Posts by Steve

Still better than Virgin Media

I've sent them three emails so far asking how to opt-out of this. The first reply just gave a link to the Reg article that detailed how dodgy the scheme is:

"BT, Virgin Media and Talk Talk argue that Phorm's anonymising techniqueswill achieve this feat. When discussing Webwise, the consumer brand for Phorm's advertising targeting system, the existing partners all place heavy emphasis on its widely-available and standard anti-phishing features.

Here is the link for it http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/phorm_broadband_isp_targets/"

Then they recommended that I call their 25p per min tech support line! When I email them again to point out that they had made no attemp to answer my question, I got this:

"Unfortunately, I do not have enough information from your e-mail to diagnose the problems you have been experiencing or locate your account.We need a clearer view of your computer's activities prior to this problem occurring. Can you please email again with a few more details about the problem. I will then be in a better position to help you.

I need to know the following:

<<insert technical questions here: no more than 4 unless its essential>> "

Both emails were signed:

"Kind regards

(Your Name)

Virgin Media Technical Support Centre"

They can't even use a fucking email template properly! The fact that I pointed this out to them in my second email leads me to believe they are just seeing the word "Phorm", opening up a template and hitting send. If I don't a satisfactory answer from the third email, then I'm phoning them up and that'll *really* make the cunts sorry - I have honed my belittling speech to perfection.

It's not about protecting my privacy anymore, it's about punishing VM and it's staff.

For the love of god!

Doe their pig-headedness know no limits? Their own statistics claim that 40% of the population would resist ID cards (but they spin it as 60% in favour, natch).

The figures they released before that said 30% would resist so the number of people they will need to arrest is going to be getting close to half the population by the time they bring them in. Their only real hope is if they can manage to stay in power continuously for about the next 60 years so that they can phase them in as all us refuseniks die off.

Frattini's losing it.

""We cannot have mafia or traffickers or terrorists using better technology than our police," Frattini said at the most recent announcements of new measures."

The last few terrorist attacks that I recall didn't have anything more high tech than a mobile phone. Or maybe he was speaking out against the plans.

I guess forcing the police/customs to buy and use crap technology is equivalent to giving useful technology to the criminals.

Re: "incorrect usage"?

"and yes, that means if someone says "ignorence" it's you sad smirkers who are the fools. there's no "right spelling", it's just that you were taught that there was. there's the commonest spelling, sure, but that is not the same thing at all."

Jiaflk, oavoni sjki ohndsv^^ks. Kafu; kjaolso isnfk wnwncpo laasof mqbfi. Plloa oac mqnvon obi oecha lkcqno lksva?

If the spelling isn't "wrong" and the grammar isn't "wrong", the fact that you failed to understand the above can only be down to the fact that you cannot read. Or maybe you need to understand the difference between theory and practice - in theory there is none, but in practice there is.

Language is about communicating an idea. If the rest of the world uses one convention and you try to communicate using a different convention, then you most certainly /are/ wrong. The degree of your wrongness can be measured by the size/number of differences between your conventions and those of your target group.

If you are in the middle of a diatribe berating people for their incorrect use of language, there most definitely are right and wrong ways to spell ignurrents.

VM's response

"Hi there,

Thanks for your email to Virgin Media.

BT, Virgin Media and Talk Talk argue that Phorm's anonymising techniques> will achieve this feat. When discussing Webwise, the consumer brand for Phorm's advertising targeting system, the existing partners all place heavy emphasis on its widely-available and standard anti-phishing features.

Here is the link for it http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/phorm_broadband_isp_targets/

I hope the above answers your query, however, should you need further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact us again.

Kind regards

(Your Name)

Virgin Media Technical Support Centre"

The original question was "How do I opt out of this?" and, yes, the muppet did leave in the (Your Name) part instead of putting his own in. I particularly enjoyed pointing out that the article they linked to has a stream of comments complaining about this idea and the 2nd of which was mine.

Re: NINNY Who?

"Who's going to figure out which bands are good enough for people to want to buy their stuff? For those who haven't realised, THIS is the factor that make the difference between 'another band' and 'The Next Big Thing'."

Bullshit. Record companies don't look for what's good, they look for what they can market. If you need proof, look at the singles chart and look at the album chart. The former is what the labels would like to deal with, the latter is something they have to put up with because people still know how to choose music for themselves in spite of all the marketing. The whole concept of "The Next Big Thing" is part of the problem with the major labels in that artists are treated like a consumable commodity. Wring as many songs/rights out of them as possible pay them as little as possible and then move on to the next victim.

"Yes the recording industry needs to get up to date but without it we'll all drown in the vast quantities of trash available online without a filter to organise it."

You muppet. It's the record industry that's pumping out the shit that makes it hard to find quality music. If you want a filter, try a radio station, the last thing you should do is ask a label to be that filter. That's like asking a car salesman to tell you which car would be best for you to buy - will they sell you what's best or what gives them the most commision?

Re: His injunction was against an American company

"This action extends the reach of corporate immunity against civil litigation, even for American companies."

That could be interesting for, say, a Chinese dissident using an anonymous proxy provided by a US company.

@ Andy Worth

"Of course it's a theoretical simulation of an event using equations and constants that are no more than guesswork in the first place, so the validity (and usefulness) of the results is questionable to say the least."

I hardly think that general relativity theory counts as "no more than guesswork". If you want experimental confirmation of it's predictions, try sending a signal to a satellite without accounting for the frequency shift.

Re: The issue at hand... sort of.

"Capitalism is not the cause of hatred and vice. It is the human predilection towards vicious and greedy behavior, something that can be found across all lines of religion, nationality, culture, economy, and race, is the root causation for all of the pain in this world."

True, but capitalism does take that viscousness and greed and use it as the basis of an economic and social system.

Robot armies

As long as every country has robot armies it's a great thing. We can just schedule wars so that they take place outside cities and set up some cameras to broadcast it.

Invading a country could be turned into the international league of Robot Wars. Definitely has the potential to make some cracking TV.

IPS is insecure already

They're outsourcing ID checks to a private company and allowing them access to IPS systems apparently borks their firwall. If these muppets can't even set up a simple VPN what hope do they have of keeping this database secure.

Non-disclosure

"However the ICO does allow for the non-disclosure of "a number of specific references... likely to have a detrimental effect on international relations." These can be kept secret."

So, they'll disclose the stuff we already know and redact the parts we're actually interested in. No surprise there then. The fact that it was an illegal invasion is obviously going to be detrimental to international relations.

Re: At least Rambo has a plot...

So I'm not the only one that thought Jumper was only the first half of a film.

As for the new Rambo, I thought it was pretty good. But I was comparing it to Rambo III and most things look good compared to that. People forget that Rambo is about gunfights and death - on both fronts it delivers admirably.

Re: so what is being said here?

"even though there's nothing in the Constitution about it at all"

I think you mean "the American Constitution", unless you think that there is only one constitution and we are all bound by US law.

"You can thank your own Rupert Murdoch "

He's Australian - or are you just dividing the globe into the US and "everyone else"

"Sorry, liberals and socialists. Better luck next time. You're doing pretty well with your molehills to mountains "reporting" of Getmo activities, but I'm not sure how many times you can complain of years-old activities or how much emotional traction you'll get from known killers who are back on the terrorist frontlines weeks after they're "found innocent" and released."

How lucky we "liberals and socialists" are that you enlightened anti-liberal(?) and anti-social(?) types are locking people up for years without trial to protect us. Except, you claim that known killers are being released, so exactly what use is Gitmo other than to radicalise its inmates?

Bear in mind that Said Qutub - the guy whose philosophy is the justification behind the actions of Al-Zawahiri and hence Al-Qaeda - only turned to violence after spending time at the hands of CIA trained torturers.

You are made of fail.

This could work

Once the little terrors see the kind of cash you can steal from public funds sorry, justly earn after a transparent and legitimate tender process, why would they bother TWOCing cars.

@ Congratulations to My Society

Have a look for his radio show "My Adventures in Serious Organised Crime" on youtube. He comes up with some great ideas.

Objectionable non-Islamic videos.

"The ratio of non-Islamic objectionable videos has increased on it."

Leaving aside the fact that a "ratio" is "of X campared to Y", does this mean that objectionable videos are OK as long as they are Islamic?

Which also begs the question; what can you get away with just by shouting "Allah al akbar" at the end of you're political speech/dancing kitten/amatuer porn videos.

@ @Andrew - rubbish

I just threw mine in the recycling bin.

But if the BPI joins a torrent swarm...

...aren't they then making a copyrighted work available for download due to the nature of the BitTorrent protocol? Is this then entrapment?

And if it's being offered by a representaive of the rights-holder, does that count as the rights-holder granting permission for others to download it?

@ Crime what crime?

Copyright infringment? - he may have made an illegal copy of the financial report.

Receipt of stolen goods? - if you define the report as their IP and then define IP as goods.

Mainly though, he's guilty of pissing off an American corporation - which can be dangerous.

@ @ Steve Roper

Well they are part of the Echelon project and the Maoris have been shat on in a similar manner to the Australian Aboriginees.

And everywhere's west of somewhere.

Analog TV turn off

Surely this would be a perfect area of the spectrum for all these pirate stations. Given that most of these stations aren't trying to take over the whole of London but rather play music that their local community wants to listen to, you could hand out plenty of Community Radio Transmitter licences by making sure that no neighbouring districts are near the same frequency. Even if there is overlap in the broadcast area, there shouldn't be problems with interference.

But, I doubt any of the commercial stations will be happy about the competition. The BBC still remember that the only reason they were a success is because they raided all their talent from Caroline and Luxembourg.

Re: Re: 12:09

"The Economist is still a good rag, but for reasons best known to itself supported the Iraq War and has been stubborn about admitting that it's an unmitigated disaster. It has also bought into the Al-Qaeda/S.P.E.C.T.R.E. fantasy,"

Economists think that we can have exponential expansion forever when this planet clearly has a finite size and therefore finite resources.

It's hardly surprising that they do other insane stuff.

List, schmist.

I just want it to be an opt-in that I can ignore as I've always got install files for Firefox and Opera. The only time I would use IE is if I had to use the Windows Update site and that's just because the bastards at MS deliberately borked the site for anything but IE.

Re: Why isn't...

"...there a self destruct sequence?"

Probably got damaged at launch when the Damge Control System shorted out due to a sloppy conversion to imperial units.

NSPCC idealism

“However, the Government has missed an important opportunity to make physical punishment of children illegal. It is an offence for adults to hit adults and children should be given equal or greater protection from assault."

However, we do have this concept of "reasonable force" in law where force is used in the prevention of a crime. We also have a police force which regularly uses force against protesters to deter dissent which is a far more apt analogy for parent and child than two civillian adults.

A smack on the wrist to let a kid know not to stick their fingers in the fireplace is safer than letting them get burnt to learn the lesson. I'd also like to meet the person who can have a logical, well-reasoned debate with a four year old.

As a toddler, I used to bite people. My parents told me not to, but I ignored them. One day my dad bit me back and I never did it again.

Re: Writing on the wall at Asda

Asda are owned by Walmart so I think we know which way they'll go.

95 Years!?

Unless there are a lot of artists who wrote their first song at 5 and expect to be able to sell it until their 100th birthday, there is no need for a 95 year copyright period.

I think we can all guess who McCreevy sees himself working for, the twunt.

@ Wade Burchette

"Why is that the Antarctic had more sea ice last year than it ever did on record? Why is that Johannesburg, South Africa had 50+ days of below normal temperature last year? Why did it snow in Baghdad for the first time since people can recall? And why did it snow with some accumulation in Jerusalem too? Why is that parts of the western US have had their coldest January on record?

And why does no one look at history? If you look at the history of the weather since we have accurate records, you can clearly see that our weather now is neither unusual nor unique. It happened before."

You realise that those two paragraphs directly contradict each other, right?

Completely back assward

What we need is to get a group of these kids and take them to Redmond and then on for a tour of the major labels. The kids can then explain in depth about how they understand IP/copyright but just don't give a fuck.

They can explain how they are in favour of free trade and how MS is working against it.

They can explain how they see the collapse of the music industry as a positive thing that will free music from the monopoly control of the labels.

There was music before the industry and there'll be music after the industry and the kids this age that I know are more interested in finding and listening to independent artists than the souless tripe put out by the big four.

Re: does "online" == "used website"

They don't have to deal with your paperwork and you don't put any load on their website - it's win-win so you can bet your ass they count it in the "online filing" stats.

Re: entrapment/honeypots

David:

"...the "rights holder" will download a torrent, fire it up and start to download content illegally from that there internet. Now, correct me if I'm mistaken, but is breaking the law to catch a criminal actually allowed?"

Gordon:

"They're not breaking the law. Downloading music is not illegal - but downloading music without the permission of the copyright holder is... As they work for the copyright holder that ought not to be a problem. Saying that, if the bittorrent service made it a TOS that you're not to use it for detecting filesharing..... Then it might be."

But if they then offer it for upload, they are either implying that permission is granted for others to download it or they are offering a copyrighted work for download without permission.

So, the downloader is innocent or the record company is guilty of a worse crime than the downloader.

Great news

After having to listen to all that whining by people who "never go overdrawn" and who always "pay off the balance each month" whenever the subject of unfair bank charges comes up, I have to say that I find this hilarious.

I think they're are finally starting to realise that the people they've been looking down on all this time have been the very people who've been subsidising their "free" bank accounts.

Money is debt. It may be a harsh wake up call for some, but if we all paid of our debts, there would be no more money.

Re: @Robin

The idea is that the enclosure projects the image of what's behind it. As long as you can do this in the right frequency range, the scanner wouldn't see the enclosure.

Also, anything that essentially amounts to x-ray specs to see through women's clothes will never be pointless.

Why is she cleaning?

I thought they were supposed to be selling drugs to our women and eating our babies or some such.

How about every time one of these people manages to get around security we give them amnesty, sack whoever they managed to outwit to get in and then give the immigrant a job in security responsible for stopping the method they used.

We could extend this to anyone who thinks that they've found a totally novel way to get in can turn themselves into the government to claim their amnesty and fat government pay cheque. Net result: only the truly ingenious and creative people get in to the country - the rest have to stay in France as an incentive.

Let's have some realism here

The kid is 16 years old. Bitching that he doesn't have experience and that this qualification is worthless, is like me saying GSCE science is worthless because I've got two degrees in physics and I've worked in commercial labs.

Stop thinking of this as "kid with certificate thinks he knows more than me". He's a kid doing his GCSEs who know has a good theoretical grounding in the area he wants to work in and also has as much experience as most of the "certs don't beat experience" crowd ever had at his age.

And the experience he gains after this will likely teach him more than they learnt as he understands the theoretical framework underpinning what he is doing.

Wrong way to reduce paperwork

Paradoxical as it may sound, the solution is to make the forms even longer and more complicated. Maybe then the police will start reserving stop and search for when it's supposed to be used - when they have a "reasonable suspicion".

And for any bobbies who might be reading, living in an area of high crime is not reasonable suspicion of being a criminal. Neither is being out after dark without a middle-class escort. Unfortunately being better educated than a police officer and being prepared to stand up for your rights is grounds for being singled out and harassed - I know this first hand. Without proper recording of stop and search it will be impossible to prove that harassment.

If they want to make it less time consuming, reduce the form to what's actually needed to accomplish accountability. Name/number of officer, time/date/location and reason for search and hand that to the guy getting stopped. When someone walks into the police station with a phonebook's worth of reciepts from the same officer giving dubious reasons, you can weed out the bad officers.

Re: Not just in America

"But it's not just Merkins that are crazy, us Brits have our fair share of unstableness."

That's just our lovable island eccentricity.

@ Ash

1) Rent a car without a driving license and credit card,

Information which is not automatically passed to the government. Given the government are going to want to record uses of this ID, they then know every time you rent a car.

2) Buy a house without registering as the owner,

If your scheme is anything like ours, the important point is that the information will now be keyed according to the person, not the property. Thus building up a file of everything you are or own and anyplace you have lived - even if you only rent.

4) See a doctor without having some kind of previous history (you need to transfer your medical records from old surgery's to new)

Not over here. The last time I went to the doctor, I wrote my name, address and telephone number on a form, saw the doctor and got my prescription without any verification required. On the few occasions I've been to casualty (ER) I was getting medical care whilst my parents were still filling out the form.

5) In the US you can't get medical care without insurance, which I KNOW requires ID

I don't want to commie up the debate too much, but there is something very wrong about an industrialised nation not having universal healthcare.

Scavenger Hunt

Find me one person worth less than £1m who wants this lying scum to have any power or influence over this country. You'd be hard pushed even if you started at the Labour party conference.

Re: Re: "over-interpretation"

More likely:

"If you disagree with me you have interpreted all of the rules together instead the small out of context part that I'm trying to use to justify my actions."

Re: re; Third Degree

"Not all college degrees come with speel cheeker installed and instead of making a mistack, I wold rathor let you now I don now if it's speled corect to begin with. and no, I don know EssJay. Just City University, Community College, and DeVry."

The concern is not that you were unsure how to pluralise thesis, but that someone who claims to have three degrees doesn't know how to find it out. It is only someone with researching skills that inadequate who would use wikipedia as a source.

If I was marking your work I'd see it as a) an inability to distinguish a reliable from an unreliable source or b) an atempt to pad out your references.

Out of interest, in what subjects are you "degrees"? Mine (BSc & MSc) are both in physics and I would most likely have been publicly mocked for trying to pass of wikipedia as a source for anything. I also taught for a while and I had 11yr olds who understood why wikipedia should not be referenced.

This is fantastic!

With all the friends who'll be asking me too clean this off their computers or show them how to use Linux (about 5 mins work) I should get about 6 months of free beers out of this.

@Im_Gumby

"We're "obsessed" with Iran ever since their revolution took our citizens hostages."

It a shame that, as far as most Americans are concerned, the first event in Iranian history was the seizing of American citizens. If you look back a little further - say 1953 - the picture looks a lot different. The US and UK overthrew a democratic, secular government to protect oil profits. They then imposed a dictator on the population and the CIA trained the nastiest secret police force the world has ever seen, namely SAVAK.

After suffering under a US imposed oppressive regime for 25 years while you syphoned off their oil wealth, it's not surprising that they were a little pissed off with you guys. They also have good memories.

"My question is why don't you Brits hold them in lower esteem?"

Because they haven't really done anything to deserve the way the US is attacking them. Also, the last time I checked, they weren't the ones breaking international law. To be honest, I hold them in in about as much esteem as I hold the US or the UK.

"After all, it was less than a year ago that they captured 15 of your sailors... Here's a refresher link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6484279.stm"

They detained 15 sailors who were operating in disputed territory just off the Iranian coast. These sailors were returned unharmed with a nice new suit each - a damn site better than the treatment dished out by the US and UK to civillians. If the Iranians were stopping and searching boats in the English Channel, you can be sure that the Royal Navy would have something to say about it.

Re: Flawed logic

Dead non-smokers contribute zero tax as well. What's your point exactly?

Or is it more a case of your flawed reading?