* Posts by Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

41 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009

Full-body scanner blind to bomb parts

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.
FAIL

Dear moderatrix

Told you so ....

UK gov cuts ribbon on public datasets site

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Re: Guru Meditation

Guru Meditation is also the Virtualbox name for a hang.

Cyber sleuth sees China's fingerprints on 'Aurora' attacks

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.
Boffin

By 'eck

That's a neat little CRC algorithm.

Rattled Red Hat battles support impostors

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

It's the Red Hat business model

Patch the software to buggery, introduce no end of subtle bugs and dependencies, then charge people to sort them out. Perhaps people are starting to get wise to this ?

Oz man coughs to DD-jub job advert outrage

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.
Boffin

Develooper

is a random Perl hacker, as eny fule kno. You mean you didn't check http://develooper.com/ ?

Apple and Microsoft plot iPhone Google slap

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Permutations of Billness

But what's his slowdown factor - will we ever know he's in there ?

Nexus One web address used to punt smoky jazz

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

G^HFoolish mortals

nexusone.google, as eny fule can predict.

Gumtree comes over all queer in blocking 'offensive language'

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

ghey as a gay

As far as I understand - I write as a parent of teens and and as a wrinkly nightclubber - ghey is a rather lame back-formation so that people shouldn't be offended by the slang use of the word "gay" to mean lame and ineffectual.

BOFH: Made of win

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Re: Soon to be ex-boss

I thought the BOFH was going soft right up to the last sentence ...

UK.gov rejects calls to open up on ContactPoint security

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Re: How the government makes all it's decisions

@AC 14:06: You forget step 4. publicly and noisily sack the independent expert if they dare to point out the facts.

AOL taps strategy boutique ahead of Time Warner spin-off

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Can I be the first to say

"Meee toooo!!!11!11!!!!!"

O/S bloat: What's the cure?

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Why has nobody thought of this before ?

Running isolated apps under a common operating system. We could call it something obscure like a "chroot" ....

Users howl as Fedora 12 gives root to unwashed masses

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

got root - no title

No root password in Fedora 12 ? So just like Fedora 10 Live and Fedora 11 Live in fact ?

China fingered in cyberattack on mystery high tech co.

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

One of 100 countries ?

So, basically, everywhere except Chad, Mali and Burkina Faso can do this stuff ?

Demon splurges details of 3,600 customers in billing email

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.
Boffin

Re: Demon is so last century

I was going to say 'nine years since sacking Demon/Thus and I haven't regretted a minute", but my Demon co-founder-member (remember them?) dingbat has expressed it first ..

Premium rate regulator stops providers charging for free info

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Good grief

An official body which cares about the distinction between the commercial and non-profit GTLDs. I thought everyone had forgotten the difference, wonders will never cease.

Music industry cooks UK government's piracy stats

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.
Thumb Down

wot no torrents ?

I have used file sharing software

therefore i am a music pirate

therefore i must turn myself in at once.

i may be some time ....

Microsoft goes Darwinian with evolutionary tree patent

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

this is a title

Microsoft seek to extent patents on innovation to the realm of scientific research.

"you can't discover that, we've patented it already"

Hotmail pulls Attach-Photo feature over security concerns

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Sooo ...

... not at all because embedding images in emails is a common way of evading spam filters, then ?

Researchers forge secure kernel from maths proofs

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

@vincent himpe

you appear to have a sign error in your algorithm, maybe you should have verified it mathematically ...

Texan judge outlaws Word

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.
Thumb Up

Texas a-go-go gone ?

Might the District Court of East Texas, that well known legal forum for patent trollery, have outreached itself at last ? Hopefully M$ have deep enough pockets to set a precedent which will be sufficiently binding to bring an end to Texas legal tomfoolery.

Image spam: the threat returns

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Techniques

Greylisting is of little benefit these days. In my own logs I see the same hosts re-attempting delivery of identically addressed spam every couple of hours - greylisting would only delay the first of these and the rest would sail right through.

On my spam mix, the most effective and least cost single measure is Spamhaus CBL which stops around 45% of it before HELO. Rejecting mail from hosts with no rDNS takes care of almost all the rest, though this latter isn't advisable for ISP level filtering as it can give false positives. SPF takes care of the attempts to forge local domains and a check on resolvable sender domains catches a good few percent as well. The 5% of remaining mail goes through SpamAssassin which stops the final 1% of spam, leaving me 4% of genuine clean mail.

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

image spam

Morphing image spam differently for each mail isn't a new technique, the spammers introduced it about two years ago and it became very widespread in order to get round spam-image checksummers.

Tyre firm sketches rubber SUV concept

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Any colour you want, then

as long as it's black ?

Blackpool acts to avoid fall of Pericles

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Sounds like a market niche

We could call the new company "international computers unlimited", or something

UK border control can't count

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

"Material evidence is, increasingly, misread or overlooked."

name just one goverment department or policy this isn't true of.

Landlord sues tenant over moldy Tweet

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

obspeeling

do you perhaps mean "mouldy" ?

Hubble snaps fall-out from Jupiter impact

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

"collision between"

Yeah right, clearly the comet was driving without due care and attention - how could it not have seen an oncoming planet the size of Jupiter ?

iPhone push hack shoves IMs to complete strangers

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Re: Rolh, Blain, Marvin, AC etc

maybe apple users are used to runnning everything under one uid, but back in the real world you can't normally read someone else's messages without their security details. a mere userID shouldn't hack it.

Open-source firmware vuln exposes wireless routers

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

who on earth runs any httpd as root ??

c'mon guys, i thought openwrt was supposed to be mature.

o-pwn-wrt more like.

Riot police raid birthday barbecue for 'all-night' Facebook tag

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Now you know

Now you know exactly what the Criminal Justice Act 1994 means to you.

Don't forget that some of us tried to warn you. We've had 15 years of it - now your chickens are coming home.,

Freeview HD to debut in December

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.
Happy

Re: HD DVB-T on my PC?

Thanks PhilR and Quirkafleeg - I hadn't appreciated the difference of DVB-T2. Must read more carefully (since I am always complaining that Reg journo's don't any more !)

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.
Boffin

HD DVB-T on my PC ?

Just out of interest - if I had a DVB(T) card, and if I were in one of these lucky areas (we are currently scheduled to be even later than London in switchover I think) - if so, could I then receive HD Freeview without upgrading ? If it's only a matter of codecs, it seems to me it should be at worst a Simple Matter Of Programming.

Blue chip FTP logins found on cybercrime server

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Upload ? Really ?

Have you really researched your facts here, Reg ? All these organisations (well the ones I know about) publish FTP *download* credentials to customers. Sometimes for beta software, sometimes for subscription access. I used to have Sophos access in my former job and we have BBC FTP access where I am now for obtaining commercial subscription video content. FTP is still quite widely used for these purposes.

Obviously it shouldn't be - even https with basic auth is more secure than FTP - but it is, and not necessarily very insecure as long as you don' mind your beta software being copied.

My money would be on compromised machines in other organisations spilling the passworded beans for users' read-only passwords to these sites.

Incidentally we too have an FTP site (well sort of), but it can only be accessed by sftp, with public key login. Passworded access is disabled.

John you at least normally do some critical analysis and investigation of these vendor press releases, what has happened ?

Facebook knuckle-raps Intel, AMD

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.
Thumb Up

Good

A technical article that apparently includes some technical analysis. Maybe there is still hope for some of the journos on el reg.

UK.gov CIO speaks out on sheep and clouds

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

I've only got one question

At last it can be asked - do Government CIOs dream of electric sheep ?

Microsoft forbids changes to Windows 7 netbook wallpaper

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Isn't it obvious ?

M$ will announce that "OK, you can change your desktop background after all", and everyone will sob with gratitude.

In the euphoria, some much bigger and more significant but less immediately visible limitation will go unquestioned until after launch, when it will be revealed (as with Vista home basic) that it really is so crippled as to be useless.

It's how M$ deliberately and habitually does things, as El Reg reminded us in a recent M$ EU antitrust article.

Twitter would have stopped Rwandan genocide, claims PM

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Gordo talking cobblers as usual

The facts about Rwanda were perfectly well known, but governments ignored them.

Very much like Gordo always does to public opinion.

So how exactly is he suggesting that more publicity might have changed things ?

Dutch company augments mobile reality

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Cheers

>just waiting for the version that can show us the quality of beer available before entering the pub

It's called the Good Beer guide, and is almost certainly available in handily portable dead tree format from a licensed hostelry near you.

Carter recommends 'G Cloud' for gov IT

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

Apparently ...

... the G cloud has hit the G spot ...

New Pegi videogame ratings designed

Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.

So injecting drugs is normal ?

> hypodermic needle ... indicate that a game contains ... drug references

And thus do our youth become inured to the idea that injecting drugs is the normal way to take them ... well done Our Jacqui (oh she's gone, hasn't she !)