Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: We cannot spare the money to hook you up...

"although we sold the one we had"

Not even that. It was demerged as a separate company, AFAIK because BT didn't like the amount of money paid in the spectrum auction.

In fact, I wonder what it actually cost BT to do that. Staff TUPEed into O2 at the time would have been in the BT pension scheme. Presumably there would have been a pension scheme with equivalent benefits set up for O2. If the BT scheme hadn't been in deficit it would have been a straight transfer of the appropriate proportion of funds from the BT scheme to the O2 scheme. But as the BT scheme has been in deficit for years did BT have to add in extra to make up for the shortfall?

Re: @Salts - Hmmm...

And what boots the SD card? It's got a stage 1 boot in ROM on the SoC.

"A very clear and simple rebuttal of the O2 response"

True. An even clearer one is "how would the customer's computer have the PUK on it?".

Re: his raised suspicion among the staff

They were setting up an operation to relieve punters of money. Something to which casino operators would have deep moral objections.

Re: Did Goliath need a capital G?

Yes, it's a proper noun.

Re: The Point

OK A/C. Pony up. No secrets.

Post here your bank account details, password, security answers etc. And your eBay, Amazon etc logins & passwords.

What's that?

You've just discovered that not only do you have something to hide, you're contractually obliged to hide it?

Re: "We already took action on this, and we are totally on it,"

For some value of "already".

Re: Lol

"I could do it the easy way, but just think what happened to Forever 21 with their $500M fine!"

In that case you'd better work out the difference between fines and damages otherwise it would damage your credibility.

Re: Distraction, annoyance, graphics bloat: Web 3.0

" If it isn't the big-ass fotos ...which take up the entire top half of the scroll"

You wouldn't be thinking of somewhere quite close to here would you?

Re: It's all fine

"flatten creases on shirts"

Flatten creases? Nobody told me.

"In other words, eat Widows you proles! "

ElReg promoting cannibalism?

Re: Hmmmm

"Don't have enough information from the story, but posting a disk encrypted with very strong encryption may be appropriate"

We've not been told the data was encrypted. I'd have thought that if it was they'd have been falling all over themselves to reassure us. So...

Re: Obvious

Have an upvote for flashpig.

"A list of topics we don't want to see in this thread, because they've been done to death and totally discredited:"

So why did you introduce them?

Re: I was more interested

"I wonder if we'll see more of these specialised search engines appearing."

I wish. I sometimes put enquiries into Google about placenames. What I'm looking for are historical references. Inevitably the results are headed by piles of estate agents' adverts.

Re: When will the NSA do their damn jobs?

'I even saw a "honeypot" advert on tv here in the UK the other day'

You watch adverts?

Re: HSBC

"What doesn't work on the HSBC site?"

Working & being officially supported are two different things. I used to bank with HSBC for both business & personal. I don't know if it's changed but their credit-card settling process used to look a bit Heath Robinsonish. AFAICT it was handed over from one system to another mid-process & not hiding the join 100% successfully. One night this hand-over consistently failed. I thought I'd give them a friendly heads-up that they might have a problem, maybe some overnight job getting in the way. Of course they want to know what S/W you're using & their instant response was "we don't support that". This was later confirmed in writing by them. So for that and other incivilities such as closing my most convenient local branch I sacked them.

As of a few weeks ago HSBC group - including FD - still had the same restriction listed on their web-site. Even Barclays list Linux as supported. So although First Direct may work OK with Linux as soon as there's a problem, even at their end, you''ll find they don't want to know.

"he court would quite literally tear them to pieces"

I think the word you were looking for was "metaphorically".

Re: So How's Pets.com Doing?

"Back when owning a generic dot com domain was supposed to be the ticket to success, there was the famous crash and burn Pets.com. I've never visited that site before, but I did just now to check on it before making this post. There's no site at pets.com, it's just a re-direct to another domain that I've never heard of that sells pet supplies."

A few minutes with whois shows that pets.com was last modified late last year. The other domain was registered a few years ago. So it's possible that the pets.com domain was acquired fairly recently by the owners of other site who elected to keep their existing site - and existing customer recognition - and do the redirect as a quick fix. Not saying that that's what happened but you can't draw too many conclusions from a redirected name.

Re: The simplest and best solution

With a republic you can vote for the head of state but you always end up with a politician.

Re: Not Again

"This one is going to be particularly hard to fix"

Really? I paused reading when I got to the sentence that said fixes were available, installed them which took less than a minute, carried on reading and then went to the comments section where, of course, I found exactly the sort of comment I expected.

Re: Organising the Techies

Write to your local MP. Suggest they get together with various members of their friends & family of a reasonably wide range of age groups. Get each one to check his smartphone for apps which use encryption. Ask them what their reaction would be if those apps were made illegal. Point out that the likely results would make the Cameron policy the shortest political suicide note in history (your MP should get the reference).

Also point out that criminals, including terrorists, disregard laws. Although the MP's constituents would be affected by such legislation and considerably angered by it the terrorists wouldn't. They'd have sufficient resources to roll their own apps; the strong encryption genie has been out of the bottle for a couple of decades now and it isn't going back, ever. So all that will have been achieved is a large bunch of unhappy voters and a smaller bunch of uninconvenienced terrorists.