Posts by Sceptical Bastard

Spare me...

... from moronic wankers in academia producing meaningless drivel. WTF is all that bollocks about half-life, for a start? And why are mathmeticians suddenly linguistics experts. Tosspots.

They are simply wrong. Neologisms will replenish the language's stock of irregularity - for example, 'snuck' is widely used for what used to be 'sneaked'.

Anyway, the researchers are 'Murcans who speak a different language from us British. For example, we've lost the participle 'gotten' whereas it is correct US usage.

From the hearse's mouth

Quote: "I know Goldsmith of old and I really don't like him - in fact, not many people do! I won't say anymore otherwise the comment will be pulled."

Why mince your words? My day job is in IT but I've also worked in music promotion on and off for many years. Harvey Goldsmith is generally regarded as a loudmouthed bullying scumbag. In my (very limited) dealings with him years back, I found him to be a money-grabbing shit.

Quote: ""This gig is for charity. Led Zep will not be paid for it, neither will Mr Goldsmith." As several other comments make clear, bands do very well indeed out of these 'charity' gigs. And I somehow doubt Goldsmith will be doing anything out of the goodness of his heart.

Robert Plant isn't "a weird fucker" as someone suggests. I've met him socially on several ocassions and he's a very affable old Brummie. In fact, he's surprisingly sane for someone who received that much adulation as a young man. Sadly, though, his voice is shot, especially in the high register - I know because I watched him perform a ninety-minute set at a festival a couple of years back with a scratch band called Priory of Brion or somesuch. Embarrassing.

The caring sharing IR?

Certainly sharing, anyway.

Quote: "As such, this voluntary disclosure shows a refreshing level of ethical responsibility ..."

Eh? Congratulations to the Inland Revenue for allowing an employee to leave a laptop containing a raft of sensitive personal financial and identity data in his car? Then have it nicked? Oh, well done that man!

Quote: "Commitment to its customers." Yeah. Right. *That* will impress everyone who has to deal with these caring bastards on an annual basis.

At least the thing was encrypted. I wonder if he had the key on a memory stick in the glove box?

Czar?

Every time the government annoints a retired copper, third-rank civil servant, or quangocrat as czar or czarina for this that and the other, there is a fuck-up followed by a bust-up. The efforts and pontifications of MPs are little better.

The solution (for all revolutionary-minded vultures) is in the Rolling Stones' line from 'Sympathy For The Devil'...

"I killed the czar and his ministers / Anastasia screamed in vain"

Let's have some blood on the carpets of Westminster.

Or at least some commonsense proposals that eschew the word 'czar'..

Can someone tell me...

...WTF is an "entire Windows ecosystem"? Since when has bloody software been a community of animals, plants, and bacteria in an inter-related physical environment? Unless you regard the droids at Redmond as bacteria?

As for the comment: "....users of knock-off Microsoft software are likely to purchase Windows software and applications over time..." I have to maintain at least one home machine running Windows (compatibility with clients) and over the years I've run everything from 3.11 through 9xx to W2K and XP. But I can lay my hand on my heart and say I have never - and will never - pay a penny for any Microsoft product. It's all been knocked off. Oh, except the excellent 'Natural' MS-branded keyboard I bought cheap in 1998 (and which I'm still using).

And while I'm in 'WTF' mode, why the fuck have you Vultures introduced those puerile icons? Not a Paris Hilton angle among them!

@ John Naismith and Anonymous Vulture

To John Naismith. I am in absolute instinctive agreement with you, John: politicians are, indeed, self-serving venal scum. Nicely put if a tad understated.

To Anonymous Vulture. It isn't necessary to add a blizzard of comments to every item in El Reg. You won't get a prize for profligacy and you're starting to piss off us regulars.

As to fingerprinting kids to verify their eligibility for subsidised school dinners, it is not only a misuse of technology, an affront to libertarian ideals, and an absurd example of the sledgehammer approach to nut-cracking, it also proves there's no such thing as a free lunch - at least not if you are poor.

Shoot the bastard

Quote: "It's not the first time innocent cooking materials have morphed into potential bio-terror attacks."

Oh, you've heard about my wife's culinary skills then?

Living in London, that Thai chef is lucky he wasn't wrestled to the ground and shot in the head by our Brave Boys In Blue.

PS. Where's the Paris Hilton angle?

Wake up, 'Dozeboyz!

Quote: "...within the community that constitutes eBay Inc"

You can see why he said that - friendly, fuzzy, warm, etc - but it's not a bloody community. It's a multinational corporation.

As to the story itself, I await the torrent of 'told ya so' smirks from all the Redmond fanboys out there.

@ Morley

I agree. Anything originating from TLDs .cn, .ru, tw and .kr goes straight to /dev/null.

BTW, I liked the "Great FireWall of China" quip, Vincent

@ Anonymous Vulture

Next? Not til our Egyptian chum has got those fuggers at Private Eye! (And he's probably got Sue, Grabbit and Runne out searching for Drew Cullen as I write.)

The solution

Set up a doggie 'Hot Or Not' website. Keep the dogs that attract the most points and kill the ones voted least 'hot'.

And to all those Reg Club commentators who advocate the Korean solution, there's not much meat on dogs and it is too strongly flavoured for western palettes. (And don't let anyone bullshit you that cats taste like rabbits - they don't).

What do YOU think, amanfromMars?

Double take

I had to read the story twice. Microsoft accusing another business of predatory or monopolistic practices is like Hitler complaining about anti-semitism. Talk about pots and kettles...

As to the Google droid's assertion: "Online advertising benefits consumers, promotes free speech, and helps small businesses succeed" I was left gaping in disbelief! Free speech??? What fucking hallucinogens do these these sharks think we're on?

Personally, I regard Google, DoubleClick and Microsoft with equal suspicion and contempt. Which of the bastards owns which is of little interest - they're as bad as each other.

@ All of you

While you're all busy flaming each other's choice in retro computing, I have an even more shocking confession.

Yes, my friends, pity me... I actually still have my vinyl In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and, what's worse, I still *play* it!

Ah, side two... seventeen minutes of thumping riff, clumsy solos and sententious lyrical bollocks.

"Nurse! The cattle prod!"

Spelling...

Not sure whether it is spelled paedophile, pedophile or pædophile. I shall ask my wife - her spelling is pretty good for a 14-year-old.

(Note: to law enforcement fanatics and hysterical moral arbiters: I was being sarcastic and do not actually have a 14-year-old wife)

How to remove Norton 'security' products

To completely remove Symantec apps is dead easy.

Simply back up to CD or tape all your user data. Then erase your hdd, re-format and partition it, and reinstall your chosen OS. All that's left to do then is reinstall all your apps and re-load all your user data. Job done.

However, to completely remove Norton from Win NT/2K/XP machines (or even from Win 9xx IIRC) machines *without* a clean install is nigh-on impossible.

These products are pernicious scumware IMO.

Impartial and important news

Quote: ""IT risk is too important to be left to IT departments," said Hunter, who has written a book on the subject, entitled IT Risk: Turning Business Threats into Competitive Advantage, which was launched at the Gartner IT security summit earlier this week."

Biting the hand? Nah, meekly publishing advertising by a consultant (and, as all avid readers of BOFH know, consultants are scum).

Another day, another press release masquerading as news. Wake up, Vultures! Simon and the PFY would be ashamed of you.

An elderly IT pedant protests...

Quote: "Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman... at 11:44 am on 19 September 1982...made the fateful suggestion... (of a) character sequence for joke markers."

He might have sent the claimed email at that precise time. But he wasn't the first with the electronic smiley (let alone the mechanical typist's smiley).

In April 1979 - over three years earlier - a guy named MacKenzie posted an email to MsgGroup (the unofficial community on ARPAnet which was instrumental in formulating email standards and protocols and whose most prominent member was Dave Crocker) posted a suggestion that by playing with punctuation in email one could more easily convey subtleties such as sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek content.

MacKenzie proposed using a hyphen and parenthesis thus -) He also freely acknowledged that he'd cribbed the idea from an article in Reader's Digest.

Of course, quite a few of the MsgGroup's members were at Carnegie-Mellon. So it is, perhaps, surprising that Scott Fahlman seems to have missed MacKenzie's contribution and the minor flame war it precipitated.

I vaguely remember to seeing quoted a passing reference to 'extended punctuation sets' in a RFC. Buggered if I can remember where or when - anyone who can be arsed could search it out here:

http://rfc.net/rfc-index.html

And lest younger Vultures think I am an old fart, I can still toss off in under ten minutes ;)

True, but...

Hot news! Users can be stupid and computer-illiterate. Talk about stating the bleedin' obvious!

As obvious as counter-claiming that most financial institutions are money-grabbing arseholes with only the flimsiest grasp of IT security and an almost-criminal tendency to hive off their incompetence onto their customers.

Quote: "Two thirds of the companies said they did not want to be responsible for the customer's IT security..." More accurately, they don't want to be responsible for *any* security measures that might cost them money or hit their profits.

Oh, and how come El Reg seems increasingly to be punting verbatim press releases as 'news'? What was it HL Mencken said? "News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising."

Phew!

For a moment, you guys had me scared!

Now that's news!

Is Microsoft really planning death camps?

Genius

Quote: "A once in a lifetime opportunity, congratulations on grabbing it with both hands. Sod the IT angle"

I'm with Rose on that! Well done, Vultures - a truly great pun.

The question is...

Quote: "there are no invisible people around to demonstrate it's usefulness"

But how would you *KNOW*?

Get it right, fanboys

QUOTE: "Who invented the mouse? Apple."

Yeah? You checked that, did you? Actually, the original 'x-y co-ordinate pointing device' (a mouse to you and me) was invented at PARC in the early 70s as an adjunct to a putative GUI for Xerox photocopiers.

However, Steve Jobs is *probably* the person who did most to popularise the mouse as a periheral on GUI 'soho' computers.

As to "kinda useful for point and click", so is a touch screen or a stylus or, dare I suggest, the tab key and enter key. But the mouse seems to have become universal - I'm not sure why because for many tasks, keyboard shortcuts are far quicker.

But, hey, WTF would I know? I'm just a sceptical sour-faced *old* person.

Anonymous doesn't mean useless

Further to Charlie Clark's point (above), data can be gathered with personally-identifying information yet be effectively anonymised while retaining its value for statistical analysis.

My business recently conducted on behalf of a client a survey of 16,000 people at an event. Paper forms were distributed and a prize draw formed the inducement. To distribute the prizes, the form requested respondents' names, addresses and emails.

We received a surprisingly high response, mainly because our client is a trusted brand and had been very generous with the prize pot.

The form was designed so that the section containing the personally identifiable information could be readily cut off.

Thus we ended up with two piles of paper: the answers to the twenty-odd questions (which contained no personally identifiable information) and the names and addresses of the respondents.

The name-and-address portions were divided into those who had ticked the opt-in for email marketing and those who had opted out. The opt-outs were shredded: the opt-ins were added to an OpenOffice Calc (our client's preferred spreadsheet format) data file of email-shot recipients.

The statistical information was entered into an entirely separate MySQL database for analysis. It will provide a very rich source of information which will allow our client to improve the event and target its market spend more cost-effectively in future.

A good result for us and our client - and one achieved without anyone's privacy or identity being compromised.

All this - and no boffins involved.

WTF?

Quote "(Mendes) Was illegal and shouldn't have been in the country. If he wasn't here he couldn't have been shot at. Simple."

FOAD, you moronic anonymous coward. I sincerely doubt you or a member of your family will ever be shot several times in the head for no better reason than a fuck-up by incompetent trigger-happy police - but I live in hope.

I know, I know - do not feed the trolls.

Trust Sony? Yeah, right!

Quote:

"According to Sony, the blame lies with code supplied by a third-party developer from China."

Just like they blamed the Banbury(UK)-based coder-wankers who supplied the infamous CD DRM rootkit.

Since that fiasco, I've made a point of boycotting Sony products and (except for stolen or pirated copies) music released on Sony's labels.

The word 'scum' sums up Sony for me.

Bollocks

Quote: ""over half the population (55 per cent)" spent an "average 172 hours" of their spare time extracting stuff from the net."

What, 172 hours a week? A month? A year? A lifetime?

As it is an attention-grabbing stunt by a price comparison site whose press release fooled some bone-idle hack at The Sun, it's almost certainly bollocks anyway.

If it weren't, though, how come none of the machines I fix /acquire /examine ever contain any porn? Or (apart from spyware and Firefox) any downloaded apps? True, I find the odd MP3 of Amy Bloody Winehouse or the Arctic Monkeys. I feel cheated!

*PS. I did find some smut on one second-user HDD bought in a job lot from a local vendor - naked Barbie and Ken dolls posed going at it. And, no; I wasn't aroused.

The solution is...

... not to work nor to seek work.

Breakfasting at 11am, lazing about all afternoon on the beach and reading El Reg in the evening before going down the pub is a much better bet. And, it seems, a more secure one.

Cowardice at Vulture Central?

Quote:

"We weren't willing to risk getting a one-way ticket to the gulag, so we haven't actually validated the authenticity of the credentials by trying to log in to an account."

Jeeze, El Reg - you are so chicken! With a few creative emails, you guys could have started a major conflict! "Drew Cullen launches world war three" - now THAT would have been a newsgrabbing IT story...

Prince is the proof

As several Reg readers have pointed out, Wales is a principality. Its 'ruler' is therefore the current Prince of Wales. As any fule kno, the Prince of Wales currently does it with a woman who looks like an equine, not an ovine. Ergo, the Welsh cannot be sheep-shaggers.

Stick THAT in your pipe, D Bevan, you humourless horse-humper.

All that said (and in a weak bid for topicality) I've always thought Camilla is twice as wank-worthy as the sexless Diana (when she was alive, obviously). I wonder if Cammy uses IRC... ?

Sod the legalities...

... I want to marry that dog!

Hurrah for PR

I love El Reg to bits - been reading it for years.

However, I'm getting really sick of publicity being punted as 'news' on The Register. I've worked in IT and I've worked in PR and I can recognise a bloody press release when I read one.

Oh, and DO STOP doing that infantile thing with exclamation marks every! time! you! mention! Yahoo!

Double-take

At first glance, I thought that read Hardy _Heroin_ and started wondering what influence those Afghan poppy-growers had over Canonical.

Ubuntu is a great distro but I fear the release naming scheme, however attractive a few years back, must be causing embarrassment now. The recent alliterative pairings are struggling not to look laboured. Fawns simply aren't feisty; nor, as far as I know, are herons any hardier than most birds.

BTW, if M$ had adopted the same scheme, would Vista be Worthless Weakling or Woeful Wanker?

Cost?

It would've *earned* them millions if only they'd trusted this lovely guy who emailed me from Nigeria...

Why does this story...

... make me feel very uneasy?

Apart, that is, from the government's abysmal record of screwing up IT projects and wasting mind-boggling amounts of (our) money while doing so.

Same old story

"... the success of Storm relies on the ability to dupe recipients into clicking on links and installing programs..."

Says it all, really <sigh>

Yes: REALLY justice

Do keep up at the back, Matthew!

This bag of pus didn't get thirty years for "peddling some crappy penis pills and sending a bunch of (albeit unsolicited) emails".

He got thirty years for being a shitstain on the face of humanity, for dealing in Class A drugs, for money laundering, for attempting to pervert the course of justice, for fleeing during a previous court case, and probably half a hundred other crimes. Thirty years being buggered and beaten seems very lenient to me.

El Reg's headline disproportionately emphasises the incidental information that he was also a spammer.

Sadly true...

Quote:

"...media players are casually left open on people's desktops all the hours they are at work...."

Then their workplace sysadmins and their managers need to crack down on the skiving bastards. Send in the BOFH and the PFY.

Quote:

"No one thinks anything of clicking on a media link on a Web page or downloading (yet another) codec."

I shouldn't think that applies to many Register readers. Nor to lusers on networks that are managed and configured by Stalinist sysadmins. And there should be a good bit of Stalin in any sysadmin.

What lusers do on their own machines out of office hours is their own affair. If they can't or won't learn even the most rudimentary security good practice, they deserve all the VXers throw at them. Except, of course, pig-ignorant people's compromised machines and the resultant botnets make online life that little bit more irksome for the rest of us.

<sigh>

All as bad as one another

Quote:

"I've used i.e for years, never got a virus, never been a victim of phising, never downloaded anything dodgy.... but then again, I'm not a Toser."

No, you're a smug semi-illiterate troll. You should change to a browser that provides a spellchecker.

I agree with previous comments that all browsers have vulns but at least Mozilla is quick to fix them. And I also agree with the observation that if you are prepared to click through to a moneyshot of Paris Hilton's genitalia then you deserve everything bad that happens to you.

Call yourselves paranoid?

Jeeze!

You guys are really NOT paranoid at all!

For example (above):

"I've got Firefox set to delete all cookies every session so as it crashes every week or so, I get to clear the cookies fairly regularly."

'Every week or so' is not even 'fairly' regularly. Every few minutes is regularly.

I use FF's 'clear private data' (Ctrl+Shift+Del) virtually every time I change a page and I have FF set to delete all private data at closing. If using webmail I close FF, Stephen Gould's 'CleanUp!', then re-open to continue browsing. (In fact, I use Gould's 'CleanUp!' a lot).

Another example (above)

"I'd get annoyed if I had to turn 'safe search' off every few days again." Convenience (or laziness) triumphing over security? I mean just how onerous is changeing the search preference in Google?

Changing a preference on a serverside app means another cookie so I use FF's delete private data immediately after any session which places cookies (which might mean half-a-dozen times an hour).

Also, because my ISP allocates dynamic IP addresses, I tend to break the connection fairly frequently during the day (takes only a few seconds to re-connect) which slightly inhibits Google establishing a direct linkage between search sessions.

I don't search for porn: I don't run scams: I'm not planning to kill anyone or blow up parliament. In fact, I've got nothing to hide. But that's besides the point: I value my privacy and I'm prepared to suffer a few minutes daily inconvenience to retain some of it.

If I wanted to do anything nasty online (which I don't) I'd at least go to the trouble of doing it from behind Tor or using a public computer (in a town away from my home area).

As for Google "doing no evil" and being a cuddly outfit run by groovy laid-back hipsters Serge and Larry... what utter bollocks! Google is a huge, aggressively-acquisitive, rapidly-expanding, information-hoarding multinational corporation. The less a commercial entity like that knows about me, the better.

Near misses

Damn! I missed this one!

Irritatingly, I can't match pets to streets. My gran had a spanial called Lusty (true!) but she lived on Pavilion Avenue. Doesn't quite work. Whereas my parents had a mongrel called Tonto and lived in Cummings Road. Had it been reversed, it'd have been a winner!

(Tonto - named after the character in The Lone Ranger - was a vile obnoxious evil-smelling fleabag that should've been put down at birth but lived to be 17, thus surviving long enough to bite me several times during my childhood.)

BTW, that Silky Staines ... anyone got her phone number?

Get a life (and NOT on Sadville)

Quote: "So, grow up. Some people really do switch."

Years on Macs, a bit of BSD, plenty of Linux, and most Windows since 2.0 - I've chopped and changed as work demanded but I hope I've not been a smug self-righteous know-all git about any OS.

How the f**k can people get so fundamentalist about computer operating systems? I mean, aren't there enough zealous nutters in the world already? Maybe there are 72 virgins awaiting every Unix martyr?

I sit in front of bloody computers all day every day to earn a crust and, far from zealotry about this or that OS, I am delighted when 5pm comes round and I can turn away from the monitor , get out of the office, and pursue my *real* passions - drinking beer, watching television, and trying to persuade the wife's sister into wildly kinky transgressional sex (or ANY sex come to that)...

Fanboys, forget computers - get a life!

Taking Microsoft-hatred a bit far

"He was a Windows ME user"

Not really reason enough to execute someone ;)

More to the point WTF is this story doing on El Reg? And why is it on the security section's RSS feed?

I run FF but...

... I can't find a Linux distro that ships with IE and Microsoft doesn't seem to offer their browser ported to 'nix. I feel deprived.

On a less facetious note, I'm not entirely sure why real-world users would fall foul of this cross-browser handler exploit. If they have FF installed, one assumes they'd use it in preference to IE except for sites which rely on M$ tech (Active X and so on) or IE ident in the browser header. In the latter case, there's an FF add-on to spoof the useragent header string. Or am I missing summat?

BTW, is 'facetious' the only word that contains all five vowels in alphabetic order?