* Posts by RW

1097 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2007

Bank security guru: Sue your bank for refund

RW
Go

Different in Canada

My bank (Royal Bank of Canada) remains alert and takes the initiative.

Last year I ordered a couple of pretty rare CDs via CDandLP.com, paying online with my CC. Within hours, the bank called to verify that the transaction was valid.

And earlier this year, they called again to tell me my debit card had been compromised, that they'd blocked a fraudulent transaction on my account, and to please come in to get a new card.

I have no complaints.

Sounds like British banks are run by thieves.

[The compromise was apparently a bogus keypad that was capturing numbers and passwords. Many people were affected; the lines for new cards were long when I went in; and they had five tellers assigned to handling that job that day.]

Is iFlorist the greatest website in the universe, ever?

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Coat

@ Armus Squelprom

"our esteemed Moderatix"

Talk about damning with faint praise.

Make that Our Divine Moderatrix, She Who Walks on Water, With a Crown of Stars About Her Divine Visage, Bringing Peace, Joy, and Happiness to the Denizens of the World; She Whose Outstretched Great Toe is Worthy of Worship and Adulation; She Whose Merest Glance Penetrates the Hearts of Believers. [and so on]

Cripey! Just like fake positive reviews, if you're going to suck up to ODM, go for the big time, eh?

Tories to cut IT to keep National Insurance down

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Coat

What he didn't say

"We are going to purge management ranks of the grossly overpaid drones who do not deliver medical are."

Without knowing any details, I'll wager that half, perhaps three-quarters of NHS managers (and their flunkies) could be dispensed with.

Times websites want £1 a day from June

RW
FAIL

@ Ralph 5, "All effort should be rewarded"

No, absolutely not; you have that wrong. A chef may work his butt off, but end up producing horrible food; for that he deserves no reward.

Further, you wrote:

"Everyone producing content through this medium - journalists, photographers, authors, musicians, software developers, etc - deserves to be paid for their work."

Well, where online news is concerned, the chef analogy holds. If Murdoch wants to charge, he's going to have to give people a product worth buying. Today's Times Online is NOT worth buying. Articles are too short, with little analysis, but lots of bias, and there's far too much space taken up by regurgitated publicist productions.

Ah, well, not to worry. Good old market economics will ride to the rescue when the Times Online sees its readership drop precipitously. Free market über alles!

RW
Stop

Requiem for a once-great newspaper

In the few years I've regularly read the Times online, I've seen its journalistic standards droop from not bad to tiresome. If Murdoch wants to charge, he's going to have to raise the journalistic standards a great deal, get rid of news about "celebrities" and how to cook custard, and otherwise make the Times website useful for people with brains.

The Times used to be a global newspaper of record, but not these days.

I anticipate that come June, like many others I'll be dropping the Times from my bookmarks.

It's easy to measure the worth of an online news site these days: just calculate what fraction of articles are devoted to "celebrities". Frankly, what Paris and Britney and all the rest do is of no earthly significance, and if we heard nothing about them, the world would still go ahead. I admit that teenaged girls might wilt for lack of role models, but that's hardly a tragedy. They might learn to be themselves instead of ersatz dollies.

PS: Murdoch is as old as the hills. Instead of trying to impose his withered, aged views on the world, maybe it's time for him to ride off into the sunset. He'll be dead soon enough, though the evil he's caused will live after him.

'Switch to Century Gothic to save the planet'

RW
FAIL

But email doesn't even need fonts

Email is, after all, a plain text medium. It's only dear MS's confusion between the RFCs for email and for newsgroups that led to native html email.

I deliberately use an antiquated email client that can be told "do not attempt to interpret html" because I don't want it fetching images, scripts and style sheets and bringing onto my machine any associated malware.

Dear Diane Blowmehard or whatever her name is would do better to forbid the htmlization of email. And to disable direct printing from email clients. Silly woman.

FBI cyber cop says 'very existence' of US under threat

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Thumb Down

If the threat is serious

Why is any part of the US government still using Windows?

Or is this a case where ignorant lawyers and MS fanbois prevent taking that action?

What puzzles me (as it has other readers): why is an IT section of the government headed by a lawyer? You can't learn about IT security by reading "IT Security for Dummies", dummy!

Yes, Internet Explorer is on the wane in Europe

RW

@ Dazed and confused: "rampant fanbois"

It's no different from the old days of mainframes, when managerial fanbois wouldn't consider for a moment anything but IBM. Just like IBM of yore, MS in first and foremost a marketing operation that peddles second-rate product, and succeeds to a large extent due to the rampant fanbois.

One difference: IBM's dominance of the old mainframe market gave them economies of scale that other computer manufacturers could only dream of, and their software was pretty good, though of course it was nothing like as complex as what runs on our contemporary desktops and servers.

Today, in spite of their market dominance, MS continues to vomit up grossly inferior product with bugs that must cost the world far more than MS's gross intake.

As a nod to the historically minded, the names of the Seven Dwarfs: CDC, Univac, Burroughs, RCA, NCR, Honeywell, GE. And the names of a few other computer manufacturers some of us dimly remember: Philco, Bendix, Raytheon, Royal-McBee, Dec. Some of these names are referents to extremely innovative architectures that, had they been widely adapted, may have significantly altered the course of computing history.

Why do we not have an icon of a papyrus scroll with a bearded scholar weeping over it?

US couple jailed for TV shoplifting brag

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Boffin

@ Mark 65

Read the article again. The whatsits weren't nailed for shoplifting, which is NOT a federal crime; they were nailed for "conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines", which IS a federal crime, thanks to the operation of the interstate commerce provisions of the US constitution.

This may leave the door open to further charges of shoplifting, under state law.

Your understanding of the US legal system is imperfect. A key element of the US system is that it is a federation of independent states, and the states are not creatures of the federal government. Thus the legal system is double barreled: there is both civil and criminal law at both the state and federal levels,

Home Office takes non-action against phone pinchers

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WTF?

Is £2.5m worth government intervention?

I know that all of us would welcome the arrival of a package containing £2.5m in cash, preferably unmarked small denomination bills, but in the larger scheme of things, £2.5m is chickenfeed, a mere bijou, a nothing.

Surely the Home Office has more important grist for its mill?

From where I sit, this looks like yet another example of NuLabour and its minions thinking that no matter is too trivial for them to stick their noses into.

Loud sex ASBO woman back on the job

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Paris Hilton

It's involuntary

She's hardly doing this on purpose. I bet a jelly-filled donut that most of us have had sexual partners or known of people who at the critical moment let loose with the most amazing verbalizations. Some Buddhist sects believe that at the moment of orgasm, one gets a tiny taste of what enlightenment is like; is it any wonder that it inspires the autonomic nervous system to express itself freely?

And that, to me, seems to be an iron-clad defense. "Yes, your lordship, I farted long and loud, but even the emperor Claudius recognized that farting is an uncontrollable natural function which it is harmful to try to rein in." Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of coital ululations.

But underneath all this it's probably the neighbors being jealous of someone who clearly has a rich and satisfying sex life, unlike their own prematurely withered libidos.

Mandy quango says Apple, Amazon are too obscure

RW

No problem too trivial for NuLabour to stick their noses into

But lots of problems are too complex for NuLabour to understand, hence nothing is done about the things that really count.

That's NuLabour for you: stupid, small-minded, ignorant, unimaginative turds.

Undoubtedly this quango is staffed with idiots like those who promulgate the ludicrous, so-called "health and safety" rules. Horrible thought: NuLabour like quangoes as they provide a means of offering employment to the unqualified.

Computer glitch prompts 50 raids on elderly couple's home

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IT Angle

Why it happened

The project leader was the police chief's second cousin's son.

I wax sarcastic in saying that, but it's clear that whoever was in charge of systems development didn't know what they were doing. Did they perhaps use some ancient, screwy, non-relational database system that doesn't offer the equivalent to naked SQL?

Or is it one of those legacy systems that's been in existence for 30-40 years and through the normal processes of "enhancement" has become truly Byzantine in its complexity, with source code lost and original programmers long retired?

Or was it an accountant that pointed out that a cheesecake was cheaper than paying to get the bad data properly purged?

Or all of the above?

End government pre-snoop on stats

RW

"inconsistent with international best practice"

I just about choked when I read that. Is ___anything___ the current ship of fools do consistent with international best practice?

Prediction: if Labour wins the election, you will see a tidal wave of people leaving the UK. This may be a desirable end in the view of Labour because it will help lower the average IQ even further.

Health records riddled with errors

RW

Stupid is as stupid does

If the people trying to build and populate this system are terminally stupid, it's partly because UK government, both national and local, is run by amazingly stupid people these days.

Stupid people in positions of authority invariably resist any input from intelligent people under them, quite rightly believing that it threatens their cozy way of life. Hence, stupid leaders prefer to hire people even stupider, and as you descend the ladder of authority you get into realms of sheer idiocy and moronism.

This is also tied up with NuLabour's distaste for anything that might be construed as elitist, such as intelligence, education, experience, and a realistic outlook on life.

Net downloads cause 'millions of lost jobs'

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Stop

The drop in CD sales

Using myself as a data point, the drop in CD sales has next to nothing to do with downloads.

I have a very large CD collection, but in recent years the number of CDs I buy has dropped to almost nothing. Why? Because I am a classical enthusiast, and I already have pretty much everything I am interested in. I do, indeed, have two downloads, but they were purchased quite legally by a friend from a Russian site. I wasn't sure of the music being worth the $60⁺ price in the case of the faux Popol Vuh album "Yoga" or the $1200 price in the case of the American Gramavision recording of LaMonte Young's "Well-tempered Piano". As it happened, my intuition was right.

Every so often, I do log onto Amazon or CD Universe and buy a few CDs but not often and not many.

Admittedly my situation is probably quite different from mass market pop music lovers, but I doubt I'm unique.

Dell bars Win 7 refunds from Linux lovers

RW
Terminator

Small claims court?

Since the amount at stake is probably under the limit for going to small claims court, that might be a useful route to follow in countries that have such courts. It's supposed to be lawyer-free, btw.

The amusing sequel comes when Dell ignores the judgement you will get against them; you then sic the bailiffs on them and have a truck or an office building seized to be auctioned off to pay the judgement.

Irate Aussies go after US website

RW

Ozzies are just too sensitive and too PC

Onine, I once used the phrase "not worth a piece of coon shit", meaning the turds raccoons leave at the bottom of a tree. (They appear to defecate as they climb.)

Got an angry message from an Ozzie, where "coon" is apparently a pejorative term for Abos.

Interestingly, "coon" also used to be slang for "black person" in the US, but it's day is past and the word is now back to meaning raccoon and nothing else.

But don't let Harriet Harpie-person hear, or she'll add it to her lame equalilty legislation.

Microsoft pushes temporary security fix to IE laggards

RW

@ JC 2 re software bloat

When I worked for then-Burroughs (now Unisys) eons ago, the guys who maintained the Large Systems OS, the famous and elegant MCP, had a policy of alternating releases between new functionality and greater efficiency. New features always had a cost in efificiency, but it was surprising how often the next release reclaimed most, or even all, of the lost ground.

I wish the Linux movement would adopt the same idea. Windows and OS/X I don't care about.

Historian warns against copyright-fight heavy hitting

RW
Grenade

It's just fucking entertainment, people!

Songs and movies. Entertainment, nothing more. And why, therefore, are the governments of the world so hot and bothered to do something about the piracy? Particularly when there are far more pressing issues to be dealt with.

Oh, wait, I forgot: there's a well known reason why the UK's ZanuLabour government is so antsy on the subject: because their minds are too small to encompass the really serious issues of the day. ZanuLabour knows of no aspect of life too small or too trivial for them to pass laws about. To say nothing of under-the-table influence and, no doubt, good old fashioned bribery in some form or other.

A more pointed reason is that the sweeping away of the old music & movie business model has resulted in the shakers and movers of the industry having a shortage of funds to pay for nose candy. If you think of the RIAA and its ilk as addicts facing the problem of having no money to pay for their next hit, all becomes clear.

I used to think this accusation was baseless, but as time has gone on, it's become obvious that it accounts for a great deal of the craziness.

Argos buries unencrypted credit card data in email receipts

RW
Alert

@ Black Betty

> The ijit who thunk this up needs to be introduced to the rough

> end of a very large pineapple.

Clearly, thinking was a minor part of the development of this extraordinarily lame system.

What I fail to understand is why _any_ company would bother with writing their own software for online sales. It's a very complex application which demands in-depth understanding of many issues, security among them, and there are very good canned solutions you can buy off the shelf.

It's against the odds that Joe Troll Programmer will have the breadth and depth of knowledge necessary to do the job right.

One wonders if the day is coming when software for online commerce must be vetted and certified by disinterested third parties before it can be legally deployed.

Street View threatens to throw Eurostrop

RW
WTF?

Over-reaction

I've found Google StreetView very....well, frankly, very entertaining. It's allowed me to find the house I was conceived in many decades ago as well as most of the places I've ever lived. Interesting to see how much change, and how little change, too, there's been.

What I notice, consistently, is how few people are actually shown in Streetview. Maybe it's different in Germany, but in the US and Canada, it's uncommon to see anyone at all (barring drivers of vehicles), and exceptional to see someone imaged sharply enough to allow recognition.

The Germans need to get down off their high horse. Google is already happy to delete "embarrassing" images brought to their attention, and makes a reasonable effort to blur auto license plates and house numbers.

Personally I wish they'd leave the embarrassing images up for their entertainment value, but that's just me.

LibDems score copyright coup

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Thumb Up

About that Crown Copyright

We have the same pestiferous concept here in Canada, and it sucks. The USA provides a far better model: nothing the government produces is copyright, period. That's why on Wikipedia you often see photographs derived from the US government used.

I don't know the legal basis for this, but the concept seems to be that the information has already been paid for via general taxation, so should be freely available. I believe that if you looked into it, you'd find that the US government spends a fair amount of money making such information easily available. The GPO (Government Printing Office) is famous for publishing incredible numbers of pamphlets, even books, on all sorts of subjects from making soup to designs for large animal restraints to hairy quantum mechanical calculations and charging next to nothing for them.

An admirable approach, and a detail worth remembering next time you feel like kicking the US for some retrograde nonsense.

PS: about those animal restraints: the answer is yes, indeed.

Intel: Just 3,000 employees run Windows 7

RW

The costs of churn

1. Environmental: didn't I just read a series of news articles about the mountains of discarded e-waste that blight some third world countries?

2. Intellectual: Miss Smith in personnel finally figured out how to put a watermark on every page using Word. Churn her desktop PC and you also churn her hard-won, valuable expertise.

Internet Explorer 8 still not mingling well with 2,000 highly-visited sites

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Alert

MS-SVG

Why, oh why, do I have certainty that whatever MS does with SVG, they'll get it wrong?

Is there a test suite for SVG?

Most resistance to 'Aurora' hack attacks futile, says report

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WTF?

@ Robert Hill re black-boxing security software

Sounds to me like "security through obscurity", which has never been a viable approach.

Is it perhaps time for Microsoft to throw in the towel on Windows and admit what everyone else already recognizes? That Windows is inherently insecure, and no number of after the fact fixes is going to change that. Maybe it's time to open-source Windows and let world+dog start looking for holes in that morass of code?

Why is it that Apple, presumably with a fairly small programming staff, can produce a system (including apps) that is far more secure than Windows, even though Microsoft has enough programmers to declare war on China?

US must redesign killer hot dogs

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WTF?

Gee whiz, it's just like the web!

How to solve the problems posed by children interacting with the web (and seeing porn thereby) and with hot dogs (and choking to death thereby): ban children from using the web and from eating hot dogs. Fine, jail, torture parents who allow their crotchfruit to do otherwise.

Someone needs to set up "Kiddies' Web" where all sites are guaranteed innocuous and there's no way to break through onto the real web.

I don't know what the hot dog equivalent is.

Brussels data watchdog cries foul over secret copyright talks

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FAIL

The thing that kills me.....

It's *only* music and other entertainment. Hardly anything the world can't exist without. If the MPAA or the RIAA object to someone pirating their precious IP, then let them sue in the normal manner. Why on earth do governments think this is important enough to warrant special legislation, to say nothing of tearing down fundamental legal structures?

How much manpower is wasted on piracy by governments that could be otherwise be busied with anti-terrorism matters? Remember, next time something blows up, it was in part because the people that could have stopped it in time were busy tracking down piracies of "Happy Birthday".

US school comes out fighting over webcam spy claim

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Simple analysis

Whoever decided to use this feature is simply stupid and not clued in to privacy issues.

From what's been said in the press ("inappropriate behavior"), the school board clearly used this feature to simply spy on a student. Denials are merely lies.

Further, what the student does on his own time is his business and not the schools. Schools may be in loco parentis but only during school hours - or so it seems to me.

Stupidity and dishonesty and control-freakism. (Just like NuLabour.) That's all. Nothing more to see. Move along folks.

US sorority girls in booze-fuelled orgy of violence

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Linux

Really no surprise

It's kept a deep dark secret, but careful investigations have shown that violence toward a spouse is roughly equal boy-on-girl and girl-on-boy. The harrridans and anti-sex squads of the radical feminist movement ("all intercourse is rape") have effectively suppressed this, by outrightly lying about it if necessary.

Here's a delightful link to prove the point:

http://geneva.rutgers.edu/src/faq/feminist-myths.txt

And for a related discussion from the ever-reliable Craigslist m4m forum:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/forums/?act=showThread&forumID=72&thread=92670&ID=150720146

Why is there no icon depicting a penis in a state of acute arousal?

Google and Yahoo! join Oz protests

RW

Make the internet safer

At least when King Canute ordered the tide to turn back, he knew perfectly well that it wouldn't.

The internet was built for adults, not children. If you are so foolish as to let your little ones (and the prudes, bluenoses, and hysterics) go into an adult-oriented arena like the internet, don't be surprised, alarmed, or upset when they themselves are surprised, alarmed, and upset by evidence that adults enjoy sex in enormous variety, have no restraints on their choice of vocabulary, and get a kick out of seeing nekkid ladies and gents consorting with one another in every conceivable combination, and a few that are inconceivable.

The idea that the internet is (or can be made) "safe" except for selected "adult" sites is nonsense. The internet is de facto unsafe for tender minds unless a site is specifically intended for their consumption. It's not a matter of putting adult sites on a blacklist; it's a matter of putting kiddie-oriented sites on a whitelist. And then enforcing that whitelist only for children.

PS: The internet and the ready availability of online porn went mainstream about 1995. We must now have a large cohort of young adults who have been viewing porn since well before puberty. Has anyone done a study to find out if doing so has fried their brains wrt sexuality?

ISA chairman assures nation: Your data is safe

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Risks? No; certainty is the word

...former Information Commissioner Richard Thomas was cautious. He said: "With any large governmental collection of personal information, there are clear and substantial risks that the information may be inaccurate.

"There are risks the information data may be out of date. There are risks the information may be irrelevant. There are risks that it may be compromised or get into the wrong hands, and the larger the database the larger the risk."

What he should be saying: "It is certain that some of the information is inaccurate, out of date, and irrelevant; and that the DB will be compromised, and the data will get into the wrong hands."

And, no, the size of the database doesn't affect the risk. It's more like the number of people who have access, who is looking after the security side of things (if it's a NuLab PC type, insecurity is a given), and so on. Even a database of one record containing one field is at risk if three million people can access it.

This raises the question, what is the ISA going to do about inaccurate, out of date, irrelevant data? How are errors to be corrected? How is stale and irrelevant data to be purged? When the DB is compromised, as it assuredly will be, who is going to be taken to the Tower for decapitation as an irresponsible idiot?

They can't claim ignorance of the "risks" (sc. certainties) now.

Directgov kids' site apes explosive gay porn brand

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Linux

@ Deckchair

I view it as just another example of gov.uk stupidity under the banner of ZanuLabour. When you have a government that thinks education, experience, and sheer talent are dangerous, anti-proletarian elitisms, it should come as no surprise that in 13 years the rot has permeated the entire structure of British government from top to bottom.

Cameron might make a great deal of electoral hay by proposing that all government employees be required to requalify for their positions. Those not displaying acceptable (i e, high) levels of intelligence and sheer gumption would be dismissed with prejudice (and no benefits).

Sayonara, stupid cops. Sayonara, stupid H&S drones. Sayonara, stupid dustmen. Sayonara, stupid social workers. Sayonara, stupid managers. And sayonara, stupid MPs.

Which icon most suitably symbolizes "a proposal for social revolution"? I'll use Tux for the moment.

Inside Microsoft's innovation crisis

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Coat

The most telling thing

It was the head of MS PR that responded, not somebody who actually knows anything about computers.

Remember, PR types, marketers, and spin doctors are nothing more than professional liars.

Lotus Symphony 3 beta goes OOo

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Unhappy

@ Morris Maynard

Today's Lotus Symphony has absolutely nothing to do with the Lotus Symphony of yore. It's only connection is the name.

I use Lotus Symphony 2 and prefer it to OO because it is less clumsy under the fingers, but IBM is missing a beat or two in its construction. First, it is unable to open old 1-2-3 files in the WKS, WK3, and WK4 formats. Second, it too slavishly imitates the horrible user interface of Office instead of going back and reviving the very simple, flexible interface and menus of the Lotus 1-2-3 R5 (a program I still use regularly in preference to any other spreadsheet); thus those of us with piles of WK4 files are still stuck. Third, they did not even think about resurrecting Improv, which represented a complete rethink of spreadsheets and how they work.

MS tried to mimic Improv in a release of Excel a decade or so ago, but as usual, missed the point. If anyone knows where the source code of Improv is, they'd do the world a favor by releasing it as Open Source so it could be implemented in modern environments.

DNA pioneer lambasts government database policy

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Troll

@ Bayleaf

"But they won't listen to him, he is only a scientist who knows something about the subject."

Wrong. You do not understand the thinking of the stupid idiots that run ZanuLabour. Correctly phrased in accordance with B'liarism-Harmanism-Jacqui-Smithism, your remark would read:

He is a filthy elitist smarty-pants, untrue to proletarian principles, lacking solidarity with the working class, and (worst of all) not a recipient of "benefits". He probably enjoys sex, too, dirty man that he is. [Harriet always has to chime in.]

IE Windows vuln coughs up local files

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FAIL

It's the Microsoft w-a-a-a-a-a-y!

Create features, functions, and facilities that are inherently insecure! Yee haw!

ActiveX was the first significant step down this long and slippery slope. There's an O'Reilly book on HTML from about the time of ActiveX's debut, when Netscape was still the godzilla of browsers. In it, the author specifically warns against using ActiveX on a webpage because of the security risk. Did Microsoft act responsibly? No, of course not.

From another perspective, what MS has done over the years is to tightly integrate the OS and all applications (at least those from MS). Doing this has the effect of making those apps a part of the OS, increasing the size of the OS, and hence increasing the likelihood of there being security holes.

This is nothing new. Windows and, iirc, DOS have had undocumented trap doors in them for many years, so Excel could do its own memory allocation and thereby bypass the inefficient scheme in the OS.

The thing I wonder is this: why can a small security firm figure out these holes, yet MS, with its hordes of employees, can't? Can it possibly be that MS doesn't hire the best and the brightest, or is it that it simply doesn't bother to look at the security implications of various bells and whistles?

Don't tell me it's so!

New inside out hover-magnet fusion reactor debuts at MIT

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Boffin

@ Vladimir Plouzhnikov

"we can see that [fusion] works on every sunny day"

Well, no, actually we can't see fusion working, at least not directly. Fusion processes occur at the center of the sun, not in the outer (visible) layers. What we see is the resultant heat that's made its way up to the surface.

Solicitor General takes fresh pop at PunterNet

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Thumb Down

@ AC 14:28 GMT

"It's perfectly obvious that HH and Co are ideologically opposed to the very idea of prostitution"

ITYM "It's perfectly obvious that HH & Co are ideologically opposed to the very idea of sex."

Free postcoders bang on Ordnance Survey door

RW

What Britain needs

Is the US attitude toward these things: they're paid for by the people, hence they're not even copyright. Indeed, the US GPO (Government Printing Office) has, over the decades, published documents on an astonishing variety of subjects. Examples: hairy math relating to the quantum mechanical analysis of molecular spectra, as prepared by the boffins of the National Bureau of Standards; recipes as used in government cafeterias devised by home economists in the Department of Agriculture; and the design of restraints for large animals, also thanks to the Dept. of Agriculture.

And to cap it all off, the prices charged by the GPO are only nominal.

The US is a far from perfect country (like all the others) but at least it gives the people back _something_ for their money.

New York Times builds paywall - very slowly

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Thumb Down

Will we get what we pay for?

I won't even register to read the NYT for free. It's too NYC-centric and if one is looking for reasonable coverage of international news, it's not the place.

The Times, once a newspaper of record, is polluted with too many inane articles about "celebrities", as is (sadly) the Guardian. Strike those off the list of sites that are worth paying for.

Seems to me that if a newspaper wishes to charge online readers, they have to provide top flight news coverage that you can't get elsewhere. No parroting of wire service articles, and no publication of useless gossip about the Britneys and Parises of the world. We can read that kind of trash almost anywhere.

If murdoch wants to make money charging for online access to the Times, he's going to have to raise its standard of journalism quite a lot.

Home Office advises Police to break the law

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The Home Office's counsel and its advice...

...is, if my experience with lawyers is any guide, worth exactly nothing.

Lawyers are very well aware who's paying them and, like the designers of "Japanese" gardens, tend to give you what they think you want.

In all likelihood, the Home Office turned to its pet poodles among the legal profession for the nonsensical counsel they received. No other response could be expected under the circumstances.

Legality is of dubious worth anyway. There have been more than a few seriously bad dictatorships and police states that went to some trouble to give the appearance of legality to their actions. What's more the issue is right vs wrong, with lashings of old-fashioned morality on the side. Funny that the Son of the Manse doesn't seem to get that there's a moral angle to government as well as a legal one.

Berserker Bing bots bring down Perl network

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Herding cats

That's what it must be like inside MS development offices. The company has a long track record of disorganization with no clear lines of authority, plus it has such a huge staff that (as it turns out, but not unexpectedly) a fair number of them aren't fully competent. They end up with some schmoe way down deep in the bowels of the outfit writing this bot without proper specifications, without proper testing, perhaps even unknown to his/her superiors.

Or to put it slightly differently, no one's in charge. Ballmer runs around frothing at the mouth, but that's not "being in charge".

With a corporate culture like that, with billions of lines of code that they have admitted they don't completely understand, with crap development software that does nothing to auto-block certain fundamental programming errors like array overflows, you can't help but wonder whether MS is really a bloated corpse of a company, gradually swelling in the hot sun from internal decomposition — it just hasn't exploded yet.

Why is there no icon for "dead animal bloating in the sun"?

Texas Instruments to patch smart meter crypto blunder

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FAIL

I'm astonished

There is an enormous body of research on PRNGs, and they are very well understood — but evidently it was ignored or misunderstood by TI. Likewise, the enormous body of information about programming and testing PRNGs to make sure they do what they are supposed to do.

Using a bad PRNG was a forgivable sin 40 years ago, but not today.

Why do I suspect that a member of the sound-bite generation did the programming, someone whose attention span doesn't encompass anything more than a 140 character tweet?

Apple lawyer smacks Gawker with Mac tablet hint

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Happy

Who was the first twit to aggravate themselves?

¿Was it perhaps Barbra Streisand who complained that the California coastline survey showed her house (never mind it was from an airplane quite some distance offshore)?

If she had shut up and said nothing, very few, if any, people would have even realized they could invade her precious privacy. But attempt to unleash the legal vampires, and all she did was publicize the very fact she wanted to suppress.

Just so in the present case.

When will they ever learn?

French top MOT failure league

RW
Troll

@ AC 16:01 GMT

"I'd like to know *why* VOSA are at all concerned about this"

Because the data shows that corporate products aren't perfect. This is part of the contemporary wheeze that no criticism can be tolerated, none at all, ever. It's the same wheeze that means, whenever government does something stupid, spokesmen deny up one side and down the other that anything's wrong in any way. Or else they claim it was intentional and in the victims' best interest.

Also why ministers of the Crown lie endlessly because they too can't stand even the smallest amount of valid criticism.

Of course, this attitude is patently ridiculous. I'm only human, you're only human, even our Divine Moderatrix is only human, and all of us make mistakes with some regularity. But corporate and political bigwigs have such an inflated sense of their own importance that they want to be like Christ and His mother, sinless. There's a word for people like that: silly assholes.

European court pulls plugs on terror stop and search

RW

What's really important

1. Identify the specific people who push these police state agendas within government. I suspect there are specific civil servants in the home office, possibly in cahoots with certain representatives of the Stasi, who make sure that each new Home Secretary toes the line. Then publicize their names, preferably with dates, places, and leaked communications proving their involvement. "If you've done nothing wrong, then there's nothing to fear about publicity" is a good working slogan.

2. Nag, nag, nag all candidates in the upcoming election "what is your party going to do about the many laws NuLabour has passed which have the effect of destroying centuries old British freedoms and which have implemented a police state????" And then call them on it if they start to spout bullshit. If they waffle, the proclaim "so you're in favor of a police state, eh?"

3. Ensure that in every riding there is one independent candidate running on a platform of repealing NuLabour police state legislation. Talk this candidate up with your friends, relations, and co-workers. Do everything you can to elect MPs who are not responsible to any party and who are unafraid to tell the control freaks among the cops, local councils, H&S idiocracies, parliament, and the Home Office to fuck off.

Is it art or is it pr0n? Australia decides it's ALL filth

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Thumb Down

Oz pols seem to have exceptionally dirty minds

Time was when an image of a naked child symbolized innocence. Decades ago I had a landlord who had hanging proudly on the wall of his living room a photo of two of his children as toddlers, naked as jaybirds, confronting a long-horned cow on a beach. A photo that won a contest and was published in the newspaper for all to see.

Now the dirty-minded fundies can't see naked children as anything other than evidence of depravity. Do they (the fundies) realize how transparent their objections to depictions of the human body are?

And worse, they are succeeding in imposing their hyper-sexualized view of nudity on entire populations.

I saw a clip of some Oz fundie railing about skimpy swim suits on the beach and topless women sunbathing. He was a withered old fart who, I would guess, hasn't had an erection in decades, much less the opportunity to deploy said engorgement as God intended. It was laughable. Perhaps there was an element of jealousy, too, in that he couldn't don Speedos in public without causing gales of laughter.

Interfering busybodies, just like those who run the NuLabour Nanny State in Britain.

Tory questions identify government's best paid CIOs

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Flame

@ AC 17:01 GMT

"You need that kind of salary to attract the best."

I call bullshit. What's needed is more of a K-Mart blue light special attitude toward hiring executives: maybe not quite as good, but a whole lot cheaper. Considering that Britain is essentially bankrupt, even if the IMF hasn't yet come knocking on the door to haul the chancellor away, where does the idea come from that the UK can even afford the best? Can't afford it, seems to me.

Frankly, most management positions could be filled quite well by wandering out to the nearest bus stop and tapping some random person on the shoulder. The management caste has managed (excuse the pun!) to put forth the meme that they're special. They're not; at best they act like a bunch of Dilbertesque pointy-haired bosses, at worst they actively terrorize their underlings, the people who actually do useful work.

When I was still working, I was moaning to my immediate supervisor about the CEO's penchant for fucking the dog and other assorted wasteful sillinesses. Reply? "Oh, but he's the CEO, he can do anything he wants!" My response? "He's paid a great deal of money and should therefore be held to a much higher standard of behavior."

I wish I had a photograph of the puzzled non-comprende look on the supervisor's face.

In moments when my imagination runs wild, I dream of a society in which there are two rules of management compensation. One, that no one in an organization can make than a fixed-by-law multiple of what the most poorly paid minion makes. A factor of 4.0 or maybe 5.0 would be about right. Two, that all managers must have at least 10% of the drones under them making more, on the grounds that anybody can "manage", but only a few can do truly specialized work demanding real talent, experience, and education.

Apologies to our Divine Moderatrix for going off on a rant, but over compensated, under worked, utterly unqualified managers are a particular peeve of mine.

Outrageous new means of megastar demise spotted

RW
Heart

Beetle farts? Astroboffinry?

Dear God in heaven, what have I done to deserve this?