Posts by Jez Caudle

Fact checking is such a bore.

If you were to actually do some fact checking, you know, journalism, you would find that to be able to exploit the bug the web site needs to be using AuthLogic for authentication and the person needs to know the session secret code.

AuthLogic is a third party Gem, it is not part of the basic install. If a site doesn't use it, and uses Devise for example, then there is no reason to patch.

You can get full details here: http://blog.phusion.nl/2013/01/03/rails-sql-injection-vulnerability-hold-your-horses-here-are-the-facts/

Have a read and maybe update your story now you have the facts?

VPN's are cheap and easy to setup

I'll just pop over to Linode or some other US VPS provider, sign-up for the cheapest package, install a VPN server (sudo apt-get install pp2pd). So now I have a US IP address.

I read stuff that is banned in the UK and then put it out on Twitter or FaceBook again via my US proxy. Who's going to stop me?

They really don't get it - do they?

All true but ...

... think of Skype.

On half of all Android phones it just won't work. It won't work on mine. After a software update the mic stopped working on Sony Experia phones.

The problem is fragmentation. The iPhone eco system doesn't have that problem to the same extent that Android does.

How many people mod their TV? iPhones and iPads are for consuming stuff and they meet that need. Us Geeks have Android and we root and install etc. When the walled gardens are erected us Geeks will still know how to tunnel and subvert.

Each to their own I say.

£250 for a design??

That is cheap. I hope none of my clients see that. They'll want a refund.

For the £250 he wanted from the escort he could have had 'O' (with CIM) and then 'A' levels. Maybe he should have done some sort of market research and then done some bartering.

Any good for voice over work?

I have tried using a blue tooth headset for recording video voice overs but the quality just isn't up to it.

I wondered how it faired when paired to your Mac?

Let it go!

Technology moves so quickly but some people don't move with it. That is their choice but why should the rest of us miss out because some people can't or won't keep up?

There are plenty of people using Windows 98 still. Should the developers of the world make sure that these people are supported? Stop your iPhone development!! We have out of date stuff to support!

By the time 10.4 support is phased out by Mozilla how many people will still be using it? I remember a quite vocal but small group attacking Opera for not supporting OS9 ...

Photo on the card.

I had my photo on the back of my Gold credit card when having a gold credit card meant something - i.e. I was loaded. This was the golden age of IT in the run up to the dot com bubble burst.

I had put my card behind the bar and drunk a good bottle and a half of red wine myself when I went to check out at the end of the night.

I'm not sure if the bar maid really was pretty or if it was the booze but she looked like an angel. When she asked me which card was mine I said: The gold one <pause for effect> with my picture on the back.

Didn't do me any good. I went home alone.

Am I getting old?

I had to switch the video off as the jerky nature of it was starting to give me a headache. I'm sure I was headed for a fit.

I got the idea that the phone was aimed at fashion conscience young ladies.

Acer Aspire One A110

I did a clean install and now the box flies. It is much faster than 9.04 - the lag gas gone and the wireless network connection is instant - before it would take upto a minute before connecting.

My install was flawless and I'm loving my netbook again.

WTF?

Technically, the brewery had already left Newcastle when it moved to Tyneside, south of the river,

When it moved to Gateshead, south of the river. Gateshead is still in Tyneside. As is Birtley. As is Barley Mow. Chester-le-Street isn't. Neither is Ousten, Perkinsville or Pelton.

You have to pay???

Did I read it right? You have to pay 99 American Cents per megabyte to transfer free books onto the device?

The article says:

It also charges 99c per megabyte if you want to transfer your own files wirelessly.

Does this include over Wifi? Or is that just over the mobile network? I undertand charging to get free stuff via the mobile network as bandwidth needs to be paid for ...

Let me go ...

... or I will simply jail break. I'm thinking of jailbraking anyway so I can run applications in the background - like GPS tracking for example.

Can they keep a phone locked to their network after the contact expires? Alas I didn't read mine when I signed up. I'm going to ask for a copy.

If some one needs to explain the joke ...

... then they don't get it.

I need someone to explain the joke.

Sexist Rubbish

"The gender pay gap can be misinterpreted. It does not compare men and women doing the same job. It reflects the fact that fewer women have higher paid jobs and the way to address that is not by comparing misleading average pay rates, but by improving opportunities for women via better childcare and careers advice," she said.

It is the womans job to look after children is it? How about making it easier for dad's to do childcare as that is also their role as parent. She is basically saying that a woman's role is to bring up the children. Once a child is weaned off breast milk strict equal parenting can be begin. Before that the man can do other stuff to help out while the woman feeds.

Allowing maternity leave to be given to the father would be a start as well as giving parents more flexible working hours - not insisting on 37.5 weeks for example.

My employer is very good. I have a very strong relationship with both of my children. Something that is a father's right.

IPv6 and the iPhone

The iPhone doesn't support IPv6 which is a bit ironic as it is one of the offenders that is leading to the demise of IPv4 address space.

I want to run IPv6 at home - why? Because I can. I'm not sure if the Acer Aspire One with the Linux build supports IPv6. I'll tell you if it does when the iPhone does.

The "IPv4 Exhaustion Counter" looks fun. Something I'll be checking on regularly.

Still getting chucked off planes?

So Stallman wants Facebook, for example, to allow others to write the clientside Javascript that does all the AJAX? Because if that doesn't happen then we are locked into something nasty?

Here is what would happen if Stallman had his way: someone does indeed write a replacement for the clientside Favebook JavaScript and it is better than the stuff Facebook wrote. So Facebook decide to stop paying their JS developers and instead allow unpaid geeks to do the business for them. Facebook are getting something for nothing unless they decide to give some money back.

Look at OpenSSH. Used by loads of big companies (Apple, Cisco etc) who have donated not a single penny to the project.

This doesn't mean that the projects should stop. OpenSSH is very useful and deployed massively, but who, apart from a few geeks too smelly and ugly to get a girlfriend, would use a replacement JS library for Facebook et al?

As Naomi Campbell also gets thrown off planes we should ask for her advice on this thorny issue as well.

Now this was very good until ...

... you stated that Apple should make loads of different phones.

You mention the low end of the mobile market having razor thin margins. The only way to make money is to make cheap phones that are plastic crap. Just like the PC biz Apple is leaving other companies to have a race to the bottom while it keeps turning out high quality kit.

If you like Apple is an expensive 'escort' who leaves you feeling like you've had the Girl Friend Experience. The other phone/PC makers are the street prostitutes who leave you feeling grubby and ashamed (and with an itch) as you know you are feeding their crack habit.

I know which one I'd like to suck my cock.

Mini prices gone up and ...

... no remote included in the price.

This morning the entry level Mac Mini would have cost £391. The Refurb Store had one for £320.

Now they are £499 except they don't come with a remote anymore, so add £15 to that price.

I'll be waiting on the Refurb Store to buy one, either a previous generation and pay a little extra for iLife 09 or get a current gen one. I won't be buying a new one at those prices.

SAS Crop circle?

Do you see the crop circles to top and right of the SAS barracks?

They are using Alien Technology and have Alien DNA. Why else would they storm the Iranian Embassy when everyone else was watching Steve "Interesting" Davis play snooker?

I was watching in black and white on a 14 inch portable TV.

Ruby On Rails

I have Ruby On Rails running on my Acer Aspire One and it uses SQLite by default, not MySQL.

The thrust of the piece is totally acurate. I have both an Acer and an iPhone. Why? Because I can...

I have implemented this ...

... where I work and it wasn't easy.

To avoid the phishing attacks most banks allow you to add a phrase that is displayed every time the 3DSec box appears. I have set this up with all my cards as I opted in so I could test the system I was building.

Most banks ask for the whole password which a key logger would get. But if your OS is full of security holes that is hardly the banks fault. What is the banks fault is the moving of the liability from the CC company basically to you. It was explained to me that successful 3DSec makes it almost impossible for a person to claim fraud, the only defence being "that someone was holding a gun to my head"!

My cousin runs a airport transport service. He picked up a party of 15 who had pre-paid via CC. 6 months later the money was removed from his account as the CC owner claimed it had been used fraudulently. My cousin worked his nuts off to prove the guy had used the service. He is loving 3DSec, now he doesn't have to photograph every punter who uses his service as he requires 3DSec.

When we forced users to use 3DSec here our sales plummeted, so unless the bank says that payment can not be made unless the person goes through it - we don't do it. The amount we lost in legitimate sales was huge compared to the amount of fraudulent sales, which was and still is negligent.

For those that do not like Sec3D, can you please stop complaining and suggest an effective, secure alternative please?

I know what I'll be doing...

Time to set up loads of email addresses and have them send loads of messages to each other with words like "bomb" in them. I have a 40gb cap on my ADSL and I use about 3gb a month. I'll use the other 37gb for sending rubbish and doing automated Google searches for bomb making and jihad and then spider those sites. With images switched off I should be able to hit a lot of web pages before my allocation runs out.

I also get free evening and weekend calls to most of Europe and all of the USA and Canada - including mobiles!!. I'll set up the computer to ring random numbers in random countries or even chemical suppliers, small banks, Mosques etc that I have screen scrapped from the web.

Now all I need is a few thousand more people who want to join in.

Let them data mine shit!

Difference in qulaity

The difference between VHS and DVD is huge - the same difference between cassette and CD.

The difference between DVD and Blu-ray is not that obvious at first glance.

Also having bought our music library first on vinyl and then cassette and then again on CD and then bought it on iTunes because we managed to find the CD case but the CD was missing; then having bought our film library on VHS and then DVD - we don't have any money to buy it all again on over priced Blu-ray.

A good song is a good song even if it sounds muffled with loads of hiss on a cassette. Steps will always sound shite even at 48bit, 196hz. I'll stick to my well made films and enjoy them, the video quality not being important.

Yes, I am starting to get old and I sound like my dad.

You just know ...

... that when these babies hit the general public someone is going to send you a disk with one single 10k Word file.

2 million IP addresses?

Moneysupermarket.com for example uses something in the region of two million IP addresses.

How does that work then? I doubt they own 2 million IP addresses as the IP4 address space is running low.

Anyone have the technical details?

It's 17th June ...

... not April the 1st.

Is this all for real or I am having a sense of humour failure?

The date of the AGM

Did I miss something as I didn't see the actual date of the AGM posted any where.

CPW Braodband

The quality of service may be something t do with it. At peak times my CPW broadband is the speed of dial up, at none peak times it is very very fast.

Also Sky is doing the normal Murdoch tactic of pricing others out of the market at the moment before ramping up prices.

Maybe people are prepared for quality and CPW is not quality, it is cheap and nasty.

Casey Keller

Casey Keller not a safe pair of hands? I'm sure you would find a load of Fulham fans who agree and loads who don't. I think Shay Given is a better goal keeper.

Why Motorola thought employing a goal keeper was a good idea is anyones guess. No wonder they are going down the pan.

Nice article

and the arguments are well made, but it seems there is a problem with your keyboard. It would appear that the "s" key doesn't work after pressing the "h" key. For example we keep seeing the word "math" with the "s" at the end missing.

Antigua and Barbuda

Isn't this the same country that is in dispute with the USA via the WTO and is allowed to suspend it's copyright law regarding products originating in the USA?

Oh yes, it is.

Maybe this software will push the entertainment industry into forcing the USA government to settle and either pay out big time or allow competition in the gambling industry.

This is just the leverage Antigua needs.

Ruby Script

I started writing a Ruby script to fill their database with crap, although the credit Card numbers would have been valid from a check digit point of view.

Then EastEnders came on, which I don't usually bother about but I wanted to see if Max gets back together his wife after his affair with Stacy and how Bradley is doing. Of course EastEnders was better in the 1980's with Ange and Den and Rolley the dog. Or was Rolley in Grange Hill? Susan Tulley was in Grange Hill and I hated her then and I hated her in EastEnders as well - Todd Cartey was good in both but he will always be Tucker Jenkins to me. Shame the original Mark died. What every happened to Tony, the builder from the first few episodes? He put a record out and nobody bought it. You know Dot Cotton is not an original character don't you? She came in about 6 months after it started. Bill Treacher was great as Arthur going to prison because he stole the Xmas Club money to pay for his duaghters wedding to Loffty and having a nervous break down on the way and she got cold feet at the alter and then married him later anyway. In real life Loffty is now a football pundit on BBC Radio London and he's an Arsenal fan. My wife knows Patrick Vieria's wife, Sherry. She came to our wedding and we were invited to theirs but couldn't go because my wife was due to drop with our first born. Which was a shame because it was a really good do by all accounts.

I never seem to get anything done without being distracted. Biscuit any one? I'm putting the kettle on ...

He infected a computer?

Surely every fact quoted should have had a question mark appended to it to make it into a question for your NZ readers?

They make everything into a question over there. 2 + 2 = 4?

Etc?

Technical details

I wondered if El Reg could post technical details of how exactly this works.

If they know where you are going and what you are looking at, how do they then show you ads? Do they rip and replace ads from other sites or wait until you hit a site hosting their adverts - at which point they look up your previous habits and then display loads of "relevant" ads?

A nice technical article and some possible mitigations would be fantastic.

The size of a football

Is he talking about Association or Rugby football?

You know, I bet he is talking about the abomination of men in plastic armour taking 4 hours to play a silly girls game. The one where the players have to wait for the TV networks to come back from adverts before they can "play on".

Silly game, silly country. God bless the Queen and the Queen Mum who single handedly won the war by waving at poor people in the east end during the blitz.

Where's the remote gone?

They don't come with a remote any more - Apple wants 15 quid instead.

I want the mid-range MacBook and have saved 50 quid by not having to pay for a larger HD but I have lost 15 quid because I want a remote.

I still 35 quid up by waiting for the upgrade and I get a faster laptop for that although is it worth waiting for Centreno 2 to come out with the higher FSB speeds?

It could be a while before Apple incorporates the technology. When Apple was using IBM they could keep things secret but now we know well in advance what Intel are doing so the secrecy is a little pointless. Except that is generates hype and free advertising etc.

It's a trick

During the cold war the Russians would regularly drive lorries from an embassy in the West back to Russia via Germany - the load being protected as diplomatic baggage. On one occasion the lorry in question was carrying a few thousand copies of a book by Khrushchev that nobody would read and had been hanging around the embassy basement for years.

As the lorry passed through various nations borders the CIA got more and more frustrated as their expensive kit was unable to work out what was in the lorry - leading to all sorts of paranoid theories.

Maybe this is what the USA government has done. Send a very cheap object into space and then make a big noise about shooting it down. "Well it must be important if they want to shoot it down!!"

Not only do they frighten the "enemy" they also get a chance to test their ability to shoot something in space. Double-plus good!

Of course in my day the Wilderness of Mirrors was much better than it is now ...

Word Perfect was already going down hill

I remember using Word Perfect under Windows 3.0 and it was impossible to use c1991. So much so that my boss at the time would not use Windows at all and used MS-DOS just so he could write things up.

The rest of us in the office used Letter Perfect, a stripped down version of WP that ran under DOS. It had a graphical viewer for print previewing that was alot more accurate than the DOS screen. Being stripped down you could use it for it was designed for - writing simple manuals, letters, faxes and memo's. We don't have memo's any more!!

I think this is the point that WP started to loose market share. They got too big for their boots and though that they could release any old sh!te and get away with it. The version of Office for Windows 3.11 was far superior and popping up in more and more places in the following years.

This is probably why MS decided to knife WP at a very critical point and leave the field clear for themselves. I hope MS looses big time. Their Office suite is just bloat - megabytes of unneeded rubbish getting in the way of producing documents. I would rather use VI.

Scan code doesn't work if host name has 1 in it.

Make sure your local hostname doesn't have a 1 in it or the thing won't work - use 127.0.0.1 instead if running locally or create something in your local hosts file.

The hostname for my server had two 1's in it and all I got was JS errors!!

Wrong cartoon company ...

Mickey Mouse was in Disney cartoons. Acme appeared in Warner Brothers cartoons. So your joke is factually wrong, unfunny and hurtful to the worshippers of God's representative on Earth - Porky Pig.

We are a loving and tolerant religion which believes in peace and unity, therefore those of us of the Congregation Of Porky will be taking to the streets to call for your execution while holding banners proclaiming "Death to the Unbelievers".

When you posted you must have know that Mickey Mouse and his believers are our mortal enemies. We will add your name to our list of enemies - a list that includes Warner Brothers who committed blasphemy when they depicted Gods Emissary as a cartoon character!!

Tha-tha-tha-That's all folks!

Fox and The Times

So the Times (proprietor R. Murdoch) is giving space to story about Fox (proprietor R. Murdoch) allowing it's content to be rented on the best selling portable music/video device ehh?

Did the article also mention Sky and MySpace par chance?

All fluff

Another New labour trick of announcing nothing new as if it is new and obscuring the facts to big-up id cards.

They are also playing the immigration card as well without actually taking any action. If they were to actually look into cases of illegal working it would mean paying decent wages to the investigators and carrying out actual investigations - both quite costly. Why spend money there when there are plenty of private companies to hand money over to for running down the NHS, schools, Military Research etc?

Most people will be put off by the fines and threats of prison time but those who have the most to gain from employing illegal workers - people traffickers, those who refuse to pay even the minimum wage - are really not scared as their profits and illegal activities carry a much larger tariff. And they have managed to get away with it for years anyway - so why be worried?

This is the government that in the name of efficiency has reduced the amount of Tax and VAT inspectors - and then whines on about VAT carousel fraud. The Home Office lurches from crisis to crisis driven by newspaper headlines. When a newspaper reveals that foreign criminals are not being deported at the end of their sentence all resources are shunted to that problem leaving other problems to appear.

I stubbed my toe on my bed this morning. I bet that wouldn't have happen if the UK had Identity Cards.