Posts by Iggle Piggle 137 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
..this will be the same France where it is illegal to sell off your second hand perfume in the on-line car boot sale.
But fair enough, you can't go round telling Microsoft that they must embrace other peoples browsers and then tell Nintendo that they should be able to have it all their own way. I am not sure what the situation is with the iPhone. I though it was not illegal to sell software for it, but Apple won't sell it from their shop unless you pass their mysterious criterion first.
When I first signed up to Plaxo it was an excellent service that allowed me to sync my address book on various computers and check my address book online when travelling. This used to be free. Then they started to want to be a kind of Facebook with all that messaging stuff and syncing became a premium (and not cheap) option. I can see the day coming when I delete my Plaxo account.
I'll bet!
But seriously, el-reg, if you stand by this article then presumably you are also in trouble for providing a link to the child pornography in question.
I have to say it took a few looks and a lot of squinting to see what people were on about. I still can't see why Lisa Simpson though. As for the logo, it looks like they drew lots of really bad ideas on post it notes (pink and yellow) then threw them all on the ground in disgust and suddenly realised, "Hey that looks like 2012, let's go with that".
The article said that technology would be used to inspect the packages and determine if the content was illegally shared files or not. You might, as others have, argue that no reliable technology exists to look at a packet and quickly determine if that is part of a legally shared file.
If you make a big presumption that the technology is reliable then actually this might show how much or how little illegal file sharing is going on. Actually persistent file sharers might even start leaving VM just to be out of site, in which case this would skew the figures to make it look like little file sharing is happening and of the file sharing that is going on little of it is illegal.
I suspect that those that argue that this will push towards encrypted sharing are right. However that will only stop the ISP from inspecting the shares, it will not stop people in the record industry setting up honey pots and polluting the shares with duff content.
I've said it before but what the hell I'll say it again. There are loads of reasons why we should not be sending McKinnon to the US. If he was of completely sound mind and if certain states in the US has not called for the death sentence then perhaps it would be acceptable to extradite him under the terms of the (hopelessly one sided) extradition treaty that was signed with the US.
However the US do execute people and for me that is reason enough not to have an extradition treaty in place even more so that people have stated they would like to see it apply in this case. I also remember a passionate description of his illness from another sufferer. If this is how Garry has to live his life then what are we doing even considering sending someone who is ill for trial in another country? Let's hope that his appeal is successful and that he can then be treated nearer his family.
If this thread goes the way of earlier threads on the same subject then there will follow a stream of people saying something along the lines of 'If you cannot do the time then don't do the crime'. Garry is ill, he meant no harm but did not understand that what he was doing would be viewed as wrong. Autism sufferers often have an inability to empathise with others, your inability to empathise with Garry suggests that you might want to get tested.
I'd like to see a Neanderthal woman of Arnie's age actually whupping him. Oh wait, despite or possibly due to her rather more active lifestyle she would be long dead. Same with the Romans. So were we able to go back in time and ask them if they would like to swap lifestyles with us I suspect they would quite happily accept.
Let's face it, the idea that someone working in IT has a secure job is a complete joke. So perhaps banks should indeed be very careful when lending close to 100% mortgages to anyone in this sector.
It seems to me that we are saying that the banks are to blame for the crisis (and they are) because they would lend to absolutely anyone (and they did). So now that we are trying to introduce rules to curb that stupidity we should not perhaps be surprised when there are a casualties such as someone with no proven track record deciding to go freelance.
Actually it seems to me that in the current climate lending money to someone to buy a house with anything approaching a 100% mortgage while having just started their own IT business would fall into the category of unsafe lending. Precisely the kind of thing we complained the banks did.
I believe that society does need protecting from people with mental illnesses who seem unable to separate right from wrong. I am sure that both sides have exaggerated the extent/lack of damage caused by this guy but hacking into Pentagon computer system can only be considered right by people who are deluded.
Given his mental state it seems that the British should never have considered extradition and certainly not to a country that routinely puts its citizens to death. I understand that certain states in the US have called for McKinnon to face the death penalty and it is at that moment that his extradition should have been stopped.
.. filling up your shiny new Skoda having just seen some filthy fifteen year old Porsche pulling away from the same pump and knowing that it has just dumped it's used juice into the machine you are now using.
Or to put it another way, how will they enforce quality control. I bet someone will find a way to fob off the garage with something that isn't up to standard.
I could not agree more with PirateSlayer. Sticking to the speed limit should not be that difficult to do! But in these modern times with the modern technology we have perhaps the speed limit could be based on current road conditions and not just a theoretical number that was devised many many years ago when cars were very different. But I still agree that only those people who plan to travel over the speed limit really need to worry about the cameras.
Some people have commented that accidents are caused by people braking sharply at cameras. Firstly that suggests a scenario where both the car braking and the car following are exceeding the speed limit only the car behind was too close to stop in time. Well perhaps adhering to the speed limit and keeping a safe distance would have solved this issue. However I have seen people braking to well below the limit out of a sudden panic. It should be no problem to someone driving at a safe distance behind but imagine that they were actually not stopping for a camera but a child that has run into the road. Now they are not going to simply slow down but might actually need to stop. If the driver behind is too close to avoid sharp breaking from 60 to 40 in a 50 limit then what hope is there if the person in front had to brake from 60 to 0 for a child?
Average speed zones can be a pain in the backside. I've had the experience myself that you a driving through road works on a motorway you find yourself constantly monitoring the speedometer and that really cannot help safety. So how about a kind of matrix of lights on the road or road side that ripple along at a safe spacing and speed, then all you have to do is watch the lights out of the corner of your eye. Even better would be if this was an active system that went red and slowed down as vehicles ahead are slowing.
Good idea to open up the safety data for a particular camera. But as someone mentioned, if they introduce a camera and another safety measure at the same time then how can you tell which really made the difference and I am sure local councils will not be above such tricks to keep the cash rolling in.
I know this argument has been put forward before but I'll say it again. I really do not see why this has to be done. Sure Microsoft has an advantage when it comes to the browser installed on new systems that run it's operating system, but they also have an advantage when it comes to which calculator is used, which text editor is used, etc.
And why does this pettiness only seem to apply to Microsoft? I was not asked which browser I'd like when I installed Ubuntu. Nor do I seem to have any choice on my Wii. I'm not sure what is available for an iPhone but I'd bet that Apple has a lot to say about it.
Haven't had such a good laugh in ages. Had the privacy nuts had their way we would not be allowed to see such footage for fear that we might offend one or two piss heads. Keep up the good work the Reg. I'll start reading twice as often just to make up for Carl 4.
My fault :-) I forgot to put a smiley in the sentence so you had no way of knowing I was joking. Now where is the smiley for sarcasm? :-)
But really that was my point entirely. The fact is that if this had been snail mail nobody would have blamed the recipient and yet because it is email some judge has decided the account should be closed as if somehow that will help recover the lost items.
I worked for one of those big banks based in Amsterdam for a short while. They got my postcode wrong and sent my entry card by post to the address of someone who lived a few streets away. Being an honest citizen he sent it back. Had this happened in the US and had the recipient decided to chuck it in the bin, the post office would probably have been forced to board up his letter box.
It does seem that cyclists have really pissed a few people off here and my experience has been that it is the lycra wearing brigade that seem to bring the reputation of the average cyclist into disrepute. Either they are wizzing by in the traffic jam (the bastards) or they going too slowly round country lanes (the bastards), so logically creating lanes dedicated to these people should please the country drivers and keep the cyclists at a safe distance from the irritable city commuters too.
The AC who thinks that they deserver no opinion because they do not pay road tax is just an idiot. Indeed I believe that everyone from pedestrians, through scooters for the disabled, and up to A class emission cars also pay no tax so why get so high and mighty about one group?
On the negative side it does seem the lycra brigade are also guilty of a certain amount of Martineque behaviour. I remember once being out on a local cycle path between home and the shops with friends and we had our daughters with us when a bunch of lycra clad clowns came whizzing along shouting verbal abuse because the girls were travelling slower than they would have liked.
...and offered some protection from phishers and porn then perhaps this would be a nice default situation. However if all they do is convert www.theregister to www.adserve.com them there is nothing in this for the customer and opting out is the only sensible route (assuming that remains an option).
I have set up OpenDNS for my in-laws and my parents and myself. In most cases it was as easy as going to the router and setting the DNS server to that of OpenDNS. However BT have a funny idea that trying to change the default DNS server is something that only scammers would want to do and so they do not allow it. This forced me to change it in the computer which is not my ideal solution and actually just as possible for the scammers.
I understand that the idea of the database is to help parents guard against allowing their children to wonder off with some paedophile. Possibly the database helps a little but I doubt it. However a mobile version of the application. What possible good can that do? I mean why not simply pop along to (the appallingly slow) web site mentioned in this article every now and then and check for new people in the neighbourhood. Surely the only people this app serves are those wishing to hunt down the paedophiles wherever they happen to be at the time.
I wonder if the creator of the application and the database has considered his liability if it can be shown that his application wrongly identified someone who is then subject to an attack by such a vigilante.
Judging by a quick visit to the (appallingly slow) site it seems that the density of perverts is astonishingly high. So checking the site serves little purpose because most of the US is covered in kiddy fiddlers. This leaves parents with only one option and that is to be real parents and not leave their offspring unaccompanied or in the company of strangers until such an age when they can educate them properly about the dangers of strangers.
I suspect that the point of this article was to make all increase our sympathy for Gary. To be honest I am not sure that that is how I feel. Sure I feel sorry that the UK government is prepared to have an extradition treaty in place with a government that still executes people and I feel sorry that Gary will probably have to serve his sentence in a US jail well away from his family and friends.
But is mental illness a defence? I mean surely if Gary is unable to tell right from wrong he should not get a shorter sentence he should get medical help and if no help is available then he should be kept away from society so that he cannot do it again.
But then again what kind of sane person really commits any crime. What is sane anyway? I believe that Gary's illness makes him less likely to consider the impact of his actions on other people. Surely no sane person would ever take the life of another if they considered the results of their actions. No sane person would get behind the wheel of a car when drunk if they thought about the people they could hurt. No sane person would actually steal from someone else not knowing the impact that may have on the victim.
So perhaps we can empty the prisons quite quickly but then start filling up the mental institutions at the same rate.
If she can show that any other tenant of a Horizon apartment has a mould problem that has been reported and has yet to be resolved without the tenant being temporarily rehoused then it could be argued that Horizon are OK with that tenant living in a mouldy apartment. If that is the case then what she has reported via her twitter is accurate.
Years ago we had a rented flat with a leaking roof and later a mould problem. Time after time we reported the leak, the damp, and eventually the mould. They only really showed any interest when we took a significant chunk of mould that had grown (a kind of bracket fungus that look a little like an ear) round to their office (which was also their estate agency business) on a busy Saturday morning and asked in a loud voice if they thought it was OK to allow tenants to live in such conditions.
I feel fairly safe making these comments because it is very unlikely that anyone will remember having a blue tenant that carries a blanket everywhere. It was a long time ago.
So I can look forward to several more occasions where my plug-ins are not compatible with
Firefox and I have to confirm my desire to have Firefox go and search for upgrades. On the other hand my plug-ins for IE7 have been carried over to IE8 with no fuss.
It does seem that Firefox is going for the title of the most annoying browser upgrades.
That said it does have some nice features such as remembering where it was when it crashed so that I do not have to open a dozen tabs manually.
"But the conclusions - that sending text messages while driving is really very dangerous - should surely be obvious to everyone by now."
Yes, you would have thought so wouldn't you. But clearly some people are just either too stupid to realise that is it dangerous or, possibly, they are driving a big heavy lorry and feel safe in the knowledge that it is likely the other guy who will come off worse in any accident.
Perhaps some people are a little young to remember and perhaps others just have short memories. For a long time we, as a world, decided to boycott South African goods due to the way they treated their own people who had the 'misfortune' to be born a different colour than the perceived optimal white. At that time many people argued that a boycott only hurt the very people that it was designed to help, but boycott we did and as a result an entire racist regime fell. Of course in the light of recent events in that country you might argue that little has changed. But not having basic services is a step forwards compared to how it used to be.
It is true to say that a widespread boycott of Foxxcon will hurt that company and it might mean that some of those people lost their jobs. And it might mean that Apple and others decide to a look a little more closely in future at where they outsource production to. It might also mean that you will have to pay even more for your consumer electronics so that the people that produce them have the right to something as basic as a chair.
Perhaps it is only a dream that we can end the kind of abuses that were made illegal in the west a long time ago by boycotting manufacturers that outsource to sweatshops. However I seem to remember Nike changed their tune not so long ago when a similar tactic was proposed against them.
Or "Please, India, train up a bunch of your people and then they can emigrate to the US where we can pay them less penuts than the rather expensive home grown ones.". Perhaps the US is different but I thought that right now there were a shed load of unemployed technical people, so how about Bill does something to employ some of those rather than making their situation even worse.
Right then, out of pure spite I think I'll install some Linux on something.
Why would any other country want to buy tech stuff from the UK when they can cut out the middle man and go directly to India, China, etc...
At the very least this will not make Britain great it will just allow a few Britains to cream off the profits while hiring from overseas and pocketing the incentive money given to them by the British tax payer. If they are going to throw around such money then they should also put some policy in place to say that anyone recruited must be getting a proper salary and paying tax in the UK.
A while ago I realised what I had against Open Source. It's not actually that it is free stuff, it is the fact that so many people seem to use open source as a way to cut costs. Your point was that critical stuff should be written in house, while Open Source does mean sharing not only the burden of testing but also the risk of points of failure it should also mean that you have two hundred times more testers.
Just because code was written in house, it does not make it necessarily better code. All code should be tested and certainly all code written externally to the company should be tested doubly. If the manufacturers of these two hundred products had tested then perhaps this bug would have come to light before getting into production. Clearly it seems that the assumption was that someone else will have tested so why bother.
"that there is justification to say that using an unsecured WAP is allowed as you've already asked permission"
Likewise if you did not want me to use your garden hose to fill my swimming pool you would have put a padlock on the tap. If you didn't want me to use your car you would have locked it. If you did not want me to enter your home and help myself to your television you would have made sure the door was shut or the television bolted down.
To say that just because someone did not secure their property it makes it quite legal for you to use them seems quite a bizzare attitude to take. Having said that it seems to me that, unless the police officers in question have such a low crime rate, there must be better things they could be doing.
I frequently deliver my daughter directly to her classroom (she is four years old) do I need to be vetted along with every other parent? I'd suggest that as long as they change that guideline to a fixed and enforced rule that states that all visitors to the school must be accompanied at all times unless they have clearance then our children are safe from even the most predatory author or politician.
It really pisses me off that politicians feel they should have different rules than the rest of us and this case is no different.
"So the AC in the article asserts that it's QA's fault for not finding the bug, typical programmer, using QA as a safety net for shoddy code."
Well perhaps in your organisation developers invariably deliver 100% perfect code but in most organisations QA/Testing are indeed a safety net for the developer's (and analyst's) mistakes and they perform a vital function. It seems to me that the test cases performed were obviously not adequate to catch this mistake.
Some other offences they might consider:-
'Loitering with intent to use a pedestrian crossing.'
'smelling of foreign food'
'Urinating in a public convenience'
'Coughing without due care and attention.'
'Looking at me in a funny way'
'Walking on the cracks in the pavement,'
'Walking in a loud shirt in a built-up area during the hours of darkness,'
'Walking around with an offensive wife.'
And of course: 'Possession of curly black hair and thick lips.' or stop and search as it is more commonly known. But surely even back then they would not have thought of 'Being of intimidating stature'.
Silverlight does not require IIS behind it to work.
Let me qualify that a little though. If you are going to use Silverlight to stream media then you will need a server capable of streaming media in the format supported by the plug-in and if you are going to use the new .Net RIA services then you will need IIS but you really do not need a WIN/IIS configuration to host a XAML application. All you need to do is specify a new MIME type and place your application on the server and include a tag in your page and you are up and running.
I have my doubts about the necessity for Silverlight just as I cringe when I reach yet another web site that uses Flash with no HTML alternative. For a while I had wondered if Microsoft were only making money from the sale of the development tools. However I guess some people will insist on streaming Micrsoft format media and others will want to use .Net RIA Services and then that will mean using a Microsoft server.
Almost all the corporations I've worked for use IE6 as standard (although none has yet told me that I cannot install Firefox). It sounds like Orange has developed a series of Intranet tools to handle customer requests and complaints in which case targetting a specific browser seems perfectly legitimate.
Those who have suggested using FF from a USB drive may be forgetting that USB devices may not be allowed or possible (although strange that downloading from the Internet is possible then). Additionally you are forgetting that logs on the server may well tell the support guy exactly what user agent was in use at the time of the crash so you won't necessarily get away with it.
Fair enough it seems that if you have a low score to start with then, as a newbie, you cannot really do anything and if you have a high score then the trolls will simply get a new address with each new site or after each ban. So how about going down the route that some sites already use and have verified email addresses.
This would be something like having the admin sending you an SMS to your mobile or billing and refunding your credit card. For this you would start with a higher score and be less likely to become a trouble maker given that now they have your mobile number or credit card. Of course you can steal both of these items but then are there really that many cyber bullies into phone and credit card theft?
You could even associate the IP address with the mail address and give automatic negative weighting to anyone from Nigeria and Ghana. I'd love to know if all those attractive women that seem to want to contact me on Skype from there are real. I have my doubts.
I'd worked for around 18 years as a contractor until I recently took a permie job (I know, I feel dirty) and believe me paying for a shuttle bus is really nothing to complain about. I've worked for companies that refused to allow me to sit in the same office, or indeed building as the rest of the team, a company that would not allow us to use the company car park, various companies where the subsidised canteen was either off limits or not subsidised, and one place where they had a separate entrance. Again several places either did not extend the Christmas get together to the contractors or did not allow us to bring along a partner. One big car company refused to allow the contractors to share the company aircraft to attend meatings even though they ultimately had to pay for the commercial flights that were used instead, and conversely an airline forced us to use their planes or partners planes for meatings when better routes were served by the competitors even though their own staff could fly with any airline.
But really I look back at that and see no reason why they should give us the same perks as the permanent staff. Now I need to find out what perks are available to me here :-)
To be honest I cannot quite see how you can relate persuing someone for breaching your patent to being anti sharing some code you have written. If you are saying that anyone who has an idea should be compelled to share it with everyone else then I would disagree. There are some projects where we can all benefit by collaborating together, that does not mean that we cannot have day jobs that we want to keep to ourselves.
However your point about mono should indeed be a concern. Unless Microsoft come out and openly declare that they will not chase after the authors of Mono or Moonlight then I think people would be best to avoid those products. In the case of Moonlight this also means that authors should effectively avoid Silverlight too because, unless you are targetting a corporate Intranet, you are effectively excluding an increasingly important portion of your audience. That said Silverlight really is quite good.
So is the fact that my latest installment of Ubuntu came with Firefox, Open Office, and other applications, also anti-competitive? Or is it only Microsoft that can be considered worth taking to court at the tax payers expense? I am sure that giving the user the option of buying a version without IE or at least choosing not to install it, would have been a reasonable compromise.
What next? Will it be considered anti-competitive that when I want an application for my shiny new phone I have to go to the manufacturers web site? Perhaps new cars with a gaping hole in the dashboard so we can all go back to choosing our own car radio that is subsequently nicked the next time we leave the car parked for more than 5 minutes?
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