* Posts by Richard Hesketh

13 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2007

Reg scribe spends week being watched by government Bluetooth wristband, emerges to more surveillance

Richard Hesketh

Re: What do you want from your surveillance state?

True. But it's also true that for nearly all of those millennia we were thinly-spread and not very mobile, lacking affordable mass transit with global reach.

I'm not sure that justifies the surveillance state in any case - at least, not beyond a very strictly scoped scheme with a minimal lifetime. It's all fuzzy round the edges, of course...

Natwest online payments go down

Richard Hesketh

Workaround

Dunno if it's still broken, but when I tried to pay a plumber mid-afternoon, I got around it by registering the payee on the web, then paying through the iPhone app. Worth a try if you're still struggling.

HSBC online services still offline following 'attack' on bank

Richard Hesketh

Re: We successfully defended our systems.

Umm. Isn't the object of a DDoS to Deny Service? I contend that HSBC failed miserably. Not saying it's easy to defend against a DDoS - but they plainly didn't, from an end-user perspective.

Apple unleashes monster patch batch on Mac faithful

Richard Hesketh
Happy

SSH/Hijack Issue fixed

Rogue Amoeba have issued a fix, so if you have Airfoil, having it update itself resolves the issue.

Apple hit with another class action

Richard Hesketh
Thumb Down

Reality Check

Erm - what's to stop the user going to any other web-based music store in their web browser & downloading MP3s which they can subsequently drag & drop into iTunes?

The fact that the iTunes app itself only connects to ITMS does not constitute a lock-in. This is a ridiculous suit & any reasonable judge ought to throw it out with very little deliberation required.

With regard to liberating iTunes material from the hated DRM & the m4a/p file formats, Sektah has presented a simple solution that works.

Vodafone UK loses roamers worldwide

Richard Hesketh

I too suffer Vodafone on two fronts

At home and at work recently I've also had silent connections, long waits for connections that sometimes ail, sometimes succeed. Voicemail notifications that can arrive up to 14 days after the call, and calls diverted to voicemail for no readily apparent reason.

Frankly I'm pretty hacked off with Vodafone, but of course they won't give two hoots about me as an individual, and my employer is too small an account ot hold sway - Vodafone deal direct with us corporately anyway, we have to use a service provider.

I'm on the cusp of saying 'screw your contract Vodafone, I want out!' What do we have to do to get these muppets to run a dependable network - I'm beginning to regret leaving Orange! Petition anyone?

BT prepares for superfast broadband investment chinwag

Richard Hesketh

A few thoughts...

1. I don't think BT's baulking at the cost - look at the billions going into 21CN.

2. I'm actually happy to see them get 21CN out of the way first, because it will give the country a far better backbone off which some of this natty new stuff can hang. Moving the core of the network to IP will make it easier, cheaper & quicker to provision new services of all kinds in the future - though of course this does nothing to address the copper/aluminium/soggy string presently linking most of our homes to the world. I don't believe any other major global telco has yet done what BT is currently doing to the core of its network (though I stand to be corrected if I'm wrong), so shall we stop all the pointless hand-wringing & trying to convince ourselves that we are world+dog's poor relation when it comes to telecomms?

3. Maybe we look a bit late coming into this ultra-high-speed access game, and we could argue about chickens & eggs ad-infinitum, but the apps for that kind of bandwidth to the home are really only just getting started.

4. Show me the evidence that not having multi-gigabit broadband to the home is damaging the economy /now/, or in the next 5 years and I'll worry. Until then, I'll assume that neither BT nor the government is stupid, and that in time (if only just in time!), these technologies will come.

Coming Tuesday: 5 Microsoft patches

Richard Hesketh

@WP

Christ, if you're gonna troll, at least try to make it worth reading by injecting the occasional fact into your pointless diatribes - the concept of a desktop & window metaphor in computer user interfaces came out of research by Xerox at their Palo Alto Research Center, the results of which were demonstrated in 1975, the very same year that MSFT was founded.

Apple unveils larger nanos

Richard Hesketh

@ Mark Aggleton

Your remarks assume that cost is the major factor in the higher UK pricing. It ain't necessarily so. Products cost more in the UK because enough people are prepared to get their wallets out & pay the higher prices. Until we effectively veto products selling at higher prices like this, manufacturers will, of course, keep charging the higher prices - we really have ourselves to blame, to a large extent!

Apple squeezes out iPhone update before Black Hat

Richard Hesketh

@ James - do your research

The story only mentions two particularly important/interesting fixes for OS X - I've updated my MacBook overnight & there are many more patches in there that the article does not discuss. If you're going to attack Apple's maintenance of its platforms, then at least do so from a well-informed standpoint - ElReg news articles != exhaustive release notes!

Accusing a vendor of security through obscurity simply because their market share is small is just petty, small-minded and really rather stupid.

BT matches analysts' forecasts

Richard Hesketh

For pity's sake stop whinging

Okay, so other countries have faster services. Okay, so complex, rich websites loading a bit quicker would be nice, moving large files & emails in/out faster would be good too. But I'd contend that the great majority of home users probably aren't making maximum use of their 8mb ADSL Max service at the moment (discounting those who are still on 512k/1mb/2mb - bet there are still a few of those...).

Right now I don't feel I really /need/ 24mb to my home, much less 100mb! Personally I can wait for the applications to start coming along - even if this does present a chicken-egg dilemma the 7mb (typical) I get from ADSL Max is quite adequate for now, thanks.

iPhone hackers disclose vulns and hunt for clues

Richard Hesketh

CPU

WRT Andy Blackman's earlier tilt at someone blaming Intel:

1. The platform's not really the issue here, anyway - most of the problems seem to be in application-layer security from what I've read.

2. The 'Samsung ARM11' processor is so called because, although manufactured by Samsung, it uses an ARM CPU core licensed from Intel (or possibly Marvell, if it's XScale - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture)

Customers give new ISP market thumbs down

Richard Hesketh

Vote with your feet

Anyone who claims they don't have a choice just isn't trying. I watched Demon's service degrade after Thus got it's claws in, and jumped ship. I'm delighted with the service I currently get from Zen, and a subscription to Which Online would get you access to their latest report which recommends a number of ISPs who get consistently good ratings from their subscribers. I'm sure there are plenty more good ISPs out there - I can only echo the second poster (above) - you get what you pay for - don't sign with TalkTalk or Orange and expect first-class service, it's just not realistic.