Posts by dotdavid 1712 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2010
"MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5) works with GCHQ, the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, the Department for Energy and Climate Change and also with law enforcement – through the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure – to respond to cyber security threats and disseminate best practice"
Wait a minute, the Department for Energy and Climate Change?! I can just about see why the department of bugging businesses would want to get involved, but why would the Windfarm Marketing Board be involved?
Unless AGW refusenicks are active cyberwarriors...
"To charge the SmartWatch you get a USB cable with a proprietary connection"
Considering people like me will always be forgetting to charge it (I never charge my watch after all) you'd have thought Sony would have tried to go for the industry-standard micro-USB charging connector wouldn't you?
But what would I know, I'm no industrial designer.
"note that both Oracle and Facebook have their office campuses a mere stone's throw from the steadily rising San Francisco Bay"
So the reason for Larry's purchase of that island becomes clear....
Wait... island? Larry you idiot; you were supposed to go for the hollowed-out volcano!
"those approaching retirement were twice as likely to protect their computers with additional security software (paid antivirus, third-party firewalls, or integrated security suites)"
Like the ones that CheckPoint sells, perhaps?
Call me a maverick, but I don't equate using Microsoft Security Essentials and other free stuff as "living life on the edge".
Scare tactics to get column inches in the regular press, methinks, and fool the less savvy into paying extra for their IT security.
Louise Mensch is a household name in the UK. Leveraging her trendy brand to entice youngsters to a new niche social network should be quite easy, and Menshn should be an enormous success - security hiccups or not.
Wait a minute, did I say Louise Mensch? I was thinking of Lady Gaga. Forget what I said; no-one cares who she is and what she does.
"Rather than using its muscle to fix the broken supply chain, as Apple did, Google is designing its hardware and content around it. Which isn't adding value, or solving any problems, but really more along the lines of putting lipstick on a pig. ®"
Most sensible analysis I've seen in a long time. If Google threw money at solving the content problem this sort of expensive box might work. As it is, who wants to spend £200 to watch YouTube on a big screen?
"We've just heard back from Sony: the price is £199, though retailers will be free to charge what they like.
Hopefully, it will be priced to avoid becoming the flop that the first Google TV set-top box, Logitech's Revue, proved to be. Logitech wanted $300 (£193) for Revue and at that point had no access to apps."
...but it seems not.
I figured $200 would translate to £200, seems to be the norm. But why they think a £199 box will be a sales success when the £193 Revue failed miserably (and that was without alternatives like the RaspberryPI/XBMC and the various ~£70 Android 4 HDMI dongle devices widely available) I have no idea.
If this device was around the £100-mark I reckon it would be a good buy, especially if Google somehow managed to announce a proper IPTV service (you know, so GoogleTV has *TV* in it) for it. But unless retailers heavily discount this I don't see it happening.
The utility bill thing always baffled me; it would be trivial for any half-competent techie (not to mention a professional forger employed by one of the fearsome terrorists and drug dealers) to fake one using logos and whatnot procured from the interwebs. What exactly is the point?
"It's a strange but true fact that while moving an account is quite easy (it's easier than moving house – yet people move house more often than banks), very few people actually do. The stickiness of personal banking is observable but not really explainable by standard economic theory"
Personally, the reason I don't switch banks is because I did it once before and for all its' faults my old bank turned out to be better than my new one. Fortunately I hadn't completely cancelled the account (just moved my direct debits and salary payments across) so I just moved them all back.
Since then I've basically been immune to all banks' branding as I figure they've all got dirty secrets that only customers have the misfortune of finding out.
"there are plenty of workarounds for customers with internet access from the big telco players in Blighty"
Don't worry BPI, that's a vicious rumour with absolutely no basis in fact. The internets address of the crims has been permanently blocked forever so piracy is now finished and you can get back to promoting and producing top-quality audio entertainment.
Completely agree.
I've been interested in a "smart" TV for a while now, and after seeing the lack of support for early models I will instead be using a standalone box to provide the smart functionality I require. At the moment the Raspberry PI with Raspbmc seems to be my cheapest bet, but I reckon what with rumours of Apple entering the market and the possible launch of GoogleTV in the UK there might be some progress on inexpensive updatable standalone smart TV boxes in the near future.
Now all I need is a box that will stream Freeview over IP and I can ditch my cable. Alas my Freeview reception isn't quite good enough to do so yet.
Sony have promised an ICS update for my Ray, and even claim to be rolling it out, but it hasn't hit my wife's phone or my colleague's phone yet. And yeah, I know you need to use their rubbish desktop software to update the handset to ICS.
Why manufacturers insist on forcing people to plug their little computers into bigger computers to update them I have no idea.
But I digress; I wouldn't put too much faith in Sony's update process. And to me no SD = no sale.
"If MS built 'social' into Outlook / Exchange"
Actually we have something like that here at work called Lync. It's basically MSN Messenger with an ugly skin and less user control, and I can "friend" my colleagues and update my status. Unfortunately it won't let me play Farmville with them (or even Battleship) so the appeal is limited.
Depends. I think iOS uses a different APN if you do. Android doesn't. They might be able to count network hops and whatnot, or inspect the packets to see if you're using data not typically associated with smartphone usage.
However I suspect it's much harder for them to do so when you're roaming as it isn't their network.
"“We intend to build a tier 3.5 data centre with multicarrier fibre with diversity path and a backup multi-gigabit microwave link. The site is ideal as a backup site for government or companies and is away from the dangers of San Francisco and LA earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters,” Brand told The Register."
Come off it, with a name as generic as "PlusCom" they're blatantly a front organisation for a Bond-style supervillain.
That's the first thing I thought - surely she "befriended" these people before they posted the comments, else was savvy enough to change the default security settings to share her updates with complete strangers...
Unless (and this is unlikely) this is seriously the first contact she's had with teh denizens of teh general internets and she's honestly surprised.
"The EU's antitrust head honcho has said that Google has until early July to tell him how it's going to change itself enough to sort out its dominant position in the marketplace."
An easy strategy - just be like Yahoo! and Microsoft Bing.
Whether or not Google would be advised to do this is another question.
"Google's mobile sales and strategy boss Jason Spero told Ad Age that AdWords was the "nuclear power plant at the core" of Mountain View."
Oooh! Oooh! Google product metaphors? Let me try!
- Google Labs is the "disused industrial wasteland at the edge of Mountain View"
- Google Plus is the "club that everyone is forced to join but most people hang around in private VIP rooms at the core of Mountain View"
- Gmail is the post office at the core of Mountain View.
This is fun.
"Would you make us a cup of tea?"
"I'd be delighted to. The cup of tea represents the warmth of our family relationships, the battered but highly-functional mug showing the down-to-earth nature of our love and the fundamental synergies between our desire for a hot beverage and the state of the..."
"Forget it, I'll make one myself."
Exactly. I doubt Google did it to try and exploit the data, it was probably some engineer's design not being suitably vetted/reviewed. Any fool would be able to see that it's Not Okay to intercept and analyse peoples' network traffic even if they are on an unencrypted network, and Google whatever they may be are not fools.
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