* Posts by Al

52 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Apr 2008

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BT slammed for 'importing' cheap Indian contractors

Al

@ Beelzeebub

Not just the IT industry, sad to say. Several publishing companies are doing the same thing.

Tories, LibDems under election day cyberattack?

Al
Paris Hilton

What's the point?

Why a DDoS attack on polling day? The great British public aren't so fickle as to vote for the only party with a working website on the day, are they? I haven't done door-to-door canvassing for years, so maybe someone with later experience can tell me if this comes up a lot.

And DDoS? Come on! An interesting hack subverting the message would be far more stylish....

Paris for a cheap 'putting something in the box' joke.

Swedish factory fined $3,000 for robot attack

Al

Darwinism red in (gear)tooth and (robot)claw

Come on, the critical part here is that the guy didn't check the power properly before fiddling about trying to get it to work again. Maybe there should have been failsafes, but it's not like the machine went on a rampage all by itself.

Web 0.2 archivists save Geocities from deletion

Al
Heart

Farewell, Geocities

I'm sure I have a couple of Geocities accounts from way back when - assuming they've ascaped the purges. Somewhere, they'll be preserved into perpetuity now.

Oh dear.

Moderatrix quits El Reg: Latest

Al
Unhappy

Well, she was right....

Assuming this isn't a further jape by the rapscallions of Vulture Towers, Ms Bee did have a very valid point.

I do hope we see her back. I think the lads got a little out of hand and have been suitably chastened for it.

The Equalizer prowls Albert Square

Al
Joke

I'm sure I won't be the only one

... who's tempted to ring up the BBC and shout 'Think what you're doing!' down the phone.

Or maybe I so need a life.

Rail workers get shirty with see-through blouses

Al
Thumb Up

Tell me....

Is the Sun photo one of the National Express blouses, or is it an illustration of what a see-through blouse looks like for the benefit of its readers? Inquiring minds need to know, and so on....

Man robs convenience store with Klingon sword

Al
Joke

There's a Wildean irony here

If for no other reason than someone who should get out more, may yet end up being put away.

US smutmongers want big bucks bailout

Al
Paris Hilton

In the interests of the environment

... shouldn't 'we' be bonking less and producing fewer humans? Maybe the money should be put into online pr0n, thus enabling more males to stay at home fiddling instead of going out and potentially breeding.

Paris, because the world is ready for another night in her.

I've only shagged two blokes, insists Paris Hilton

Al
Paris Hilton

Is it panto season?

Can we shout 'Oh no you haven't?' at the top of our voices every time she says this?

Indulge your fecal fantasies with a doll that craps

Al
Paris Hilton

Curse this weak pound

I was almost tempted to get one for my neice - but it's too pricey now sterling is sinking fast.

I'm pressing my tummy hard to make myself cry and wee....

Reg readers in the dark over extreme porn

Al
Black Helicopters

Oh dear.

Plod is suggesting the image gets referred to the Internet Watch Foundation? We're doomed for sure if they're making the decisions.

Leicester nursery loses memory stick with children's details

Al
Paris Hilton

"The only question remaining...."

".... is whether staff at the nursery involved actually followed the council's policies."

Which is the whole ID cards/personal data/medical data/whatever in a nutshell.

The Council policies are pretty good. They sound inspiring and comforting. My money's on someone cutting a corner or two, maybe even to save the Council some money, and inevitably the most junior person involved will be thrown out as a warning. It won't fix anything, any more than it did for the benefits fiasco, et al.

Lib Dem stripogram councillor quits politics

Al

Oh, the irony

Sad but true - most of the numpties in the Liberal Democrats are extremely illiberal. Eight years as a Lib Dem councillor had me working with some bewilderingly narrow-minded bigots....

Gordo entertains a couple of lapdancers

Al
Paris Hilton

Fair play to the girls

This is actually a very serious matter - albeit not IT related (but I saw it was in Bootnotes). Re-classifying dancing establishments as 'encounter' venues will allow local authorities to charge silly money for licences, and/or simply ban establishments on a whim. Another easy vote-winning target, but ultimately not so good in the long run.

More importantly, this is another sign of a creeping 'new morality' coming in. The arguments against the clubs tend to the moralistic and anecdotal, as opposed to factual. 'Extreme' pornography has already been outlawed for no good reason, and this is just another step.

Bottom (ahem) line - if you enjoy consensual adult nudity, you should be prepared to either fight for it or lose it.

Paris, because give it another 10 years this is all you'll be allowed to see of her on the 'net.

Manuelgate's goth vampire stripper fades from MySpace

Al

Is it just me, or are people missing the point?

This isn't a 'she was wearing short skirt and asking for it' argument, this is an illustration of the tabloid press's double standards. Had Brand and Ross not made the call, Ms Baillie might have been the subject of an expose: 'Manuel's grand-daughter is sexy swinger!' sort of bollocks. No-one deserves to have their grandfather rung up and subjected to those idiots, but it's interesting to see the way the tabloids jumped.

I'm tempted to suggest that had Ms Baillie not had a well-loved grandad, the story would be 'Russel Brand's nights of love with bondage babe' or somethinge qually daft....

US Navy SEAL uniforms: Now with built-in tourniquets

Al
Alert

Tamponage

... is the treatment of a wound by putting a plug into it. I'll stop there before it gets messy.

Plymouth nurse punted panties on eBay

Al
Paris Hilton

Oops!

Poor lamb. The silly girl shouldn't have used her work address, though. General 'bad practice' aside, it would leave her open to stalkers.

Europe gives temps same rights as permanent staff

Al

About time too....

Our beloved government has been closing off all the advantages to being a temp/contractor over the years. Now the only thing in favour of it is some level of flexibilty, but that's two-edged. Extending legal protection to temp staff isn't going to harm the market - or if it does, it's only going to damage the companies playing the system.

Maybe it'll be a manifesto promise for the next General Election....

UK puts £55m into disabled parking reform

Al
Coat

Hoorah! More databases!

Is this part of a job creation scheme for out of work bankers? "You, too, can earn your old income doing Government Databases!" It'll cost a fortune, and be riddled with failures.

Cue a run of 'Daily Mail' stories of elderly paraplegics having their cars clamped because some numpty somewhere has put in the wrong data - and meanwhile anyone else gets one free with every five-figure donation to the Labour Party.

You don't need to be Mystic Meg to work all of that out....

(And those blue fibreglass invalid carriages were, unfortunately, death-traps. I can think of a lot of people I'd issue one to, but making them compulsory would be bad.)

Mine's the one with the blue badge, but it used to be orange.

GooTube snubs McCain's call for DMCA favoritism

Al

'Merkins don't do irony -

but if they did....'

This is wonderful.

Sarah Palin ordered to preserve Yahoo! emails

Al
Paris Hilton

I'm with James

Doubtless Mrs Palin will have deleted all the e-mails from every hooky account she has 'just as soon as I found out they weren't safe'.

The next challenge is going to be finding the new ones that have been set up.

(And why did she copy her husband into so many mails? Can the poor girl not think for herself?)

Jacqui Smith resurrects 42-days after Lords rejection

Al
Black Helicopters

A cunning plan....

The 42 day bill will be held until something bad happens, and then brought in during the predictable 'foaming at the mouth' jingoism afterwards. Cue the press howling that any attempt to oppose the new terror laws being 'an insult to the victims', blah blah blah, and Ms Smith wins.

Marketing body condemns 'draconian' Olympic law

Al

What did they expect?

I'm amazed that this is a surprise to anyone. The Olympics marketing machine has been doing this sort of silliness for years, and whoever's in power when 2012 comes won't do anything to stop it. Labour haven't the backbone, and the Tories won't do anything to upset 'big business'. (If the Lib Dems are in power then by the time they've stopped bickering about it, the Olympics will have passed.)

Cheer up - in four years time it'll be someone else's problem.

Israeli hamlet plans DNA database for dog poop

Al
Black Helicopters

Marvellous idea

Why haven't we done it in the UK? Bring back the compulsory dog licence and include DNA sampling as part of it - easy enough to check if the dog's licenced then. If and when Rover's poop turns up somewhere it shouldn't (inevitable 'prima faeces' joke...) it's easy enough to check the owner.

Don't see why it can't be cats too, to be honest.

Anonymous hacks Sarah Palin's Yahoo! account

Al
Paris Hilton

@ tony trolle

Just looked at a pic of me and my face lines up through the glasses, so it could be a relatively weak prescription.

Back on topic, while it's a bad thing to do, it's worrying that the woman who could potentailly have her finger on the button is so naive when it comes to passwords.

(There again, bless her, she's found out how naive she is about abstinence education....)

'Water bears' survive in outer space

Al

It's such a great name....

It was only going to be a matter of time before someone found a use for tardigrades.

Mind you, if that's what I was called, I'd go for 'water bear' instead. People don't wonder if you're a window-licker if you're a 'water bear'....

Yes, there was a viable liquid bomb plot

Al
Thumb Up

Isn't reading this article a crime?

People have had their doors kicked in for less, I'm sure.

That said - tip-top article. Very informative and sensible.

Doctors rally for right to call UK.gov quangonista a 'sh*t'

Al
Paris Hilton

Smart move

... after all, we've got so many doctors it's OK to stop one working because he has robust opinions.

The Scottish side of the medical profession has become riddled with a culture of turning people in for trivial transgressions and generally buggering up things for them. This latest episode is really no surprise. While it's a matter of debate whether the esteemed Dame is indeed a 'sh!t', the actions of her acolytes in defending her from harsh words are undoubtedly 'sh!tty'.

Paris, because she's not too bright either.

Taiwanese firm to sue over armed raid at IFA

Al

Pic request....

Can we have the picture of the gun-toting blonde officerene again, please?

Lockheed demos AI-based roboforce command tech

Al
Paris Hilton

The sepps are no scholars of antiquity....

else they'd have crowbarred the acronym into Icarus' father Daedalus.

That said, there's a historical parallel anyway - overly arrogant son gets powers thanks to his father and manages to fnck everything up despite warnings.

(Paris, like Icarus, is widely known for going down.)

US Air Force halts plans to establish a Cyber Command

Al
Black Helicopters

The Yanks attacking in cyberspace? G_d help us all....

With their record for 'friendly fire' attacks, how long before sites in the UK get shut down in error.

We're doomed. Doomed!

Suprise at spelling snafu sanctions

Al
Alert

Huh?

Isn't there something very wrong here? If a teacher is tired of correcting the spelling mistakes made by his (or her) pupils, isn't that indicative of the standard of education they've had?

Surely the students should be getting tought how to spell, not having their common mistakes accepted as 'variants'. Or is this to allow exam marking to be outsourced more easily next time round?

Thales wins first UK ID card contract

Al
Black Helicopters

Didn't Thales do the ID card sytem for China?

I used to work for them and vaguely recall that being in one of the issues of the staff newsletter. So at least they'll have experience, anyway.

Inquirer celebrates spammer murder-suicide

Al

Poor taste

In common with a lot of the above, I think the Reg has overstepped the mark on a couple of occasions in the past ('PC poor pop pops pills' springs to mind), it's never sunk to that depth.

None of us like spammers, but to be full of glee when someone is driven to such an act of despair is beyond wrong.

Dead author's estate snatches child's domain

Al
Paris Hilton

Here we go again

Didn't they learn anything from the whole Harry Potter debacle all those years ago? Admittedly, some of the facts here are different - there is no web site, for example, but there is still no commercial use nor any attempt at passing off. Even so, we're back in the same position of a young fan being rolled over by a company more interested in zealously protecting revenue than anything else.

It looks like the estate of CS Lewis has accepted the turkish delight from the film company lawyers. Any reader of the books will know what happens once you do that.

How government will save you from P2P deviance

Al
Black Helicopters

Legal uses for file-sharing....

To ask if there are any 'legal' uses of file sharing assumes that everything being shared is automatically illegal - which is a bad start. If I sit on a torrent distributing ABC or uTorrent, that's perfectly legal.

Labelling P2P sharing of anything as itself illegal just holds back distribution of perfectly legal (but huge) files, such as scientific or government reports where there are no restrictions on copying them.

More worrying, though, is where the 'music industry' is getting these names from. I suspect it's going to be an approach along the lines of Mark Twain's suggestion to 'beat your son once a day - even if you don't know what for, he certainly will'. The RIAA are going to pull names (or rather, IP addresses) out of a hat and send off letters using the ISPs as their catspaw. The letters themselves will have a chilling effect on the recipients - whether or not they've ever been sharing files. They will now think they're being watched and change their behaviour.

Let's keep our fingers crossed for the first test case.

UK ISPs agree to menace their filesharing users

Al
Paris Hilton

How can they tell if the material is distributable or not?

As any fule kno, file-sharing isn't just copyrighted material. If I decide to cane my bandwidth by distributing 'legitimate' files, how will my ISP tell? Are they really going to have an army of people taking a copy of whatever I choose to torrent?

Usual story - extremely crude solution from a government in thrall to big money. Even Paris could think of a better idea.

Rogue SF sysadmin coughs up passwords

Al
Black Helicopters

They couldn't have recruited a hacker because....

... aren't they all 'terrorists' now? It's probably a lot easier all round for the city authorities to lock up one bloke until he tells them the password, rather than prove that an outside hacker could get through their security.

Pretending that access to the system is impossible without the correct password gives the impression the system is, if nothing else, impregnable to unauthorised users. Getting someone else to hack in and set it right would have the US press howling in full-on 'Chicken Licken' mode that any 'terrorist' could have done the same - cue the banning of 'War Games' and every IT professional going on a 'no fly' list.

My money's on the mayor telling our man that they'd already got in, but the trial would go a lot easier if the fiction was maintained.

Apple swipes £121 for 'free' MobileMe trial

Al
Paris Hilton

"Your ignorance is not Apple's mistake"

You have to love it. Apple zealouts pride themselves on everything being so simple and easy to use, yet using a debit card instead of a credit card is a reason for punters to make a 2-month interest-free loan to Apple? Zealouts are very scary people....

Prius hybrid to get rooftop solar panel

Al

How big is the panel?

Sort of an important point, surely? I've a couple of Maplin ones in my car that probably amount to about a square foot of panel all told. They produce 3W - hardly a huge amount. It's going to need to be a dirty great panel to do anything significant for this car.

Government waves cutlass at IT budget

Al

Outsourcing?

Will this mean that sensitive data will instead get lost in 'foreign' countries, so there's the added security of people not understanding it if they find it? It's certainly a

$5.8m payout draws line under FBI's anthrax screw-up

Al
Paris Hilton

Anthrax-sniffing dogs?

How does that work? If a dog sniffs anthrax on you, surely that means you've got the anthrax - and now, so has the dog. Didn't anyone spot the fatal flaw in that plan?

UK clamps down on bus-spotting terror menace

Al
Black Helicopters

It's not the power, but the action....

As any fule kno, it's not whether or not Plod is *allowed* to do it that matters, it whether or not he/she does it that counts. Unfortunately, in our new safer society, arguing the point with the police seems to get you clobbered with 'anti-terrorist' legislation. Telling Plod they can't do something only provokes them....

Flirty texting could land Scots in jail for 10 years

Al
Black Helicopters

More crimes on the statute books - hoorah!

Surely there's already adequate legislation to cover the worst excesses that this new legislation is meant to prevent?

This is just another example of lawmakers going for easy targets. Of course it's a good idea to prevent 'sex pests' (TM Daily Mail) making people's lives miserable, but this iffy legislation seems to have been cobbled together so a bunch of politicians can say they've been tough on sex offenders - while not actually making anyone any safer. No-one's going to want to risk their political career by saying 'This is daft', but who's the law going to protect who isn't already covered? One or two idiots will be cautioned for sending ill-advised texts, and maybe some drunk will end up on page 22 of The Sun for sending a text to the wrong person, but that's likely to be it.

Black helicopter because this is all happening since Alec Salmond found out about my photoshops of him and me at it like pistons.... (i stll <3 u, Alec)

Police protester snap did not breach rights

Al
Black Helicopters

"police attempted to learn his identity from his travel documents"

Interesting line. How much information can the police readily access from 'travel documents' - which I assume to mean tickets?

Note to future protestors - get someone else to buy you an Oyster card for outings.

Russell T Davies bows out of Doctor Who

Al
Coat

the pool in the TARDIS is gone....

I think the fifth Doctor got rid of it when it leaked. Can't quote the episode, which may save me some credibility.

Back on topic - I'm terrified of a 'Jenny in Space' spin-off with the 'daughter'. If ever an episode had a rubbish ending that hinted at a ghastly misbegotten and malformed series coming from it, it was "The Doctor's Daughter".

Extreme porn bill gets final reading

Al
Unhappy

Badly thought out legislation

This new law is a badly thought out piece of vote-grabbing legislation hanging on the coat tails of one family's tragic loss. It's unlikely to save a single life, but has the potential to create thousands upon thousands of new criminals and cost millions in enforcement.

As the (proud?) possessor of a mint copy of Madonna's masturpiece, it gladdens my heart to read that it's both illegal and worth a bit.

Cops demand more time in marathon OiNK investigation

Al
Thumb Down

More silliness

As we're so often told, this sort of thing funds terrorism. Plod is doubtless still looking for the 'hundreds and thousands of pounds' made by OiNK that went straight into the coffers of enemies of the state.

Mel Gibson to star in Edge of Darkness

Al
Thumb Down

Oh dear

There is so much wrong with this idea. A complex and detailed thriller will get 'dumbed down', and you know if Mel gets his way it'll all be down to Zionist conspirators.

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