* Posts by Morely Dotes

939 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007

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Adobe to remove Photoshop pic pimping clause

Morely Dotes
Flame

Enough is enough

Your yellow journalism hacks have insulted the Free Open Source Software movement one too many times.

I will be adding theregister.co.uk to our corporate firewall as soon as this is posted.

You can ram the "freetard" insult up your ass, if there's room in there next to your swollen head.

Comcast admits it can do the impossible

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Flame

@ Richard Bennett

"Richard Bennett has argued that BitTorrent puts an unreasonable strain on Comcast's network - and that the company's best option is to clip the app's wings."

Comcast's wide-open outbound port 25 puts an unreasonable strain on my MX server's spam identification systems. My best option is to file a class action lawsuit against Comcast for knowingly aiding and abetting spam senders, and acting in collusion with them to violate the CAN-SPAM Act.

Of course, that could be avoided if Comcast would intercept all port 25 traffic leaving customer machines, and prevent them being used as "zombie" spam-relays.

And as for clipping BitTorrent's wings - since Comcast caps *all* customers at 256kbps outbound, perhaps the fact is that Comcast has oversold their capacity. A lower cap seems necessary - for *all* Comcast customers. Or an investment in infrastructure upgrades.

How much is Comcast paying you to pretend that their "best" option is to discriminate against and defraud customers who are attempting to use that which has been sold to them by Comcast?

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Flame

@ Andrew Orlowskii

"Neutrality is a proxy war for liberal activists: it's a hyper-real simulation of "activism" - with its own "heroes" and "villains". So instead of taking on a big issue like healthcare, which has powerful opponents and which might mean a messy (to nerds) compromise, it's far easier for armchair warriors to "Save The Internet", sign a petition, wear a badge, etc."

Don't be an ass. Oh, I apologize, it's apparently in your nature, and in your fiscal interests, you can't help it.

What makes you think we "armchair warriors" aren't *both* working for universal healthcare, *and* attempting to preserve an open Internet?

Ah, but you're a yellow-press hack, aren't you? Fairness and reasonableness are counter-productive to that sort of ass.

MPAA copyright punch up knocks out TorrentSpy

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Correction needed

"Illegal filesharers" do not exist. The term "illegal" implies criminal. "Unlawful" is the proper term.

And a for calling people "freetards," well, flies and vinegar. I know that Andrew Orlowski's heavy use of that term has infuriated me so much that, contrary to my own personal policy in the past, I have started sharing my more than 16,000 MP3 tracks, all of which are ripped by me in 320kbps quality MP3 from the original CDs I purchased before the RIAssA and MPAssA started suing their (now former) customers.

I have not bought a CD since then, and never will again. I rent DVDs but will not buy.

Bell Canada chokes BitTorrent traffic on someone else's ISP

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@ IMVHO

"Substitute VPN traffic for P2P. How would that change the reaction to this story?"

In this area, Comcast completely blocks VPN. Our company has roughly 100 employees. Around 30 of them use VPN. I have advised them to dump Comcast and get DSL instead. They have done so.

That's $1500/month (from our employees alone) that Comcast is not getting any more because they chose to block a totally legal and legitimate service.

My reaction to this story is "Well, Bellnexxia has a long and sordid history of ignoring spam reports, so the fact that they ignore their obligations to supply what they have sold is no surprise, either."

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@ John

"No engineer that works for a telco would promise you that. But the service definitions are written by Marketing types, NOT engineers. And the statements they make are not based upon technical realities, but on "what are the competitors saying, we need to offer more", and "what are the competiton charging, we need to charge less". How naive do you have to be, to think that such services can be technically realised?"

That isn't really our problem is it? It's a problem for the lawyers retained by your ISP.

It's very simple: When you (the ISP) promise a service and you can't deliver it, then you are guilty of fraud. *Why* you can't deliver it (Marketing lied, market conditions have changed, the ISP hasn't invested in adequate infrastructure maintenance, the ISP oversold bandwidth, etc.) doesn't matter.

Adobe opens Photoshop for freetards

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Flame

Is this official Reg policy?

If it is now officially the policy of The Register to insult people who prefer to *legitimately* get things for free rather than paying for bloatware, I shall take my custom elsewhere. It's not as if you are the only Web site with nasty-minded drunken oiks writing tech news, you know.

Cassini sniffs Enceladus's 'surprising organic brew'

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@ Steve

Don't confuse a perfectly good excuse that Management will not question with an Engineer's ability to learn the local time.

Incidentally, last I heard London wasn't on metric time any more than Seattle is.

I am 188cm tall and weigh in at 109 kg. That's a bit over 2 yards (an English measurement) and... How many stone is that?

Blu-ray 'to bloom', now HD DVD's dead

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Flame

No Sony products here, ever!

"Will you be one of the 18.8m people buying into BD this year?"

No.

Sony is the only major corporation ever to have been caught distributing consumer products which were *meant* to install rootkit viruses on PCs, and they did it not once, but twice.

No way in Hell will I ever buy another Sony product. Not now. Not ever. Never!

And my plain old DVD is good enough.

DIY satellite TV installer shoots wife dead

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Black Helicopters

@ Edward Rose

"Come on man, we just want cheap shots at the Yanks, they voted in GWB after all."

Not all of us. And frankly, I doubt it was a majority of us. The first time round, I am morally certain it was his campaign manager in Florida, who was also the Florida Secretary of State - the person who was charged with certifying the election as having been conducted lawfully, and also the only person who could have opened ballot boxes and resealed them with the official seals before the ballots were counted; and a number of ballot boxes went missing for several hours. Makes you wonder.

UK to fly the flag for OOXML

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Jobs Horns

So will there be a new sign at Heathrow?

"Welcome to the United Kingdom (A wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft)"

Where's Guy Fawkes when you need him?

Dump IE 6 campaign runs afoul of dump IE 6 campaign

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Alert

There's a better solution

Forget about IE6, IE7, IE8, or whatever.

Use a *standards-compliant* Web browser, and prominently post on your site "This Web site was designed to comply with the W3C standards. If it does not appear properly in your Web browser, then your browser does not comply with existing International standards. Please ask your browser vendor to fix it."

Problem solved.

Apple forbids Windows users from installing Safari for Windows

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@ Will

So how's the voice-recognition and voice dialing on your iPhone? Works great on my $50 LG phone!

Boeing faces jumbo problem over US aerial raygun fleet

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Black Helicopters

Re: They could, but

It's marginally impractical today. In 1975, a personal computer that could display real-time 3D animations (ala World of Warcraft, for instance (pun intended)) would have been impractical. Now, 30+ years later, US$300 will get you more computing power than most small nations owned back then.

Technology changes. It gets cheaper, more powerful, and more practical as development proceeds.

And a laser is the only weapon that can move fast enough to catch an ICBM during boost pahse, when it is most vulnerable. 300,000 km/second is the speed of light (or speed of laser, if you like). A physical object going into orbit is only moving at about 29,000 km/hour. It's the difference between the Post and radio, essentially.

And we didn't have invisible anti-gravity-powered black helicopters then, either. ;-)

Spyware 'scammer' sued over PC pop-up invasion

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@ Elmer Phud

A "pop up" is the vernacular for Microsoft's Remotely-Operated Malware Installation System, otherwise known as "Internet Explorer with ActiveX"

Vista SP1 customers get free support

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@ jeremy

"since you have not legally obtained that copy"

That's a serious charge, jeremy. I presume you an make it stick in a court of law. Otherwise, you are guilty of libel.

Fact: According to the license, an OEM copy of Windows may be sold with the purchase of a motherboard, CPU, or hard drive (at least as recently as Windows XP - I wouldn't touch Vista again if you paid me to do so). Ergo, anyone who has purchased one of those items at the same time as the OEM Windows package has obtained it "legally." Until it became unprofitable to do so, I built and sold custom PCs, which makes me an "OEM" per Microsoft's license agreement.

Furthermore, violating the license agreement is not illegal. It is a matter of civil contract law, not criminal law, and is, at worst, a tort.

So either you are knowingly libelous, or a loud-mouthed ignorant git. Which is it.?

Mozilla CEO blasts Apple for putting security of the internet at risk

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Pirate

Apple, Microsoft... I'm the guy with the gun.

When I found I could no longer install Quicktime without iTunes, I stopped using Quicktime.

I located a site (no, I won't name it, do your own research) that lets me install all the Windows XP updates since SP2, up to August 2007 (when Microsoft forced them offline) from a CD, and the PC never needs to "phone home" for WGA.

Funny how I never have installations forced on me as fake "updates" on my Ubuntu laptop.

It's arrogance like that displayed by Microsoft and Apple that encourages young people to use pirated software; at least the pirates let you *choose* what you want to install.

Yes! It's the handgun camcorder!

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Nice one, Saucerhead!

There's no reason I can see that you'd be *required* to attach it to a gun. It could as easily be mounted to the side of a hat, or on a belt.

Or, in Saucerhead's case, the leg of his romantic interest's chair.

Verizon makes nice with P2P

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@ J re: FIOS

"up to 5 Mbps" is the *cheapest* FIOS service. I get 15 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up, and actual measurements consistently show 14.7 Mbps down (or better).

Keep in mind that the cheap service is meant to compete with DSL; Comcast users are paying more than double the price of the cheap stuff on FIOS.

Mind you, I hate Verizon, but they have treated me better than Comcast ever did, and their technical support is based in the USA, with native American English speakers who are willing to escalate a call if they can't help you quickly.

I *never* got that from Comcast.

British youths think Churchill went to moon

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All I want to know is...

If we successfully sent Winston Churchill to the Moon, why can't we send all the other politicians?

One-way, mind. Much cheaper.

Cyber attacks target pro-Tibetan groups

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It's definitely a Red Army operation

The Chinese Red Army has direct control over all Internet activity in China; they've been deliberately turning a blind eye to any spam going *out* of the country ever since they got the Bamboo Firewall in place, while actively tracing the sources of spam internal to China, and executing the spammers.

While I applaud the execution of spammers, it is patently obvious that the Red Army has orchestrated the spam attacks on the West, and the latest denial of service attacks on Free Tibet are only a minor escalation of their activity.

Enraged AT&T spam filter eats legitimate mail

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Paris Hilton

It's called "karma"

AT&T refuses to act on spam reports, so seeing their customers - the people who make it possible for them to stay in the ISP business - suffering due to yet another "management" disaster at AT&T cause a bit of schadenfreude.

Paris, because she's as smart as AT&T's management, and somewhat more decorative.

US auto-emissions cleansed in urine-tech shower

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So Mercedes is saying...

"You've got a problem with air pollution, and your urban assault vehicle uses too much fuel? Piss on them both!"

Toshiba goes multi-cell with new flash drives

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Paris Hilton

Where are the actual benchmarks?

"Better overall performance" than regualr old 5400 or 7200 rpm disks is lovely, but are we talking orders of magnitude better, or a few percent better?

My money's staying in my wallet until the performance per dollar is at least equal.

Paris, because she understands performance but doesn't know where the charts are, either.

Caribbean firm circumvents BD+ copy protection

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Coat

*chortle*

*snicker*

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Sequoia attack dogs kill review into e-voting discrepancies

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Alert

A suggestion

The State Attorney General of New Jersey should file suit against Sequoia on behalf of the citizenry for knowing, willful, and deliberate suborning of the electoral process, and submit the paper-tape and cartridge records as evidence.

The only way Sequoia can prove that charge to be false (if it is, which I doubt) will be to open their machines to truly independent inspection.

Vista SP1 downloaders bite back

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Flame

@ tim chubb

"cant say i can recomend linux unless you enjoy spending 8 hours trying to get the back and fwd buttons on your mouse to work"

Frankly, tim if it's taken you that long to get something that works by default in modern Linux distros, you ought to be using an Etch-A-Sketch(tm).

The Dell Optiplex 745 on my desk here came with Vista Ultimate. I successfully downloaded SP1, but having read this artivle and checked my device manager, I think I'll wait to install it. Looks like practically every chip in it is Intel, and I *need* my USB and LAN to work.

E-Plus kills i-mode service

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What is i-mode?

For those who, like me, had never heard of it before, here's the Google link to the definitions:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS252US252&defl=en&q=define:i-mode&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title

Short version: It's a proprietary method of using a cell phone as a modem.

Comcast accuses FCC of impotence

Morely Dotes

Ex-customer here

'If you're a Comcast customer, we would like to know if your experience has proven that the ISP marketplace maximizes consumer welfare. After all, in many areas of the US, the marketplace amounts to no more than one or two options. Keep in mind, however, that if you contradict Comcast, you will be contradicting the "facts."'

I am an ex-Comcast customer. Their policies minimized my "consumer welfare" and maximized frustrations. The tipping point came when a local-to-me distribution switch failed, and Comcast told me it would be 2 weeks before it was fixed, leaving me without any Internet connectivity whatsoever - and, no, they would not be crediting me for the two weeks without service.

Changing ISPs maximized my "consumer welfare." I would advise any Comcast customers who have an alternate broadband ISP available to make use of their ability to change, and dump Comcast.

Pentagon says sat-smash smithereen cloud almost gone

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Coat

Re: Re: Naval Ranks

Minor correction (or additon if you like).

In sailing-ship naval warfare, the admiral commanding the fleet would be onboard the lead ship in the engagement, with the fleet strung out in line behind him. As the two hostile fleets pass one another, they fire off their cannon, of course. When the two fleets have passed beyond engagement range, each individual ship comes about, reversing the order of the ships in line, and the rear admiral (formerly on the rearmost ship, which has now become the lead ship) commands the fleet during this pass.

So a Rear Admiral is the fleet's second-in-command when they're sailing "forward," and the fleet's battle commander when they're sailing back the other way.

Mine's the one with "pedant" emblazoned across the back...

Video conferencing gets cheaper, nastier easier

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Looks like a commerical for a credit card

Big-ass Plasma TV: $1249.99

Vidconf-ready PC: $362.99

High-end USB Webcam: $100.95

Hands-free VOIP phone: $107.95

Selling this bundle (plus a table and paint job) for half a million: Priceless

These prices are real, I just looked them up:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=TA42P40M&cat=TVS

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=TS-0007M-AMDX723-R&cat=SYS&cpc=SYSbsc

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=960-000111-DT&cat=VID

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2200-44040-001-DT&cat=VOP

Phorm agrees to independent inspection of data pimping code

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Alert

Davies admits that Phorm collects personal data

"in my view the company has gone above and beyond the norm to expunge personal data from its system."

In other words, Phorm's spyware *does* collect personal data, but then very kindly deletes it. You can't expunge data unless you collect it first.

And there's no guarantee that they will continue to delete it in future; particularly if it becomes of "commercial value" to them.

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@ Mike Crawshaw

"a firm that deals ethically"

Which fantasy world would that be in, then?

There are two kinds of corporations: Rapacious, sell-your-grandma-for-catfood crooked ones, and dissolved-due-to-bankruptcy ones.

So what's the easiest box to hack - Vista, Ubuntu or OS X?

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@ Webster Phreaky

It's funny. I don't own a Mac, don't use a Mac, and I think the MacBook Air is design for morons.

But I am absolutely certain that OS X is orders of magnitude more secure than any version of Windows; OS X doesn't come with Internet Explorer, and IE is *designed* to allow remote code execution.

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@ Tim Spence

"with the world+dog currently hacking Vista, there can't be that many exploits left undiscovered."

O ye of little faith! There are literally million of lines of code in Vista; even Microsoft isn't aware of all the exploits.

Ofcom to hold operators responsible for dodgy dealers

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Strange days

Apparently, the UK legal system which as a rule seems more sensible than the one we have in the US, does not have the concept of holding a firm or employer responsible for the actions of its agents while they are on the job.

Resellers are acting as the agents of the cellular carriers; as such, if I am sold a service plan with Verizon which includes a promised rebate, Verizon is responsible for ensuring I get that rebate (or explaining to the FTC why they thought it was a good idea to deny my claim). Needless to say, the resellers are kept on a very short leash because of that.

Nintendo scores zero on e-waste responsibility

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Flame

Greenpeace? Don't make me laugh

Greenpeace is run by a bunch of power-tripping failed politicians and lawyers. If they gave a flying rat's ass about the environment, they'd be working on an eco-friendly way to get industry into orbit, where there's no environment to pollute and no ecology to destroy.

My engineer buddy tells me we have the ability *right now* to build a mag-lev launch system that could put a reusable 100-ton manned craft into orbit. It isn't being done because it needs to be built in Tibet or South America to take advantage of the combination of tall mountains and Earth's rotational speed.

What's Greenpeace doing about that? Not Jack shit, that's what.

Useless tossers.

Ex-MS staffer to demo Vista smart card hack

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@ toby

"I happen to believe MS to be much more security conscious than many vendors"

I agree. MS is very aware of the lack of security in their products.

They just don't care, as long as their lack of security doesn't affect sales.

BT admits misleading customers over Phorm experiments

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@ David Wiernicki

There are millions would argue for Pterry. It's all a matter of opinion,isn't it?

Russian serfs paid $3 a day to break CAPTCHAs

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Thumb Up

@ Brett Brennan

Half of your idea is good.

Charging a setup fee for a "free" email account would practically eliminate their use by spammers, because any form of payment whatsoever that works over the Internet can be traced.

Charging per email doesn't work for a rather large number of reasons (do you charge per addressee, per byte, per destination domain? How do you calculate the actual costs, so as to ensure you profit from the charges? How do you keep your customers when they can get a free "unlimited email" account from me after paying the nominal setup fee? and so on.)

But $3/day serfs aren't going to plunk down $5 or $10 per account, even if their masters are willing to pay it. Assume they each open 100 accounts per day. After all, they can pocket the $500 or $1000 for one day's "work" and quit immediately; why work the rest of the year for that amount of money?

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@ theotherone

"whats the point of using gmail to spam? there is a 500 message per day limit"

1. A valid "return address" will defeat some anti-spam measures ( I won't name and shame; suffice it to say there are some truly shite-quility, expensive commercial packages that are trivial to get around).

2. That same valid "return address" may be needed for some scams.

3. As I understand it, Gmail permits up to 50 BCCs. That's 50 * 500 == 25000 spam recipients. Multiply that by the hundreds or thousands of phony accounts that are being set up and, well, you can see how quickly it adds up.

Al-Qaeda seeks geek fanatics for Jihoo!

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Boffin

@ Sceptical Bastard

"will I get my 72 virgins before glorious martyrdom or afterwards?"

Actually, that's a typographical error, a few letter were dropped by the copyist.

It's 72 Virginians.

Do not look directly into laser with remaining eye.

Gibson and Activision duel over Guitar Hero

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Thumb Down

@ Giles Jones

"The rule should be if you have a patent and wish to sue someone who infringes it then you need to have a product of your own out there."

Not at all.

However, since software is already covered by copyright, allowing a bit of software to be patented is a boneheaded idea worthy of Bloody Stupid Johnson.

The purpose of patents is to *encourage* innovation. Software patents, however, *stifle* innovation, since even if a programmer discovers a completely novel way to achieve the same result, the *result* of the software is essentially what is patented, and therefor a new and innovative method of reaching that end is *still* subject to patent trolling.

BOFH: On the brink

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@ max allan

"I did install SCO at one stage, it wasn't as bad as Linux. At least you didn't need to recompile your kernel every time you wanted new software, which inevitably resulted in a non-bootable Linux with "failed to load ld.so.1" or something like.

I haven't kept up with either flavour and I can easily imagine Linux has overtaken SCO who seem to be too busy with crazy lawsuits to innovate."

SCO hasn't innovated since the company was sold to a bunch of lawyers. I have a machine downstairs running SCO, and it's the "latest version" - identical to the version it replaced, except for the version number and the copyright date, as far as I can see. This time I insisted that we get a contractor in to install it, so I didn't have to touch the media myself. You can't be too careful.

I've only ever compiled the kernel once in Linux; can't recall why I had to now, it was some years ago. Any time since when I've wanted new software, I've used apt or Synaptic to install it (for free, might I add) and "it just works."

But my copy of OS/2 Warp is still sitting on the top shelf, in the original shrinkwrap. I used it when I lived in Houston to do some major bank upgrades. My gods, has it been 15 years? Time flies...

Disney doesn't want AOL either

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Jobs Horns

@ Paul

"I'm sure most potential buyers have figured out that a business plan depending largely on consumers remaining stupid and clueless doesn't add up as well as you'd expect it to."

It works for Microsoft. Of course, AOL's software is nowhere near as good as Microsoft's...

Cuba lifts ban on computer sales

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@ mark11727

It was not televised *in Cuba*. I remember seeing it in California, however.

AOL buys a friend for $850m

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Hmmm?

"Ex-Google fembot Joanna Shields will continue to run Bebo, which is developed in San Francisco"

Wait, wait... You mean to say someone actually "developed" Bebo? I wasn't just the result of a massive teenage wankfest?

Lucky buggers probably got paid to do it, too.

Terry Pratchett donates £500k to Alzheimer's charity

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Flame

Re: OI! leave it . . .

"bring joy to millions and die prematurely - this proves there is no god."

Or that whatever god is in charge of setting appointments with Death is an illiterate, humourless, capricious and malicious son of a bitch.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster would never have done this to us.

Hang in there, Pterry, if anyone can beat Alzheimer's by sheer determination, I'd lay my bet on you.

And to do my own selfish bit: PLEASE spend whatever time you have left expanding the Diskworld series. Even if you outlive me (not unlikely), I'll continue buying your books as long as I possibly can (I have a habit of trading them in, then buying them back every 6 months or so anyway).

Oh, and for those of you slagging off Pterry because his donation was "selfish:" You're all going to die sooner or later. I hope quite sincerely that whatever kills you does it soon, without you knowing what you've got until it's too late, and the cure is announced right after your autopsy. Bastards.

BBC calls DRM cops on iPlayer download party

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Video/audio capture elminates DRM! Oh noes! Am I going to jail?

"If I had time (I don't, but someone else might) I'd write an application which simply records all the outputs to a monitor/speakers."

It already exists. Actually, several already exist. Camtasia Studio is the first one that comes to mine (free version here http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe which is version 3.12).

Mass compromise powers massive drive-by download attack

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Heart

A Modest Proposal

OK, *another* Modest Proposal:

Both US and UK Special Operations teams need lots of training in order to stay sharp for real warfare.

I suggest those teams be assigned to identify all members of the RBN, hunt them down, and capture, or if capture is not practical, kill them.

And I really am serious. Wipe out the RBN and you'll eliminate a huge volume of spam, and make it possible for Joe Sixpack to pay his mortgage (because he didn't stupidly get fleeced by an RBN spammer).

Once the RBN is down, move on to the next-largest spam/malware gang. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The heart icon, because that's what I want: The warm, still-beating hearts of the RBN members ripped from their chests on live Webcam.

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