Name and shame
Why won't AVG mention any names?
Surely their business model is not to make sure everyone gets infected by these types of app so we all have to buy their AV software...
Posts by Peter Ford
369 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jul 2007
Android malware hijacks power button, empties wallet while you sleep
Wheeee! BT preps for FIVE HUNDRED MEGABIT broadband trial
SECRETS of the LOST SCROLLS unlocked by key to HEALTHY BOOBS
SpaceX drone hovership ROCKET LANDER BURN: Musk to try again
That's no – actually it is: DEATH STAR MOON 'could be full of life-friendly water'
Lies, damn pies and obesity statistics: We're NOT a nation of fatties
Banking apps: Handy, can grab all your money... and RIDDLED with coding flaws
World's only flyable WWII Lancaster bombers meet in Lincs
Wednesday 13th August 2014 15:10 GMT
WTF is that!!!!?
I've seen both of these Lancasters in their natural habitats: the BBMF one flies over us at least once a year usually with his two pals, although I was buzzed by the Lancaster whilst kayaking up the river Medway when it flew over the War and Peace show one year - the title is an approximation of what was said as it came over from behind at treetop height... nearly fell out of my boat!
The Canadian one I saw whilst walking around a lake near Banff: in that case it was "I'm sure that's a Lancaster bomber - WTF is it doing here?". It was a little higher flying between the hills, so the noise wasn't quite as dramatic, but still very distinctive.
Brit balloon bod Bodnar circumnavigates planet
Beer in SPAAAACE! London Pride soars to 28,000m
LG unfurls flexible SEE-THROUGH 18-inch display
'Hashtag' added to the OED – but # isn't a hash, pound, nor number sign
Real, hovering SPEEDER BIKE can be YOURS for cheaper than a house
Dragon capsule arrives at space station for Easter Sunday delivery
Surf's up near Saturn as boffins spot waves on Titan
Wednesday 19th March 2014 11:48 GMT
Re: Interesting news, but
About the same as South Shields, I reckon.
A hollow glass surfboard should do the trick on liquid methane - I suspect the common epoxy-based composites might dissolve in methane, as would the varnish on a wooden board.
Maybe something more exotic, like an aluminium/aerogel sandwich?
Flying Toaster screen savers return on GitHub
Google Glass: Reg man tests tech specs
Super-stealth FLYING CAR prototype seen outside GOOGLE HQ
Microsoft holds nose, shoves Windows into Android, iOS boxes
MEGA ASTEROID could 'BLOW UP EARTH' - Russian space boss
New iPhones: C certainly DOESN'T stand for 'Cheap'
Meet the world's one-of-a-kind ENORMO barge-bowling bridge of Falkirk
Curiosity team: Massive collision may have killed Red Planet
Giant human-powered quadricopter wins $250,000 Sikorsky Prize
Monday 15th July 2013 10:14 GMT
Re: Power train?
It does appear to have four pulleys on the crankshaft which are drawing in lightweight thread to drive the rotors. I wondered why they kept the extra weight of a wheel and chain with it's very high gear ratio. I suspect it provides both a flywheel and a bit of gyroscopic stability: not exactly sure why the use an apparently stock wheel rather than some kind of carbon-fibre disc with appropriate weight on the rim...
US Navy robot stealth fighter in first unmanned carrier landings
Thursday 11th July 2013 16:33 GMT
I always assumed that was more a signal to the catapult operator that everything was ready to go, and warning the pilot that she's about to be launched...
In this case the robot probably gets some other signal, unless the software is designed to assume that the shove in the back means "let's go!"
Elon Musk's Grasshopper tops 300m, lands safely
Monday 8th July 2013 11:28 GMT
Re: Pretty... but pointless
That would be a frickin' big parachute and a lot less likely to land on the black to it left behind (or even in the same state as the black dot...)
While they can easily change the launch schedule to avoid a windy day, once the thing is coming down on a parachute you're not going to be able to say "Too windy to parachute in: scratch that!". The controlled rocket descent has a much wider operating envelope with respect to weather.
However...
With a parachute landing you can have used/dumped all the nasty burny stuff before you come down, so a crash is just bits of metal... With a rocket landing, you still need some fuel in there and a crash is a bit more spectacular :)
Asus FonePad: You may feel a bit of a spanner
Wednesday 12th June 2013 10:25 GMT 
No Camera?
Surely that just makes it cover two out of three bases again, like other devices!
I love the fact that I have a camera on my smart phone, but hate the tiny screen, so I use my tablet for browsing and stuff...
Why can't these manufacturers just come up with one device that actually does all the things we want it to (for a realistic price).
It would have added less than a tenner to the price to put a basic 5mp snapper in the case, surely?
Atoms star in ball-bothering boffins' Big Blue movie
Freeview telly test suggests 4G interference may not be a big deal
Friday 5th April 2013 11:35 GMT
Re: I checked last week
You can get a basic {Satellite HD box, dish and cable} kit for less than 80 quid, although it's not Freesat-branded so the EPG is crap...
I bought one to see if it would work: now all I need to do is upgrade the box and I should be able to go without terrestrial telly if need be...
US lawmaker blames bicycle breath for global warming gas
Tuesday 5th March 2013 10:31 GMT
Re: I seem to recall...
As far as I am aware, VED is not ring-fenced, so yes: VED does contribute to the total tax income available to the government, some of which is spent on roads. However, the sort of roads that cyclists are allowed on are funded by local authority taxation (council tax, business rates, car parking income etc.), so assuming a cyclist is riding in his own county he probably pays for a fair bit of the road he rides on. Add to that the impact of a bicycle on the road surface compared to a motor vehicle, and I think the costs are pretty much covered. If everyone rode bicycles for local journeys (ever been to Shanghai?) there would be immense savings on road repairs...
The roads that are funded by national government in the UK are motorways and trunk route A-roads, which are usually out-of-bounds for cyclists anyway...
Ride Riverbed's Whitewater all the way to Glacier
Boffins spot Luna-sized exoplanet
Forget wireless power for phones - Korea's doing it for buses
Thursday 14th February 2013 12:15 GMT 
Didn't Oxford do something like this?
Years ago, they put some buses on a limited route with a charging point at the railway station. Those buses I think used a big flywheel to store the power, which was spun up by induction while it waited at the stop.
To me, the bus application is a realistic use of something like this: the stops are fairly predictable and at the ends of the route are often a couple of minutes idle time to spend charging. Add in the fact that bus engines are not the cleanest things on the road, and that electric drive gives you the sort of low speed acceleration that works well on a bus, and you're sorted.
HGV's could probably get some use from this sort of thing, although it would be simple just to plug them in at service stations while the drivers take their requisite tacho breaks...
If we could remove stinky diesel engines from public transport and freight that would cut a big chunk of the pollution and emissions problems, even if the cars all stick to internal comustion engines...
Twitter translated to LOLCATZ: Strangely this had not been done
ESA proposes 3D printing on the moon
Friday 1st February 2013 13:19 GMT
Re: more techo-wanking
Problem with any type of cutting (like the CNC router) is going to be cooling it: although the moon is pretty cold there's not much atmosphere to dissipate the heat. Traditionally, cooling would be done with water, and that would need a lot more of it than making cement or printing like this.
Laser sintering might work, but again stuff is going to get pretty hot with no breeze to carry the heat away.
Hydrogen on demand from silicon nanospheres - just add water
Wednesday 23rd January 2013 17:02 GMT
Safe to transport?
Hang on a minute: this 10nm silica reacts with water to produce hydrogen gas, so it think transporting it is going to require careful waterproofing. You're not going to cart it around in open-topped railcars on a rainy day, that's for sure...
OK, there's established systems in place for bulk powders (like gypsum, for example) that react with water, but that will add to the costs. Perhaps to a level comparable with fuel tankers?
Oh, and don't eat it (unless you're a firebreathing act...)
So if it's as expensive to produce than petrol, just as tricky to transport and produces a waste product that doesn't just blow away in the wind, is it really any benefit? Maybe when the oil runs out the economics will get better...
I was hoping that the 10nm silicon would be a catalyst, rather than consumed by the process. Now *that* would be a win, even if it required regeneration every thousand litres of water or something...
Boffins develop microwave weed-zapper
Boffins spot planet that could support life... just 12 light years away
Wednesday 19th December 2012 11:33 GMT
Re: Ping Time
I would say that it is within the scope of our current tech to get an autonomous probe there which could at least gently crash and send back a squawk of data about surface, atmosphere etc. before being smashed by the indiginous chimpanzee analogues...
Not sure how long it would take to get there (certainly much more than 12 years), and we'd have to wait another 12 years for the reply, but that's not a problem, is it? Voyager and Pioneer have been out there for decades and are still going. We'd need to kick our probe a bit harder than those to get it to Tau Ceti in anyone's lifetime, but they were tasked with looking at stuff on the way out, whereas this probe would be more single-minded.
Maybe send half-a-dozen: how about the next X Prize?
Boffin claims Bigfoot DNA reveals BESTIAL BONKING
BOFH: Hasta la Vista... luser
ViewSonic VSD220 22in Android mega tablet
Google, Amazon, Starbucks are 'immoral' and 'ridiculous' over UK tax
Ancient 16m-yr-old beastie caught riding on much bigger flying mount
Friday 19th October 2012 10:08 GMT
Just think of the numbers
P1 = Probability of getting trapped in amber: fairly small number (like 0.0000001)
B = Number of bugs at any one time: very large number (like 1 billion)
T = Amount of time available for it to happen (when trees and bugs exist at the same time): large number (say, 100 billion seconds)
P2 = Probability of that blob of amber fossilizing, and being found by someone: small number (like 0.0000001)
Therefore, expected number of bugs in amber = B * P1 * T * P1 = modest number (about a million)
These numbers are guesses, but you get the idea...
Ay caramba, Ubuntu 12.10: Get it right on Amazon!
BOFH: Uninterruptible patsy supply
Friday 19th October 2012 08:14 GMT
Re: There's no excuse for IT to bypass UPS issues.
Been there (nearly)
Luckily, I got ours out before it exploded.
But it was in the *top* of the rack, which is a tricky place to put 40+kg of batteries in the first place. When they've pinned themselves into their hidey-hole (humuhumunukunukuapua'a-style) it becomes a real mission...
British car parks start reading number plates
Monday 15th October 2012 09:27 GMT
A recent case highlights the wrong here
I read of a case where a person had used a car park which has two entrances/exits as a through route to get to another (private) car park. They were spotted by ANPR going in, and then spotted coming out some hours later, but never actually parked in the car park. The parking company hounded them for money, but couldn't actually prove that the car had been parked in the car park!
So when challenged, you say "Prove that my car actually occupied a space in your car park, and then I may consider paying!"
It is much simpler to employ someone to walk around checking, surely?
Swiss boffins jump in Lake Lugano for Cray super
Swiss railways ticked off at iOS clock knock-off
Friday 21st September 2012 08:23 GMT
It's clearly different - no case here!
The minute and hour hands on the Apple version are rectangular against SBB's trapezoidal. The Apple minute hand doesn't reach the tick marks, while the SBB one sweeps over the ticks. The blob on the end of the Apple clock is rectangular against round on the SBB clock.
Distinctions of this sort would be enough to identify font designs, so why not a clock?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
