Posts by Pierre

May I be the first...

... to spout the obvious "Yo momaship so fat <insert lame bumfin-related pun here>"

It's always fun

It's always fun to see how everyone seems to assume that life *must* be of the water-and-carbon-based variety. Hey, there couldn't be intelligent life there anyway as it's mainly a waterworld, how would bipeds survive?

Needless to say, the probability of any lifeform co-existing with us in the same timeframe is pretty low, now they would have to communicate using the same physical media (and the same sensory systems). So all in all, the chances of poor aliens being hit by Bebo spam is negligible. And it's that much crap that Beboers won't be slinging at their earthly siblings (including me). So carry on, by all means! Actually, we should probably send the whole Bebo servers in outer space, to, you know, increase the chances of the message reaching its alien target. Maybe Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Twitter et al. want to join in (or "out", in this case)?

Workers are surprisingly loyal

Given that their employer will very happily fire them instantly for nothing more than a pat on the back from the shareholders, employees are surprisingly expensive to divert from the "right path".

This survey goes to show how much more loyal than the employer the employees are.

On a sidenote, this article is seriously lacking in the PH department.

Major flaws. Actually the whole system *is* a huge scam.

So how's that supposed to work then? I should register my content and get the revenue from people reusing it? What if the "thief" reused content from several sources -some of them possibly unregistered-? Does the whole revenue go in MY pocket, making ME the thief? What if a bunch of fast, money-hungry wankers register all possible content before I have the chance to do so? Do MY revenue goes to THEM then? What part of the "redirected" revenue goes to the useless leeches implementing the crappy system?

Good grief, this system is even worst than the US patents (and that's saying something).

Leeching: the safe way to make money in tough times.

Nice to see El Reg advertising shameless scams. Not.

Debian goodness?

"Ubuntu 9.04 has arrived, offering Debian goodness for netbooks, desktops, and servers"

I think my netbook, laptop*, desktops and servers will be fine with their current full-fledged "Debian goodness" for now, but thanks for advertising the dumbed-down version. Anything but MS, as the saying goes.

* nah, no "s" for netbook or laptop, I'm kinda short in the *[book][top] department.

Yeah, sad day indeed

Regardles of whether one approves of TPB , erm, "philosophy", this is bad. Very poor prosecution case, no understanding of the underlying tech or principles whatsoever, this case is not going to solve any of the perceived "problems" of the recording industry. If anything, it will trouble the water a bit more. There could -should?- have been a reflexion on IP in the modern world, but all we saw was "they stole from us m'lud. We can't prove it and we don't know what they did or how they did it, but they are bad, honest m'lud, believe me". Pathetic.

Bad justice is worst than no justice at all. In this case, I reckon the naughty IP-infringing will not decrease but strive as a reaction to a trial that was so much of a comedy that everyone involved will perceive it as unjust (no matter the final verdict, the MPAA, RIAA et al. lost all the benefits of winning by bringing up an utterly unresearched and ridiculous case in the first place).

Pirate as that's what cool kids do. In Somalia.

Physical access

Anyone with physical access to a mac basically owns the machine. Yes, contrarily to some opinions expressed here, I think it's a problem. Not for the home user, of course, but it makes "shared" or public Macs potentially insecure. Not new though.

As for the Linux threat, well it's all well and good but why would you bother? If you have root access, you can bloody well replace the damn whole kernel (an "exploit" which works on every architecture, not only unpatched x86 systems as the "attack" mentioned here).

Just another point: when you write "without creating much in the way of clues that an attack is taking place", I suppose you're aware that the actual "attack" ends with the gain of root access, way before any fiddling with /dev/mem takes place. That makes the technique described a "hacking trick" -in the noble sense of hacking-, NOT a vuln or an attack.

Possibly illegal headline?

"IBM fingered over early Linux mistakes"

Is that title a crime under the brand new law about extreme porn? Thumb up the IBM [laugther ensues]

Oh, and thumb up for the nice article, too.

Well and good but

Desktop environments are for sissies.

Mine's the one with "TWM" embossed on the back.

Puh-lease NO PATCH for this one

Also, it would be kewl to use some more malignant stuff as the payload -low-level format of all physical media mounted does spring to mind. Those annoying lusers drowning my mail server by forwarding 100MB ppt "jokes" or "mantras" (for 10 lines of text each) desserve it.

@ the bunch of braindead Vista tr0llz here!

You lot seem to think that "Vista runs fine on my $2000 gaming rig -after 2 month of heavy tuning" means "Big structures with thousands of 10-yo low-end machines should migrate to Vista".

Though I am a vocal *NIX zealot, I wouldn't advocate a massive migration to Linux or BSD for state administration in money-scarse times, either: in spite of the savings on hardware and licenses, the cost of staff retraining (or lost work hours) would be huge. It's even worst with a very expensive *erm* OS *cough* needing expensive new hardware. Especially as said *erm* OS' obsolescence is planned for later this year..

The guy is tech-illiterate and has no Vista hands-on experience... but who cares? He read complaints from state workers and saw the costs of Vista, that's more than enough to make such a policy. If you really, really need the latest, most expensive, least efficient and soon-to-be obsolete OS*cough*, you should have to justify why. It shouldn't be Vista-specific, either.

I doubt any politician have any hands-on experience on any issue they discuss. Which politico lost their house in the credit crunch? Which one ever went to war in Iraq? Which one ever got to guide a space shuttle? Which one had to suffer from gambling, or from sex abuse? Which one ever went to jail? Which one has hands-on experience on stem cell research? They just read up. That's good enough most of the time -when they ask for the right people's opinion, that is.

To the person here who dissed Linux on laptops and netbooks: most low-ressource portable machines (AKA netbooks or whatever) run massively faster with linux than with windows, the only problem -sales-wise- is stupid lusers unable to cope with a slightly different GUI. Those are lost with Vista, too. As for regular laptops, I do own two, they both dual-boot, and my custom Debian installs run better (including hardware support) than the factory-installed Vistas.

Stop, you twats

This law wasn't about spam. It was about "spoofing" the headers. With an aggravation for spam.

I'm glad it was barred. Now keep only the spam part, and it's good to go. Also, if this particular campaign crashed AOL servers, I supposed this guy could still be charged with that, regardless of the fact that he modified some headers.

Hehehe 2 days before DOOM!

Or, most probably, 2 days before the next Conficker C insignificant update. The other variants (e.g. the B variant, you know, the most widespread one) call home constantly already, and we're not dead yet.

""We have no idea what Conficker is going to do on April 1," Kaminsky said."

Well Mr Kaminsky might not know, but I think I have a pretty good idea. Nothing is gonna happen. Nothing noticeable at least.

El Reg is beginning to look a lot like the Daily Mail.

@ annoyingly clueless AC

"that was a typo. The process i meant to refer to is Gluconeogenesis."

Would you please be kind enough and stop this cut'n'paste of random cool-looking words from some Wiki article that you didn't understand?

Given the bad faith you display here, it's probably safe to assume that even the personal "facts" you gave are at best inexact. That closes it really. Go back to eating lard, as you seem to believe it's good for you.

Oh, and about your food diary: put the bloody things on the scale. Stangely enough, "pizza" is a single line, but one slice of pizza is not the same as 2 pizzas and a half.

I think MS lovers need to understand...

The aim of this tool is NOT to remove bugs from the code. Quite the contrary. The purpose of this tool is to INCREASE the number of crash-inducing bugs in released code. More precisely, it is here to allow developpers to willingly leave crash-inducing bugs in the code. It analyses the crash, and tell you if you need to fix the bug, or not. Meaning that it expressely flags fricking crash-inducing bugs as release-acceptable. Before the crash-binggy-bang-tool: your code is buggy, it crashes, you try and fix it. Whith the new tool, your code is buggy, it crashes, but the crashes might not leak info to crackers so hey, no need to bother, just release the buggy code as-is.

Also, my understanding (but I didn't really look at it closely) is that it does not examine the code itself, but the crash. Meaning that your code may still have gaping, easily exploitable security holes in it and still be considered secure by our banggy little friend. How wonderful.

Clearly, only MS and their brainless minions could think this is a good idea.

A "game-changer", really. I unfortunately have to agree. This tool will make stinky turds of what would otherwise have been only shoddy code. Yay! Where be the fireworks, we clearly need to celebrate.

While I'm a vocal MS hater...

I must admit that in this case Mr Justice got it right. Internal discussion on the possible deception of customers by the campain does not constitute admission of guilt. I merely proves that MS internally raised the question, which is certainly a *good* thing.

Now I'm still convinced that:

-the campain was voluntarily misleading

-Vista is an immensenly crappy OS

-MS (and especiall MS marketting) needs their stinky arse kiscked.

But it ought to go to real trial.

Marketting wreck?

I do hope Samsung is not targetting El Reg readership with this one. Granted, the name is suitably awesome in a very nerdy way, I doubt it will be enough. This drive seems to be very, very light in the "friend" department*. For that kind of price, you'd expect better. Samsung should take advice from Asus.

* certainly not enough for El Reg, though I reckon that the same "friend" might gain significant audience of the 4chan type... just scribble the date on the drive.

OK, let's save some time.

I suggest we stopped looking for people who broke into the Pentagon system, and focused on an easier task: find the few people around who *didn"t* crack the mighty Merkin Defense systems. That ought to save some time. Then instead of punishing the guilty, we could just give a small recompense to the innocents. A lollipop or something. That ought to save some serious money, too.