Posts by Sceptical Bastard 566 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2007
Last laugh to Shilpa? She got snogged by Gere, not Jade Goody.
Talking of whom, the Big Bruvver troll-ette is surely most risible repulsive rebarbative retard to ever grace public awareness? And yet we deride Paris Hilton who is a moral and intellectual giant in comparision (as well as not being fat and criminally pig-ugly).
Sorry, everyone - felt the need to share.
I can do all that video stuff, animations, embedded Flash applets, the whole bang shoot. I've got a clean driving licence, I'm neatly turned out, and I can grow a beard if required.
How much is Jihoo paying? Is the workforce unionised? Are homophobia and misogyny optional or part of the EULA? Is the PhD a minimum qualification or will a couple of A Levels do?
Most importantly, will I get my 72 virgins before glorious martyrdom or afterwards?
The fact that AV and security vendors are debating this at all tends to add fuel to the firestorm of bad PR. The fact there is a discussion going on helps the anti-Phorm cause, IMO.
I think it's a shame that AVG (with its substantial installed base) is not being more robust but I await with interest the response from Symantec and McAffee.
Oh, and before I forget, the customary message to Kent (that's Kent with a 'u') Ertugrul and his drones at BT, CPW and Virgin:
Phuck oph, Phorm - DO NOT WANT
You're sick of Paris? Yeah but you're a girl...
As to resuscitating the Carry On corpse, I can think of no finer metaphor for the UK idea of cinematic excellence. Why not shoot it in black and white to emphasise how culturally sophisticated we are as a nation? That and add extra fart gags. And some scousers.
Liverpool? City of Culture? Like Baghdad, City of Peace? Like Tehran, City of Homosexual Tolerance?
I'm with Frank - my mind doesn't want to accept this story and wants it to go away.
Just how much poo-related surealism can El Reg readers take in a day?
(BTW, to those who "feel compassion" my good wishes - just don't come on high-minded and self-righteous when the rest of us enjoy a belly laugh at hapless freaks)
Windows 7 next year, possible earlier. Oh no, not another one!
Like the proverbial buses, we wait seven years for a new OS from Microsoft then they start turning up in droves. In Vista's case, mind you, less like a bus than a overloaded heavy lorry ploughing through quicksand powered by a lawnmower engine.
(BTW, today I visited a client's office where - to my amazement - their workstations still run on Win 98SE)
Quote: "If it works, that is - which not very many DARPA projects ever do."
Well, the agency's work during the 1960s on packet-switched redundant networks (first inspired by JCR Licklider and carried through by many others including Bob Kahn and Larry Roberts) seems to work after a fashion.
But I bet when Lick first mused about inter-active computerised communications he didn't foresee Facebook (bitch!), YouPorn, Larry 'n' Brin or phucking Phorm.
I have been following this whole sorry saga (on El Reg and other outlets) for a while. To me, the past couple of days seem to indicate that the substantial and vocal objection of internet users is having an effect. I say that cautiously, however, and I note the comments of others (above).
I strongly believe it behoves us all - whether we are customers of CPW, Virgin and BT or not - to make as much noise as possible.
If you want to sign online petitions do it; if you want to personally contact your MP do it; if you want to give Phorm itself a roasting do it.
But it's more effective, IMO, to let your ISP know how you feel. After all, it is ISPs who will be intercepting your packets on Phorm's behalf and it is your ISP who will be making money from Phorm. You can obviously use their 'Contact Us' forms and/or their helpdesks and forums. Better yet, though, to dig around a little and find out the name of the ISP's CEO, the Technical Director (or equivalent) and the Head of Customer Services (if they have one). Then let those officers have it by name! And if you can't find an email adress for the individual, try that old-fashioned communication channel - write them a letter. That'll surprise the buggers!
More generally, it also helps the cause if the media sees a lot of public interest in the story. So every time you read an article online or on paper about Phorm, respond and comment. Oh, and corny as it sounds, try writing to the letters page of your local paper.
Or, of course, you can just sit on your hands and whinge. Then watch your port 80 traffic being monitored by money-grabbing sharp shits in suits and your broadband speed taking a nosedive.
It may sound dated and naive but the cry must be "power to the people." Do whatever you can to phuck Phorm.
Nice one, Ashlee - a fine mix of spleen and bile AND you got a plug in for your own book.
I don't agree we are suffering a shortage of villains, however. For a start, there's sweat-monster "I can dance" Ballmer. Not to mention fast-rising newcomer Kent Ertugrul whose rise up the slime scale has been meteoric.
You write: "...the public, however, refuses to grant Sergey Brin or Larry Page most hated status." Hey! Speak for yourself. I absolutely LOATHE those two bastards.
You can suggest - but you'll be wasting your breath. That troll always posts gibberish.
Oddly, his infantile spastic jabs over the keyboard seem to have won him fans among El Reg readers. And, even more oddly, his posts slip through Vulture Central's moderation.
Ignore him. At worst, he's merely a minor nuisance, just a bit more irrelevant white noise on the network
Just what the internet needs - another bunch of get-rich-quick slimeball packet-sniffing advertising pimps.
I object on both privacy and technological grounds. If my ISP turns whore and starts phlirting with phorm, I'm taking my custom elsewhere.
Great to see twenty per cent knocked off their share price BTW.
... ‘UK government data protection is a shambles’ written by a Professor Emeritus in Stating The Bleedin' Obvious?
@ 'Just a thought...'
Have YOU ever thought about inviting the military-industrial complex, Texan oil and the Klan to set you up a government? Oh, sorry - I see you already have.
Grumous asked: "Did I hear Jacqui Smith correctly on the radio - the national identity database(s) will be immune to hacking because it/they won't be online?"
Yes, mate, you did. You also ask: "Am I being very stupid..."
No. But Jaqui Smith is. As I've already said she isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer and she has been badly briefed (as well as badly coiffed and tailored).
Firstly, she evidently has no clear idea of what she means by 'online' because she almost certainly cannot distinguish between a departmental ethernet LAN, an inter-departmental WAN, and the internet. Nor, I am sure, has she any idea of the difference between the physical internet (as in a global system of WANs linked together by TCP/IP) on the one hand and the web (as in http-based interlinked documents) on the other.
Secondly, as others have pointed out, if the data is not available via some form of network how the fuck does she imagine remote users of the system (your immigration official at a port for example) will query it? By smoke signal?
Thirdly, she seems to imagine (or, rather, she has been told to say) that 'hacking' - or, cracking as I suppose her to mean - is somehow solely an internet phenomenon.
But UNLESS the ID database is held encrypted on mainframes isolated from ANY network, operated by totally loyal closely-vetted personnel and guarded by the SAS some motivated smartarse will crack into the system. Possibly by means of a clever hack but more likely by exploiting a position of trust.
When it comes to IT and security, the woman's obviously pretty clueless. But probably no more so than most politicians.
Oh, by the way, please actively support No2ID, people.
Quote: "...you have nothing to fear because you are a vegetable..."
But not as much of one as the brain-dead bastards who are pushing this mad scheme forward.
Jacqui Smith not only flashes too much of her pallid wilted fat cleavage and looks like a smug hamster with its chops stuffed with bran but she couldn't think her way out of a barn if it was on fire. We truly are ruled by intellectual pygmies (and bloody Scotsmen, of course).
Like her po-faced boss, Smith realises people see the ID card scheme for what it is - a preposterously expensive white elephant. Hence her boast today that she will trim £1bn off the cost. Bribe us with our own money, why dontcha?
Hamster-face reckons she can save that billion quid mainly by allowing private companies to fingerprint and photograph applicants. Jeeesus aitch K'rist! THAT really makes me feel confident!
She also claims that British people will voluntarily enrol for the cards because doing so will "make their lives easier." What she means, of course, is the exact reverse - that the government will spitefully and obstructively make our lives more difficult if we don't enrol. Don't these fuckers think life in Brown's Britain is bad enough as it is?
FFS, you recommend THAT vile book?
It is proscriptive, in places plain wrong, and written in an uptight buttock-clenched style by a know-it-all language Nazi. Decimation? I'd like to decimate Lynn-bloody-Truss (mainly to keep her simpering face, patronising voice and crap haircut off the telly).
A word about split infinitives. Just because the bloody Romans couldn't do it doesn't mean we shouldn't. We should - and often - if for no other reason than it so irritates purists.
To each their own English. If, for example, the 'Murcanns want to mispronounce 'missile' to rhyme with 'thistle' and 'route' to rhyme with 'nowt', let them - they know what they mean and so do most speakers of British English. 'Murcann English is far less incomprehensible to most Englishmen than the weird distorted sounds made by Glaswegians, Scousers, the Welsh, and virtually everyone aged between 15 and 20.
Bah! Humbug
Go back and read what I actually wrote.
I didn't criticise Redmond's products per se. With a bit of work by competent sysadmins and some basic staff training, XP and Office products can be made reasonably secure.
What I criticised was government institutions using "... un-adapted un-hardened Microsoft OSs and apps...." by which I meant Windows, Excel and the rest at the default settings which sacrifice security to so-called ease-of-use.
I also wrote: "I do not claim that open source (particularly 'nix-based) systems would in themselves solve security issues..."
I agree that poorly-trained trained users (and the resultsant misusage) are far more of a threat to security than the systems they use.
Or, rather, I would feel better if it weren't for my suspicion that these 'Data Guardians' will be junior civil servants with IT qualifications that stopped at GCSE level. Or, more likely, PFYs recruited by poaching counter-staff from PC World stores.
The underlying problem IMO is that far too few people in the civil service have any substantial IT, computing and systems experience.
Another problem is that the majority of government-operated IT infrastructure runs un-adapted un-hardened Microsoft OSs and apps. I do not claim that open source (particularly 'nix-based) systems would in themselves solve security issues but they would facilitate those solutions as well as saving money in licenses.
Bloody Dutch stealing our thunder! These sort of utter fuck-ups are exclusively Britain's speciality!
Maybe we can deploy to the Nederlands tax office some of the 37 'Data Guardians' recruited by HMRC? (Knowing our track record with government IT projects, I bet the recruiters poached the 'Guardians' from PC World or Dixons)
Seriously, though, what is it that governments find so hard about IT projects?
Enough already! Stop right there!
Firstly, WTF has this story to do with the mad spastic-dancing foul-mouthed sweat-monster who loves his company? Putting his name in the headline merely draws specious attention to a non-story about whingeing twenty-ninthers, people who really need to get a grip! Who cares about their bloody birthday?
Secondly, like Spleen above I also: "...leave the month and day as January 1st anyway because a) privacy and b) four fewer mouse clicks."
Why would I want YouTube, eBay, Google and every packet-sniffer in between to know my true date of birth (DoB)? Allied with other personally-identifying info, DoB is a useful tool in any scamsters' armoury.
... guess what I found under the keyboard of this laptop I bought off a dodgy-looking bloke in a pub? A neatly-folded inflatable girlfriend and a tube of KY both labelled "Property of David Blunkett, The Home Office, Queen Anne's Gate, London SW1"
And a couple of Bonio biscuits.
as a Daily Mail reader, I know that chip and PIN aids terrorists, causes global warming, gives you cancer, causes house prices to plummet, fuels drug addiction, leads to moral decline and makes it easier for illegal immigrants to traffic children (only white British ones) into peadophile slavery.
Chip and PIN is also responsible for our shambolic railways, low standards of education and the phenomenal rise of incapacity benefit.
Oh, and AIDS.
Thank you, people - the comments on this story brought tears to my eyes.
I slept through it (UK, Midlands, 60 miles from the epicentre). I slept through the Dudley earthquake too. Mind you, I'd probably have slept through the blitz. However, my missus said the plates rattled in the kitchen and the cat took a funny turn (WTF she was doing downstairs at 1am remains a mystery).
The real horror came later - all those inarticulate idiots spouting off about the terror of it all on local radio this morning interspersed by truly moronic commentary from the presenter. Name and shame - I mean YOU Liz Kershaw (halfwit sister of jailed presenter Andy Kershaw) on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire.
Quote: "These days you could probably program a 777 to fly 10 feet off the ground at 500mph and feel safe as houses."
What sort of house would THAT be? One built of semtex bricks with a rice-paper roof waterproofed by kerosene jelly topped by a lightning conductor and located on the side of an active volcano on a major tectonic fault line?
Hotmail may be shite. Yahoo may be shite. Gmail may be shite (and definitely IS intrusive).
These, and many other webmail offers, are FREE. Users should expect the level of service that implies. In fact (at least in terms of total outage) the level of service exceeds what could be reasonably expected.
It is foolish to rely entirely on a single free service for anything critical. Spread your bets, people!
If you want quality and reliability, expect to pay for it. But if you pay peanuts, expect monkeys.
... the gory details of the case! What form of cannibalism? What did it *taste* like? Google is strangely reticent on this case.
On a more serious note, the postcard analogy is a fair one. Carrier pigeon would work too.
Regarding email as 'secure' or 'private' shows a very basic ignorance of how both email and public packet-switched networks function. The judge might just as well have shouted her ruling through a megaphone.
PS: note to El Reg's icon mavens; please substitute Paris's face for that shot of her getting out of a car. In close-up. Please.
Quote (snipped):
"... they've done more for network security and censorship avoidance ... and have been doing it since long before the internet began (23 years now in fact)"
Oh, I hadn't realised the internet 'began' after 1985.
I was labouring under the silly notion that ARPANET went live in December 1969, that three networks (ARPANET, Packet Radio Network and the Atlantic Satellite network) connected in about 1977, that the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS) was born in 1978 and that JANET also started in the 1970s. I foolishly believed the whole bang-shoot was more or less complete by the early 1980s and grew steadily until 1992/3 when Tim Berners Lee's nifty little wheeze enabled every Tom, Dick, Harry (and the rest of the great unwashed) to browse p0rn to their heart's content - OK, maybe 'heart' wasn't the exact organ but you get my drift.
Sorry, getting me coat - the one with 'pedant' stencilled on the back.
'Allo, 'allo, 'allo. Wass all this 'ere, then? I 'ave reason to believe you are committing an offence of Aggravated Outdated Computing contrary to the Compulsory Use Of Vista Regulations 2008. I'll 'ave you know, sunshine, that using Windows 2000 is an arrestable offence. You're bang to rights, sonny Jim. Any lip from you an' you get to taste my Tazar!
Bloody 'ell! you're telling us that the US military's weapons systems are based on Windows? THAT makes me feel really secure - blue screen of death, indeed!
A fatal exception error has occurred at OMG:000FUD00SNAFU in module Iraq (01) + Afghanistan (02). The current action against insurgents will be terminated. You will lose any unsaved civilians in all current conflicts.
* Press any key to terminate civilians
* Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart the conflict
* Press the Backspace key to withdraw troops
Active X implicated in a security panic??? Well, knock me down with a whore's draws!
"Yahoo has announced plans to abandon an unlimited service and transfer users to RealNetworks' Rhapsody service."
And THAT is meant to be a good thing? See:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/31/realplayer_branded_badware/
On the one hand, we have people who are so irredeemably moronic that they transfer money to the bank account of a complete stranger on risible and transparently absurd pretexts.
On the other hand, is a 20-year prison sentence too harsh for the scamsters who bring a reality check to those morons?
The former richly deserve to be fleeced because stupid people with money are a danger to themselves and to the rest of us.
The latter are scum and lowlife whose spam irritates the rest of us. Causing irritation by unsolicited email should carry a minimum term of, say, 20 years. The sentence should also take into consideration any offences against English usage and grammar.
I have no sympathy whatsoever with either victim or perpetrator - lock up both of them.
(Paris icon in honour of her predecessor as world's dumbest eye-candy.)
The main reason, as most UK-based El Reg readers will know, that the porous butler (love that 'porous' jibe BTW) is in the news ATM is because of the ongoing Diana inquest. But, although he may be an exploitative self-regarding prat, the butler is not the villain of the piece and doesn't deserve to receive hate mail.
The bad guy here is 'Mad Mo' Fayed . Send the hate mail to him.
The sole reason the British taxpayer is paying up to £10million to rake over these ten-year-old events is that Mad Mo will not let the dead rest.
I've got a message for you, Fayed. Your wastrel son and his bit of posh died because their car hit a concrete pillar at high speed while being driven by a drunken driver. And because they were too fucking arrogant or stupid to use their seat belts.
No-one murdered them. It wasn't a conspiracy. It was a drink-drive accident. What's more, the Dimbo wasn't up the duff and she was probably no more likely to marry Dodi as Dido or Dando.
Get real, Fayed! Go back to your shopkeeping, you nutter, and let it rest - we're bloody sick of it all.
@ Ian McNee
Are you Hackney Marxist-Leninist Popular Front? Or are you the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front of Hackney?
Though I confess - sheepishly - to being a bit of a 'nix fanboy running Ubuntu at home, I've used both family trees (and most versions) of Windows nearly every day for fifteen years or more.
It tits me off to hear Apple and Linux fanboys dismiss Windows as "unusable". Rubbish. The decent versions are stable and capable OSes but the dogs are *real* dogs. And, at default settings, none is secure online.
Windows 2 wasn't much to write home about. But I used 3.11 WorkGroups for many years (on boxes from 386SX to PII) and it was capable and reasonably stable.
I never really got on with 95 - it seemed overly prone to BSOD at critical moments. However, Windows 98SE was fine as long as security wasn't an issue (I reckon it was impossible to truly secure any 9xx for internet use). That said, I used 98SE happily it for years.
I had limited experience of ME but what little I had was *really* bad - Windows ME was a truly awful lash-up.
Concurrently with 98xx, I worked on (and installed across a small business) NT4 machines. Again, very few real problems though plenty of annoyances.
W2K (NT5.1) had a slightly flakey start but by SP4, it was IMO the best of the bunch. Fully patched on anything better than PII/128MB, it was fast and very stable. If hardened (and behind a firewall with Opera or Firefox instead of IE), it was reasonably secure too.
Win XP needed more tweaking, tried to be too-clever-by-half, and introduced a bit too much snooping. But set up right on decent machines, I've used it for years without major problems and quite like it. That said, I still prefer W2K SP4.
My wife's firm has gone the Vista road from XP Pro. Her IT department has been swamped by problems. I've used her Vista laptop (a high spec Dell) and it is a dog. Another colleague has Vista on an older machine and it is even worse. So far, my personal experience of Vista is that it is - to use a tech term - a pile of bloated shit.
IMO the NT line has run its course. Forget backward compatibility and legacy support. I think M$ needs to grasp the nettle and design a workable, stable, fast, lean, and - above all - *secure* multi-user operating system from the ground up. Oh, and supply it in just one or two versions not a mish-mash of flavours as with Vista.
Meanwhile, I'll stick with W2K SP4 and Ubuntu at home and XP Pro SP2 at work.
6pm, Monday 21 January
BBC news reports that "...defence secretary Des Browne says a probe into the loss of a laptop with details of 600,000 people has uncovered two similar thefts .... the other two laptops held similar data but on fewer people, he told MPs."
As for the Birmingham incident, Browne told MPs that the Navy recruiting officer failed to follow security procedures.
So it's all down to "Gerald" the hapless underling - ministers and civil servants are not to blame. Our personal data is safe in government hands. I feel *so* reassured and simply can't wait to get my ID card.
Quote: "...ban all bulk data transfers via removable media without encryption. Transferring data to removable media from personal computers and laptops will be made impossible... When removable media are sent, secure couriers should be used."
Mr Poynter! You are a genius! You've had an Einstein moment - you are the new Archimedes, a Newton or Gallileo pour nos jours.
No El Reg reader could've thought up such a cunning scheme so quickly! And no IT pro could've given this 'department of the bleedin obvious' advice at the bargain-basement price that PricewaterhouseCooper doubtless charged. My tax is being spent well.
Anyway, as Tom Chiverton notes above, whatever security policies are implemented the sheer bloody muppetiness of the civil service lusers will subvert it.
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