Witness demeanour

> It's not like the video-part of it adds anything to proceedings that the court can act on ("This witness is obviously lying because he looks a bit shifty", etc.)

Actually that is something the court will take into account. The magistrate (or judge & jury) will often refer to the demeanour and manner of a witness if it goes to the veracity of their evidence. Police officers are witnesses in the same sense as any other witness, and it worries me that permitting them to give evidence behind a veil will give the prosecution a small but significant advantage. Sometimes money is worth spending in the interests of justice.

Everything about this is awesome

I am absolutely loving reading every little snippet about this -- so much nicer than day job news of the form 'here's a grey humming box that's 1.06% better than last year's grey humming box'.

The company will push out a patch

that won't be received cos the data doesn't work.

Every time my eyes see 'Bookeen'...

...my brain sees 'Broken'.

'professional facilitation of agile elaboration workshops'

I'm willing to bet that no-one, not even the author of that document, knows what that phrase means.

Presumably they just hire people who say 'yeah baby, I'll facilitate the crap out of those agile elaboration workshops, and professionally too'.

loanmod-gov.net

is currently serving a single file that looks like Cisco firmware. Odd.

Alternatively they could get rid of this farce altogether

or at the very least withhold the signer numbers until the petition closes to prevent bandwagoning.

Doctors be prepared

for a whole new type of RSI!

Sounds familiar

An organisation reinventing itself and suing everyone... hmmm, sounds SCO familiar.

Apple

should take heed; last time I was asked to assent to modified T&Cs on my iPhone, it said 'page 1 of 90'.

Who cares if it's any good

when it's that shiny?

Funnily enough they phoned me the other day

BT: would you like our broadband service? [5 minutes of blah free crap software]

Me: can you give me a static IP address?

BT: is that a website?

Me: *click*

whatever happened to

entrapment?

Surely the title should have been

Bear Grylls is an Alpha Fail

@AC

> I can understand why people would be upset about losing a Final Salary Pension but to strike over it is counter productive, especially in the current economic climate.

I understand what you're saying, and if they had said 'everyone takes a 5% pay cut until things improve, or mass redundancies' then I'd have less sympathy for the dissenters. However, shutting the final salary scheme is permanent. You can bet that CSC won't give it back once the economy swings back to a boom cycle.

@AC ITV HD

> Get a freesat box. Simply plug it in instead of your sky box. This is currently the only way of getting ITV HD.

Not true -- Sky HD customers who have had the new EPG update can add ITV HD manually by following the instructions at http://www.tellytoad.com/page/itv-hd-on-sky-hd.aspx

Demon don't know privacy

Today I phoned Demon to get them to check the access lists on a router they manage for my employer. All I gave them was the IP address of the router, and they told me everything I asked for. Didn't even give my name or company. More than a bit scary, and makes this story seem entirely expected.

The cosmos thinks you are a dick.

You now owe me £1.20.

Cat 6 cheaper? Hmm.

To install Cat 6, the average homeowner would have to rip their house apart to bury the cables. Hardly cheaper than PLT, not to mention the millions of tenants that don't have the option.

I have a degree of sympathy for hams being an ex-one myself, but PLT is hardly the same as burning rubbish. Frankly, one of the reasons I let my licence lapse was the high proportion of obnoxious self-important people in the hobby. Ham radio will always be an activity that lives on the margins of 'real' radio users, and something like this will always be round the corner.

Having said all that, if the devices really are in breach of regulations then the authorities must act, although I'm not sure what could be done for the large install base already present.

Where will you find a DVD player in 1000 years?

...or in 50 years, for that matter?

Training

Keith T: 'IT people are often sent on technical courses as an alternative to giving them pay raises.'

Dead right... but an important factor is that most training courses are rubbish, and the delegates thereon walk away with nothing except an attendance certificate and an expenses claim.

In the last fifteen years I've only attended two training courses where the trainers REALLY knew their subjects, were actually good at teaching, and the material in use wasn't hopelessly out of date.

101 looks like a dead project

I'd never even heard of it before this article, but www.101.gov.uk says it's only available in Cardiff, Hampshire, Northumberland and Sheffield -- and now that the Home Office has binned its funding, Leicester has dropped out.

It was already scuppered

because Dan Brown wrote the book.

Sun's support

has got slowly and progressively worse over the years, but sadly it's still the best I've used. I've never dealt with IBM's support operation; anyone care to tell me what I might be in for?

Google and IPv6?

$ host www.google.com

www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.

www.l.google.com has address 209.85.229.147

www.l.google.com has address 209.85.229.99

www.l.google.com has address 209.85.229.103

www.l.google.com has address 209.85.229.104

I see no IPv6 address.

Stupid is as stupid does

Anyone that falls for this was only going to buy the Sydney Opera house from a guy in the pub anyway...

An industry-wide opt-out database

would mean that you'd need to find a way of identifying yourself wherever this matters. Who wants to have to log in to a search engine?

@Aaron et al -- spoofing hotspots

Having relatively recently implemented a web-capture-portal-type authenticating wireless gateway, I gave this a lot of thought... and came to the conclusion that, unless you know in advance what to expect as the host part of the URL when you get redirected to the login page, there's simply no way around this. It's not a new problem, but it's made worse by the sudden proliferation of BT hotspots, as people will expect to see them everywhere rather than in stations and airports.

Bad man carries pocket computer while walking through a town. Pocket computer advertises "BT OpenZone" (or whatever it is) as SSID, and redirects browser traffic to a domain for which he serves a valid SSL certificate. He presents a copy of the BT login page and collects the credentials. The SSL certificate is optional, as most users wouldn't think to check for an encrypted connection before logging in.

ISTR that there's existing malware that does this, advertising something like a "Free Wireless" SSID from its host.

@Neil Hoskins

> Symbian is basically an excellent OS, and S60 is a disliked and muddled mobile phone UI [...]

I stand corrected; I have always conflated the two. Nokia don't exactly go out of their way to differentiate between them, especially to users of their phones!

@Roger Heathcote

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks Symbian is cock. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to pull the battery out of my N82 because some application or other has hung and the OS can't terminate it, or it couldn't find a GSM signal at some critical moment so everything went tits up.

An expensive way to say

"I am a cock".

Getting a job again, and 'sage'

@P. Lee: When I was a contractor, none of my employers (a couple of which were institutions comparable to the one in this story) ever had enough information about me to do a background check, and nor did they show any interest in doing so. I wouldn't be surprised to see this guy back doing sysadmin work somewhere after he's released. Unfortunately for him, he got caught in the US, so he's likely to be 896 years old when he gets out.

@Robert Brockway: The problem is that none of these professional organisations are widely recognised. I've been a sysadmin for 14 years and I've never come across anyone who's a member of 'sage'. It's only now I work in HE that I know a couple of people in the BCS -- and it really is only a couple.

Already in Scotland?

Not in Monklands, where mobiles are still prohibited everywhere (officially at least).

What a waste of money.

That is all.