Existing subscribers not immediately impacted?

I note the use of the word "immediately" there. I wonder if now would be a good time to explore other television avenues?

Re: Trygve

"A push of the F12 key and a couple of mouseclicks isn't as easy as it might be, but it still works well enough for those who like to wear a web-condom and only remove it for trusted partners."

Your comment invoked the monitor/tea interface.

iPod and Laptop with WiFi access?

There was me thinking he was meant to be being punished for killing someone.

Hooray!

A real opportunity for Gordon Brown to regain a bit of credibility here by appointing someone sensible to the position who doesn't want to take every single freedom we have away. Of course, he won't.....

User agent string

I noticed this unwanted bit of kid install itself ages ago when they first started sending it out. The clue was that it changes the Firefox's user agent to broadcast the currently installed .NET framework version to all and sundry.

Removing the add on does not revert the change made to the user agent string or at least, removing it by force like I did does not. To put change that, open about:config, search for dotnet and clear the value of the general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet preference (or set it to something witty, of course).

Subscription

"7.99 a month without any subscription at all so you can opt in and opt out as and when you see fit"

Since when did the words 'subscription' and 'contract' become analogous? Or are TomTom trying to show my right to cancel a direct debit if and when I choose as some kind of generosity on their part?

Removing thumbnails

In true Google Web2.something style, the thumbnails are not so much removed as 'removed'.

There's a 'restore all removed thumbnails' option which nicely brings back all the 'embarrassing' thumbnails you thought were gone, even those removed in previously closed browser sessions. <head/desk> <head/desk>

4chan

Did you really have to give those spotty, 13-year-old, attention seeking to**ers the publicity they're after?

Request for comment

"An Apple spokeswoman didn't respond to an email requesting comment."

You're surprised? Do you think Apple's press office even read emails from El Reg? I suspect not...

Interesting

It works better than I thought it would when I read the blurb a while back.

That said, there are clearly some 'gaps' in data that it should know about. For example, it knows all about Tropical Storm 'Fay' in 2002 but knows nothing of the larger storm of the same name in 2008.

I'm still quite impressed though.

Bollocks

It's fake.

You'll notice that the bottom right of the screenshot is blocked out (looks like a 4yo did it in MS Paint). Presumably under that is a Firebug icon and this kid just signed into his own Amazon account and edited various elements to make it look the business.

I'm amazed anyone was taken by it, even to the point of reporting it 'dubiously'....

Not that interesting to be honest

I mean, it's not really a hack or even pilfering, is it? It's just using the DOM for one of the things it was meant for - inspecting the styles of page elements.

Start Panic is reliant on the script knowing the specific URIs it wants to check and second, it can't determine *what* you did on each site it detects. For example, it can detect that you've been to http://www.google.com/ but it can't detect that you've been to http://www.google.com/search?q=something+naughty unless it specifically checks for that precise term. Given how many variations there can be on Google search URIs that give the same results, and that you'd then have to check the history for all those possible URI variations and then do the same for each TLD Google operates under, it'd take forever.

To be even relatively sure that you'd scanned the user's history accurately for even one search term, you'd probably have to probe the history hundreds if not thousands of times. It's hardly worth the effort, is it?

Come back when someone comes up with JS code to automatically extract all visits to http://www.google.com/* from the history. That will be news but of course, it will never happen (well, maybe in IE...)

Good god.

How much did that article cost, then?

Fakes

"several of the cards featured by IDScan would appear to be fake rather than novelty."

Like which ones, exactly? They're all fakes - there's not a copy of a legitimate card amongst them.

Re: The IRS are getting stiffed

Read it again, the IRS aren't getting stiffed, the taxpayers are picking up the tab (of course). The IRS aren't that stupid.

Graphics cards

So I tried it in a bog-standard off-the-shelf PC with an integrated Intel graphics processor. Won't work, says it's not supported. That's a huge swathe of the PC market, maybe half or more that come with cheap but reasonably powerful Intel graphics chipsets that are excluded automatically.

I know Google love to rush to market and then fix things but surely getting to a point where most people can run it before releasing and asking to be taken seriously would have been wise.,,

Bloody fantastic

That is all :)

Trademark

I thought that US Government departments weren't allowed to trademark or copyright anything?

Very simple to disable.

It ain't pretty but after failing to disable it by removing the scheduled task, service and registry startup entries, I eventually banished the pesky thing in the same way I disabled RealPlayer's irritating, self-resurrecting, omnipresent update process many years ago - just rename or delete the file.

It doesn't matter how many sneaky ways they have to re-enable it through the task scheduler, services, etc, if it can't find the executable then it can't run, simple as that. No application can put the file back in the Program Files directory without throwing a UAC prompt alerting the user that it's trying to do so, so it should be gone for good.

Goggle Earth and Chrome seem to run just fine with the GoogleUpdate.exe removed.

Action stations! Man the pumps!

Come on, really? 10K messages? That's hardly massively successful on a site the size of Twitter.

Yes they should respond quickly to security holes, yadda, yadda, yadda but ten thousand messages in 36 hours is a tiny drop in the ocean. No user action required because the vast, vast majority won't have noticed anything wrong.

If they're right...

...then the TV licensing laws are as stupid as we all know they are and desperately need updating for the 21st century. That's a very big 'If' though. I wouldn't trust the TVLA to be 'right' about anything, the useless, stupid, intimidating buch of muppets that they are...

This is not a title.

Thousands of airport x-ray operators slap their head in unison, realising that all they needed to do to become 'artists' was hit Print Screen ever few minutes.

Seriously, the images produced by security x-ray scanners are clearer than those...

Wow

You won't hear me saying this very often (as one of their customers, no less) but good one, AT&T... About time someone told the RIAA and their UK counterparts to piss off.

Browser.

Clearly he also uses Chrome (two icons up from the bottom of the right-hand column)

However, his default browser is obviously IE. Hence the URL short cut at the bottom of the right-hand column of desktop short cuts has an MSIE web page icon.

He also has iTunes installed and plays Bejewelled and Command and Conquer.

Shock! Horror! Peter Molyneux does things with his computer that the rest of us do as well!

@ AC "Hrm"

"I'm all for free speech, but I'm much more for the right of children to have a childhood without the fear that a grownup will use them for theirs and others sexual pleasure."

The Children. Oh! Won't somebody please think of them!?!?!

Obviously, if "the list" solely contained child porn URIs then most people would agree with you but as has been so obviously proven time and time again in different countries, it's not just that sort of content that ends up on the block lists.

There has to be oversight otherwise the powerful will abuse their power. It seems that for the time being at least, the best oversight for internet content blocking that we have is Wikileaks.

Blocking child porn: Good.

Blocking other material that the government doesn't like under the guise of blocking child porn and then blocking material that exposes your misuse of power: Bad.

April Fools

I keep thinking that on April 1st, this wanker Conroy is going to appear on TV and go "Hahahahah! April Fool! Got you all BIG TIME, didn't I!?!? Hahahah! Joke's over now!"

But I suspect he really is a big a wanker as I think he is... Wake up Australia and put this dickhead against the wall where he belongs.

I wonder how long it will be before El Reg gets blocked for being consistently against his plan and therefore dangerous to delicate Australian minds?

Come on El Reg, you're faster than this

The Beeb had this yesterday with the village name under the photo. Took all of about 15 seconds to find it. Come on El Reg, less beer, more Google phallus finding.

Another angle for those who think it's a fake:

http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?Teens_giant_penis_surprise_for_parents&in_article_id=594257&in_page_id=2

Great...

Now instead of wrangling to get multi-browser compatibility in two dimensions, we're gonna have to do it in three because we all know Microsoft will support this new 'standard' in it's own special way... I can't imagine how much fun that will be.

Anyway, isn't this exactly what Flash / Silverlight / Monolight / etc are for?

Finally

I love the way the Googlemobile's Google logo has been blurred out

No offence but...

...how is this any different from just copy/pasting a press release and calling it news?

404 Fail

Erm... The link on the MS page to get the tool raises a 404... It's not even a graceful 404 - just an unfriendly default .net error message.

Did nobody check the download link before they released it then?

fucking fuck horses

Classic!

@PG...

You're right about the root thing of course but the contents of the phpinfo() output still reveal some potential weaknesses in their system and 'potential' weaknesses are the starting points of all website attacks.

As I pointed out, register_globals is on for starters. Of course, lots of people are now screaming at me that it's not a security risk per se and you're right to an extent but it sure is a real big pointer that secure coding best practices are not being properly followed. Slapping Suhosin on the server and relying on that to protect the contents of your super globals just don't cut it these days.

If your code doesn't stick to the golden rules, sooner or later someone will get into it. On a service so widely used and (perhaps unwisely) trusted as TinyURL, that could cause all manner of problems...

Fart?

"Some of the new features will please iPhoneys, while others spell death for popular applications now available on the iTunes App Store."

What? They've added a fart button? Jiggly boobs app?

Wikileaks back up...

For me at least, in the semi-free (for now) USA.

The blocklist is up too:

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Australian_government_secret_ACMA_internet_censorship_blacklist%2C_6_Aug_2008

They're still showing too.

Normally when something goes public, the website concerned suddenly leap into action but I still see TinyURLs underpants. It's not like this would be a tricky one to solve.

You'd think that if they insist on giving themselves access to phpinfo() like that they'd stick it in a deep and password protected directory, huh?

A quick scan down the page for obvious stupidity reveals they've got register_globals enabled. Silly.

Children

Won't somebody please think of them?

Wasn't it the religious lobby that got .xxx kicked into the very long grass time and time again? Now they want to introduce something similar? Idiots.

I wonder what port they want? 80085 would be a good choice, I think...

"myriad of uses"

It's already happening. A machine readable driver's license is already a requirement to venture beyond the lobby of my step-kid's schools. Don't have one? "You'll have to fill in this lengthy form then, sir." They're moving towards the card being mandatory in the future. All down to "will somebody PLEASE think of the CHILDREN!", of course.

On the one hand, REAL ID requires one to have an approved drivers license in an ever increasing variety of circumstances but on the other, it makes it harder to get one. There are several categories of [legal] immigrants, K-1 fiancé's in particular, who can find it damn near impossible to get a driver's license until about 9-12 months of entry due to another REAL ID 'improvement' which requires non-citizens to have a federal issued ID (e.g. a greencard or work permit) to get a drivers license in most states.

Can't see it, so it isn't happening!

Do the Chicago Sheriff's Dept (or Craigslist themselves!) honestly think that just because they can't see as many postings on Craigslist, that the volume of prostitution in their city has gone down?

<~~ Even she's not that dumb...

Damn right they should tell him to get lost!

I remember back in the olden days, a better time when the first words to come out of a have-a-go hero's were not "Now where's my money?" and I'm a mere 25 years on this earth.

What happened to the days of a cheesy photo call with the area manager gushing about how thankful they were in front of the local free rag and that being enough?

Stupid thing is, if he took it to court, he'd probably win. Britain's personal injury legal system is becoming more and more like the USA's every single week. Coming soon to a street near you: Royal Mail vans with "Warning chasing this vehicle down a hill towards a busy road may result in injury" emblazoned on the side.

</grumpy git>

Third option.

I fail to understand how TomTom are in a two way either/or situation here - there are clearly three choices: switch to 100% MS, run into GPL problems or the third way, switch to 0% MS-licensed technology. If Microsoft are trying to blackmail them as the article suggests, TomTom should quite clearly explain to Microsoft exactly where they can shove their big FAT disks and tell them to Foxtrox Oscar.

There's no reason why TomTom can't run their sat-nav's internal storage on a Linux file system and the same goes for SD storage cards - format them with a non-MS file system and provide Windows users with a driver to interface with it rather than relying on mass storage device. It'll be a bit of a pain for a small amount of users who like to tweak their kit but most wouldn't ever notice that their TomTom was using a different driver.

If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times.

Paper. Pen. Cross. Sealed Box. Human Count. Done.

It takes a really special brand of idiot to think these kinds of systems are a good idea.

Pillock

That is all. That and being compared with <~~ her over there.