* Posts by Steve Evans

2772 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007

Tory proposes street-legal Segway legalisation

Steve Evans

One condition...

Given the wibbly wobbly nature of these bl**dy things, all people using them should have insurance to pay for the damage they are going to do as they bounce down between the lanes of stationary London traffic, and a number plate for we can identify them.

Sikorsky X2 superwhirlybird enters ground spin-up phase

Steve Evans
Jobs Halo

@Sam

"Wasn't there a design where two lots of rotors intermeshed?"

Do you mean tandem rotors, one on each end and a body slung between? These are more common than you realise. They have feature in designs dating from the late 40s.

They're used in heavy lifting helos like the CH-47 Chinook (aka the Prince Willy taxi).

Jobs cos that's not a halo, they're supersonic rotor tips!

Cornish lingo gets standard written form

Steve Evans
Coat

@Lyndon Hills

Don't be silly, he's from another planet entirely.

It's the one with the radio active granite in the pocket.

SF's green mayor dreams of electric car heaven

Steve Evans
Thumb Up

but...

Think of all the fun you can have zooming down the hills of SF completely silently, scaring the crap out of pedestrians, whilst at the same time recharging your batteries! Although given the weight of the batteries, I doubt we'll be seeing much of the bullet-esq flying going on!

'Experimental' Linux distro Exherbo eyes serious developers

Steve Evans
Thumb Down

Oh good..

Another package format, just what we need!

Why can't he just put his constructive comments to good use with an already established distro? I bet I can answer that, he did and they disagreed... Ego kicks in, I must be right, I'll make my own, and the Linux fractures open a little wider.

Boeing raygunship fires first blasts in ground testing

Steve Evans
Coat

Expect...

Standard issue camo netting to be replaced with huge mirrors very soon!

Mines the one with the reflective patches sewn onto the elbows.

Mobiles help UK malls track shoppers' every move

Steve Evans

Hmmm...

Distancing themselves from nasty tracking systems, but not brave enough to name the two shopping centres using it.

I'll have a guess though... Lakeside in Essex and Bluewater in Kent.

I bet I'm right on at least one of those.

And if you were watching me at the weekend, I went to Optomatix, then Jessups, saw Jessups price was a bit steep so I went back to Optomatix and shopped there... OKAY?!

Swiss birdman in Alpine backpack-jetplane stunt flight

Steve Evans
Go

Weeeeeeeee

Now that looks like fun!

Certainly would beat waiting for the ferry/chunnel on a cross channel trip... How much cheap booze and fags can you carry?

BT profits nothing to phone home about

Steve Evans

It must be hard...

Keeping a straight face when billing people for that same old pair of copper (or aluminium) cables every month/quarter for 50 years!

Royal Navy warships could run on sunflower oil - if fresh

Steve Evans
Coat

I'm frightened....

What's the point in having a glorified fishing boat running on veggi oil if it means I've got nothing to cook my chips in?!

Mines the one with the greasy marks on it.

O2 XDA Orbit 2 smartphone

Steve Evans

Yee gods...

Flat battery in just over 2 hours... I remember the roasting the N95 got when it first came out, I even had my carrier trying to talk me out of it as an upgrade option because the battery life was supposedly so poor, but not even on the early firmware which was a bit juice hungry, could you murder it that fast!

Guess that's the joy of windows... So can Windows Mobile join botnets?

USAF Colonel goes on the offensive with botnet destroyer plan

Steve Evans

Oh gawd...

So since the arms limitation treaties won't let him have any new bigger nukes to play with, he needs to find another huge weapon he can have that is bigger and better than the rest of the world. (Is it compulsory for all US military men to have micro-penises or do they have them done surgically to render them safe from female double agents?).

So whilst the US of A declares war on 1,000,000 home PCs across the globe, anyone from outside the US of A will wonder why they seem to be having problems visiting any US hosted website as the pipes coming out are all clogged up with Uncle Sam's cyber-nuke fest.

I'm sure the ISPs will love that!

Franco robbed Sir Cliff of Eurovision win

Steve Evans

@Captain Jamie

It's okay, I found some gloves :-D

Steve Evans

Eurovision is always amusing...

You can sum up the entire politics of Europe just by watching.

For example, Ireland and UK are generally nice to each other.

France will never give the UK any meaningful votes, and vice-versa.

All the ex-Russian states are so terrified of upsetting their big red neighbour, they always give it lots of votes, even if the song is purely the sound of a Yak breaking wind process by a Vocoder. At the rate Russia is crumbling round the edges, there will soon be so many ex-Russian states that Russia will win every year!

There is of course one remaining question... How exactly does Israel qualify as being in Europe?

Id Dooms gamers to new shoot-'em-up sequel

Steve Evans

IDDQD IDKFA at the ready...

I'm already loving the idea of a Wii chainsaw... Please do a Wii version!

Lancashire plodcopters in laser dazzle outrage outbreak

Steve Evans
Black Helicopters

More questioning required...

This guy must be one of our secret robot masters.

Think about it... He's holding a laser pointed in his hand, and tracking a moving helicopter accurately enough to dazzle the pilot...

There can be no other explanation!

Home Secretary goes crazy on drugs... policy

Steve Evans

I say....

...they do a random drug test on the contents of the house... Although they'd have to pick a suitable day with a high turnout.

How about when they are all voting for this new bill...

Everyone that votes for the reclassification, go through the green door, roll up your sleeves, then a publicly published hypocrite list comes out the other side.

Boris Johnson bans boozing on London transport

Steve Evans

Ummm...

"Try tackling the "serious crime" of charging long-suffering passengers three quid to travel 200 yards packed like veal calves en route to a French slaughterhouse"

Errr...

1) Get an oyster card...

2) Look at an A-Z occasionally and learn how to walk from Leicester Square and Piccadilly circus the old fashioned way!

I've heard of some people who have even gone as far as walking from Leicester Square to Embankment before, but I think that's just crazy talk.

Freesat launches in UK

Steve Evans

@bluesxman

Exactly... No DAVE and no UK History...

Ummm... I think they're the only non terrestrial (analogue) channels I bother watching.

White House admits non-existent email backups

Steve Evans

@Stuart Van Onselen

It always amuses me... In the US being called a liberal is an insult...

Odd really, as in the UK it generally means you are middle of the road and quite balanced (well they'd have to be given the previous leaders alcohol intake!).

Dope-crazed Canadians sledgehammer iPhone

Steve Evans
Coat

Ummm

But they use clubs on seal pups, not hammers...

Mines the white fur one with blood stains.

Canadian toddler dies after VOIP 911 call

Steve Evans

Hmmmm

Last time I dialled 999 in the UK, they asked me the address... Or has Canada gone all IVR now...

Press 1 for Police, 2 for Ambulance... I seem to remember a Simpsons sketch about this...

How to destroy 60 hard drives an hour

Steve Evans
Flame

Hehe...

Not as much fun as my method... For years I've been destroying old hard drives for work... I used to take them apart and use the platters to make wind chimes. Given that most drives stripe data across multiple platters, once they're removed from the spindles and strung together (also involved having some small holes drilled in them), you'd really be hard pushed to get any sense out of them.

However, recently I had a big batch of them which the boss insisted I destroyed completely without any chance of data being recovered, he even asked for proof... Easy... Line the drives up and slice them in half (case and all) with an oxyacetylene cutting torch. Much fun... I took half a drive back to the office and asked if he'd like me to plug it in!

I'll admit thermite would be more spectacular, but with a torch you can be far more creative... I'll see what I can do...

The icon, well come one, it's gotta be hasn't it!

Police go slow with encryption key terror powers

Steve Evans
Black Helicopters

This act is rather concerning...

I, and I'm sure many of you out there in techie land, have files that are encrypted lurking on your harddrive, which we do not have the key too... Many items of software, especially shareware, send you a licence key file which you have to either copy into a specific directory.

So how exactly do the feds determine which files are encrypted and known by you, and which are nothing to do with you really, and you don't have any idea what the key is?

The stupid thing is if you really want to encrypt and hide things, there are many encryption tools available (truecrypt for example) which can create an encrypted volume with multiple keys, which means you can conform to the law and provide the cops with a key, which will open the volume. What they don't realise is there is another key, which will open another volume from the same file where you can hide whatever you like. From the encrypted volume file it is impossible to tell if it contains only the one encrypted collection of files, or if there is a second one hidden in there too.

Lenovo ThinkPad X300 sub-notebook

Steve Evans

Awwww

That's techy pr0n and no mistake!

Funny how everyone is snotty about "only" 60Gb of storage, only a couple of years ago that would have been generous on a laptop!

I would love on, but at the moment my trusty R52 is working fine, so I can't justify it... The X300 just makes me all misty eyed over what is bound to come in a year or two when it does get to upgrade time... *drool*

Only thing I would complain about is the screen. The reviewer seems to think having a widescreen is a plus point... To me they're annoying. I have 1400x1050 of real estate here on the R52, and I like having 1050 vertical. To me laptop with widescreens feel like I'm operating it from inside a post box.

Japanese council worker in 750k smut site pornathon

Steve Evans
Coat

20 a minute?

Wow, I'm impressed by the capacity of his pipe!

It's the one with the Ben Dover film Co logo on the back.

No-fly list grounds US Air Marshals

Steve Evans
Black Helicopters

Isn't it amazing...

...that in this day and age, they are still matching people on name only.

Given that it isn't hard to get a fake ID, and therefore a passport, matching on someone's name is pointless to put it mildly. Come to think of it, changing your name by legal methods would probably fox them completely anyway.

Result, the list is pointless.

Needless to say, as I possess a pretty common name, I don't intend on going anywhere near the US of A.

The battle of Lesbos: Exclusive combat pic

Steve Evans

You're

...Back from the pub a tad early today... Or are they wifi enabled?

HP pulls memory Missing Link from bottle of beer

Steve Evans

@Ishkandar

Does it matter if you change the value by looking at it? At least you know the original value, so you can look at the other side and change it back.

@Lee Sexton, just because something has been developed longer, it doesn't mean it will be cheaper. Mr Rolls and Mr Royce have been making cars longer than Mr Lada....

Grand Theft Auto 4 queue man stabbed in head

Steve Evans

Ahhh...

Of course, silly me... Thanks for pointing that out Mr Vaz, computer games and movies are the cause of all violence in society...

The crusades and Jack the Ripper were caused by a particularly violent Punch and Judy act.

Tw*t.

Mr Vaz, the problem is that some people in society have no respect for others. These people have always existed. Maybe if your government hadn't made parents punishing their children for being bad a legal tightrope, the little oiks might have learnt a little respect early on in life.

MP launches ten minute rule bill on in-UK roaming

Steve Evans

@AC

There's something very important you need to know about mobiles in the UK.

First we have things called NIMBYs, these are moaning characters (usually retired - Think Victor Meldew, assuming you know who he is). They complain that the view from their telescope over the trees at the back have been blighted by an ugly phone mast.

Interestingly they're also the first to complain about lack of signal on their mobile phone.

Personally I'd be more impressed to see some phone coverage provided in the underground, it's damn annoying getting messages delivered 2 hours late (the retry period on some networks seems to be based on geological time) just because you happened to be stuck in a packed tube carriage when someone tried to send it to you... Then again, ringing phones could get annoying... How about just have SMS work?

Botnet agent plays lost sheep to avoid detection

Steve Evans

Annoying...

There is a simple solution to most of this.

Most botnets are used to send spam, the zombied machine connects to whichever server is the MX for a domain, and pretends to be another email server relaying a message for one of it's users.

So by default ISP's should restrict connection to SMTP servers so end user machines cannot connect to any SMTP servers apart from the ones owned by the ISP.

Your run of the mill AOL,Tiscali,BT customer uses the email address that came with the ISP, so they'd be fine. The rest probably use web based systems like gmail/hotmail etc.

The more techy savvy of us, who lets face it aren't really the big risk when it comes to ending up on a botnet, would of course have some kind of web interface on the ISP so we can permit other SMTP servers, or open it up for all. Please note web interface, not a call centre in India! (Done that once this week already thanks!)

It's not as if it's a hard thing to spot from an ISP level. They spend so much cash and technology mangling P2P, it wouldn't take 10 minutes to spot zombie behaviour, nobody normal initiates over a thousand SMTP connection in a day for starters. That would be enough to pass on their details to the sales team and send them an internet security package, or at least some advice on protection!

Skype comes to mobile (almost)

Steve Evans

@Ash

Worse than that... WiFi capable handsets like the N95 from Orange/Vodafone etc, are crippled at source so apps like Fring can't do voip over WiFi and it has to go over GPRS, which is definitely not something to try when you're roaming!

Unless you happen to change your handset model number to a generic Nokia one, and then flash the handset with a new firmware release... All theory of course... *cough* would never do it *cough* it didn't really work like a charm and save my bacon in a shopping centre in Eastern Europe... *cough*

Asus Eee PC 900 Linux Edition

Steve Evans

@David Benoit

The speakers are now under the keyboard.

And the reason the keyboard doesn't flex in the middle is because the keyboard's metal backplate is sitting on the top of the 3 big chips and acting as their heatsink! So no cold fingers on a winter night with this little baby!

The terror dam of doom that looms over Boise, Idaho

Steve Evans

Ummmm....

"The most vulnerable city in the US, according to the study, is New Orleans"

Is there anything of New Orleans left to destroy? last time I checked the worlds richest nation had made bugger all progress in clearing up the flood damage.

eBay slams UK.gov touting ban

Steve Evans
Stop

Nanny state strikes again...

Don't HM Gov have anything better to do? You know, like selling us further down the river to the US of Europe?

If I buy a couple of tickets for one of these premium events and then find I'm unable to go, why the hell should I be prevented from selling a ticket I cannot use on ebay?

I guess eBay should be able to set a max bid on a ticket, so a ticket cannot be sold above face value, or maybe face value plus 5% to cover the eBay commission. That sounds like a nice middle ground solution to me, although we all know what eBay are like at policing listings. I've lost count how many listings I have reported that have "BMW not Audi not VW not Merc not Ford" in their title. I could give them a regular expression to spot these if I could find someone willing to listen!

As someone else has already mentioned, e-touting is pretty new. I'm sure all the touts can remember how to do it the traditional way in a big coat with large pockets outside the venue. "Pssst, 'ere gov, do you need a ticket?"

If they really want to stop this, surely the thing to do is stop the ticket agents selling 200 tickets to one person in the first place!

I wouldn't park there, mate - Honda adds sat nav warnings

Steve Evans

@Lazy Gun

Yes and no...

I own two Honda motorcycles, and now it's getting to that time of year again, I know I can toss a coin, pick either once, and start it with ease even after an extended winter holiday.

I also drive an 11 year old German car (BMW) with over 150,000 miles on the clock, which has cost me less than £500 in parts during the last 3 years, a big chunk of that would be the headlamp and radiator that the boulder throwing motorway gritter took out for me last winter. Apart from that it's just been brake pads, filters, oil and a couple of hours of my time servicing it myself. I can't fault it.

Steve Evans

I defy their GPS...

... to let me drive into a railway station car park and not explode!

Dubai mobe cracking demo barred by Heathrow boffin bust

Steve Evans
Black Helicopters

Ha.

More than likely HM Gov just wanted a copy of the source code that's 10,000 times faster than the version they have.

I bet next time he'll send the PC + phone via DHL a week in advance!

Given the physical size of MicroSD cards these days, you could smuggle who knows how much "restricted" material on something you could hide in your ear!

The iPhone learns to read

Steve Evans
Coat

Not the first time an Apple device does handwriting recognition...

Hope it's better than their earlier attempt... Cue one of my favourite jokes...

Q) How many Apple Newton owners does it take to change a light bulb?

A) Faux! Their to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.

Sorry, it's the one with the Motorola 8500 in the pocket.

Women love chocolate more than password security

Steve Evans

Agreed...

"Little attempt is made to verify the authenticity of the passwords"

Enough said...

I'd have given them something that looked like a password for a freebie too.

Hell I've had fake business cards, with fake phone numbers in the past to get freebies at shows and to fob off pushy salesmen!

Must get some more printed...

Monroe BJ film - world exclusive still

Steve Evans
Go

Blimee...

You've started early this week, it's nowhere near Friday yet!

Nokia admits DVB-H still not taking off

Steve Evans

Just because you can...

Doesn't mean you should!

Make an N95 with a better camera flash, and a better GPS chipset (i.e. one that locks on in under 2 minutes!) and I'll be a happy man.

Oh, and recompile the old carddeck games so they run on S60 rev 3! I'm sure you'll find more calls for that on various blogs than you will for "I wanna watch tele!".

O2: We didn't know we were capping 3G data speeds

Steve Evans

I love that phrase...

"A small proportion..."

Whenever I see that, I read "99.9%"

Can we have a show of hands? How about an El Reg vote?

Sharp unwraps 'world first' Intel Atom phone

Steve Evans

Oh dear...

Another gutsy little CPU and nice device dragged to a screaming halt by a huge bloated OS.

You only have to look at the Eee to see what you can do with a nice light OS, for a fraction of the price. No hard drive required!

Now if only the made an Eee phone....

Guitar maker Gibson thrashes out more robo-axes

Steve Evans
Coat

But does it...

Automatically adjust the truss rod to keep the action nice and low, but avoid buzzing the frets?

Mine the one with the Ibanez logo on the back

London store brews £50-a-poop cat-crap coffee

Steve Evans

Pah!

Call that rare?

I'll happily eat some beans and sell them to you for £100 per 100g... But you'll have to fish them out from the U-bend yourself!

O2 PR calls Reg readers 'techie nerds'

Steve Evans

I suspect...

... that O2 only have two classes of customer...

1) Techie nerds (us lot)

2) Gullible Joe Public

Needless to say they don't like us, because we're the ones that poke holes in their contracts, question their adverts and report them to the ASA.

Ofcom slaps Beeb for Live Earth swearing

Steve Evans
Coat

Missed opportunity there...

"The BBC said in reply it had "taken note" of Ofcom's findings"

Anyone with a sense of humour would have told them to "fuck off!"

Sorry, mines the one with the feed the world patch on the back.

BBC vs ISPs: Bandwidth row escalates as Tiscali wades in

Steve Evans

Hardly a shock...

...given that Tiscali's network is barely capable of handling the traffic they currently have.

And their technical support can barely handle the levels of lying and misinformation required to fob off people reporting problems.