnets are used to send spam, the zombied machine connects to whichever server is the MX for a domain, and pretends to be another email server relaying a message for one of it's users.
So by default ISP's should restrict connection to SMTP servers so end user machines cannot connect to any SMTP servers apart from the ones owned by the ISP.
Your run of the mill AOL,Tiscali,BT customer uses the email address that came with the ISP, so they'd be fine. The rest probably use web based systems like gmail/hotmail etc.
The more techy savvy of us, who lets face it aren't really the big risk when it comes to ending up on a botnet, would of course have some kind of web interface on the ISP so we can permit other SMTP servers, or open it up for all. Please note web interface, not a call centre in India! (Done that once this week already thanks!)
It's not as if it's a hard thing to spot from an ISP level. They spend so much cash and technology mangling P2P, it wouldn't take 10 minutes to spot zombie behaviour, nobody normal initiates over a thousand SMTP connection in a day for starters. That would be enough to pass on their details to the sales team and send them an internet security package, or at least some advice on protection!
