Dr Who
This is not a million miles away from what the people creating the original Dr Who theme tune were doing.
Posts by Joseph Haig
77 posts • joined Wednesday 25th April 2007 13:50 GMT
Facebook would do well to employ this guy instead of prosecuting him. He clearly knows better than any of their current security team what needs to be tightened up.
Only slightly bad idea.
"Watson still got many answers wrong."
True, but so do humans. The correct way of using it would be to use it as a source of advice rather than a way to get a definitive answer. Having said that, the way a lot of people blindly follow satellite navigation is probably an indication that your concern is at least partially valid.
I'm more concerned about the bedside manner: "What is ... you have 2 months, 3 weeks, 5 days and 7 hours to live?"
Does the app have a good rating?
Erm, http://xkcd.org/937/
Posted in Daleks given a well-earned break
You know, just once ...
... I'd like to meet an alien menace who wasn't immune to bullets!
I, for one, am glad that the Daleks are being given a rest. Much as I am grateful to RTD for bringing the series back I found his stories to be amazingly lacking in imagination and the recurrence of the Daleks and Cybermen (and sometimes both) ad nauseam was just a symptom of this.
The weeping angles, on the other hand, were scary. Who invented them? Oh yes, it was Moffat.
Symptom or cause? Or, perhaps, not even connected.
"Sr Maria's expulsion does appear to be a result of internal strife, rather than any Church position on Facebook."
So she (a) used Facebook and (b) got kicked out of the convent, but there is no clear indication about what the relation between (a) and (b) is? And I thought El Reg was read by people with a scientific mind-set. (Perhaps global warming is caused by a lack of pirates after all)
Posted in Facebook facing fall-down issues
Facebook security?
If Facebook were at all interested in security, they would enable SSL for the whole site, not just the login page.
<http://www.pcworld.com/article/209333/how_to_hijack_facebook_using_firesheep.html>
The lesson from this is that you should never use Facebook (and a number of other sites) while connected to an open WiFi.
Posted in Vatican confirms Simpsons as Catholics
Ho hum.
You are reporting a 10-month-old opinion piece from Osservatore Romano as church teaching? Slow news day?
32-bit vs 64-bit ...
It is possible to get the 32 bit kernel to see more than 4G of memory but it requires a patch to be compiled in. For Ubuntu, this is not in the desktop kernel but it is in the server kernel so
$ sudo apt-get install linux-image-server
will allow you to use all your memory.
Re. Flash, haha
... saviour of the universe?
RHEL 4 -> RHEL 5 -> RHEL 6
"my organisation has just gone through a lot of pain going from RHEL4 to RHEL5, the majority of the difficulties came from changing gcc and the QT libraries."
And that is why you have overlapping releases. You can still run RHEL 4 for another couple of years and, with RHEL 5 released two years ago, that is 4 years to resolve all the migration problems.
"Is it possible to upgrade a RHEL5 machine to RHEL6 without a clean install?"
Possible but not recommended and certainly not supported. It is assumed that you will keep at the same major release number until you plan to replace the hardware, at which time you can roll out replacements with the new major version. This is supported by having long support cycles and overlapping releases - when RHEL 6 is released there will be 3 versions all supported in parallel.
I know people object to this and want to be able always to upgrade to the latest and greatest, but Redhat and Ubuntu have different policies. Not better or worse, just different.
F#?
F# is a fourth higher than C#, so perhaps this is Microsoft's version of Forth.
Alternatively, F# is an augmented fourth higher than C, an interval sometimes called the devil in music, so perhaps this is an subtle hint regarding Microsoft's plans for a new version of C.
The image seems appropriate.
Very intelligent 9 year old?
How exactly did the 9 year old get the password? It is not entirely clear whether it was just written down on the teachers desk or whether key-logging or similar was required. In the latter case, I may concede that the kid was clever, but in the former, more likely, case I would say that it was stupidity or naïvité on the part of the teacher. I would also point the finger at whoever set up the system giving teachers administrator access. Why on earth would they need that? With his teacher's account he should have been able to mess around with assessments, but not the passwords of other teachers and enrolment lists.
Best standards requirement ever.
"Presumably it does this on its hands and knees, picking up individual characters with its teeth."
Is that one of the requirements?
Nothing new under the sun
"Microsoft explained the delay to implementing the strict version of 29500 by saying it needed time for customers and partners to transition."
Wasn't OOXML put on the fast track for being made a standard on the basis that it was already a de facto standard?
The truth?
I don't have the full details of this, but it appears that Evgeny Legerov reported this exploit to Mozilla a month ago and they started working on a fix while the details were kept secret. This is standard practice with 'white hat' security researchers - they will release the details of what they have found but only after the developers have had an opportunity to fix it. However, it appears that "Legerov controversially offered to sell exploit code he developed." I don't doubt that the rushed release was a response to the German government telling people to stop using Firefox, but this in turn seems to have come in response to Legerov reneging on his agreement.
As I said, I do not know the full details, and this is only my interpretation of events. Perhaps someone has more information about what actually happened.
Posted in Germany warns surfers against Firefox
Sorry to disappoint you
The last major problem in IE, if I remember correctly, was the one that was used in the Chinese attack against Google. Although it was targetted at IE 6, the vulnerability was also present in 7 and 8. Microsoft released a fix shortly after the event but they knew about the problem when it was reported to them last August and they did nothing about it. By comparison, Mozilla have already released a fix for this vulnerability, albeit beta, a little over a month after it was reported.
No browser is completely secure, but there is a difference between IE, which was only fixed when there was some seriously damaging PR, and Firefox, which was fixed when the problem was reported.
Passport without ID card?
"...people would be able to buy an ID card or passport or both"
How does this work? The last I heard you would need to have an ID card to be able to apply for a passport, so shouldn't this read "people would be able to buy an ID card *and* a passport or neither"?
I intend to renew my passport just before it becomes compulsory to buy a voluntary ID card, so that I can keep of the database for as long as possible.
Posted in ID cards: the first year report
NIS?
Doesn't he realise that NIS is horribly insecure, and they should be using LDAP instead?
Restricted to x computers
If they are targeting the classroom where there is a maximum class size of 10 pupils then they are living on another planet. They should try "restricted to 50 computers" and it might be suitable for one per classroom with a bit of slack.
What is the restriction on LTSP? Oh yes, it is only restricted by the capability of the hardware.
Posted in Pope pooh-poohs airport perv-scanners
RTFA
Sorry, I must have missed something. Where exactly in that address does it mention scanners, or any particular technology for that matter. I am reading it through the Google translation, so perhaps there are mistranslations, but as far as I can see he is stressing that it is important not to ignore the personal dignity of the individuals while going all out to clamp down on terrorists. He stresses that special care needs to be taken when dealing with the vulnerable, such as refugees, immigrants, the disabled and sick. He finishes by commending their work and all their projects.
But then, why should you bother to try to understand what he is actually saying when you can instead take cheap shots at Catholics?
And these people run the country?
So, the guys who told us a few weeks ago that Internet Explorer is perfectly safe are now going against the opinion of almost everyone (including Bill Gates - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6qIETRCxbw) and installing Vista in favour of Windows 7, which is actually quite good?
I will start listening to the government on matters of technology when they stop losing people's personal data on trains, in the post, on stolen laptops, etc.
Office 2007 compatibility
I was puzzled by your comments about OpenOffice now being able to open MS Office 2007 files as I have never had problems with these files in older releases of OpenOffice 3. The people who complain about not being able to read them are generally people using older versions of MS Office.
1,999 maybe
"I'd rather imagine that if 2,000 people expressed an interest, they mostly went to get a card."
I know of one of those 2000 who expressed an interest. He did so because he is involved in No2ID and I am absolutely sure that he did not go to get a card.
What year is it?
Here's an idea. Why don't they design their site so that it doesn't matter what operating system or web browser the customer is using.
After they have sorted that out, perhaps they can have a look at this Millennium Bug thing that everyone has been talking about.
Re Did you say something?
Maybe Bing Maps looks good, but I wouldn't know:
"Sorry, but Microsoft Silverlight doesn’t work with this web browser."
Posted in Burger King cooks up Windows 7 Whopper
Bleah
That looks bloated.
Grenade icon for the 'Mr Creosote' effect.
Posted in Blade Runner tops sci-fi movie poll
@Anonymous Coward @Evil Auditor
Perhaps he is questioning whether it is fiction. Be careful, your anonymity will not protect you if he turns out to be a Jedi.
Posted in Red Hat Enterprise clone poised to 'die'
@yossarianuk
"This could never happen to Debian (possibly even less likely with Ubuntu), my reasons for this are:-"
While I respect (but disagree with) your opinions about CentOS and Debian, none of the reasons you give logically follows on from the above statement. Please explain how dependency problems, version numbers and time to release patches has anything to do with a lead developer going AWOL.
In other news ...
I hear there is new evidence in the JFK assassination case.
Posted in Microsoft bribes Oz to ditch Firefox
@Tom 35
More likely, a slew of "Congratulations! You've won $10,000 from Microsoft!" emails.
Posted in Palm Pre breaks Sprint sales records
Waiting ...
Great, but when are they going to announce a release date for the UK?
Posted in Scotland welcomes back wild beaver
Velociraptors?
Change the title of the story to "Beavers goto Scotland" and your Velociraptors shouldn't be far behind.
And that would satisfy Steven's request for an IT angle.
Google killer?
The best way I have found to find things on Wikipedia is to use Google. I find the Wikipedia search box pretty much useless.
Posted in Brit nuke subs exposed on Google Earth
nuke
Was I the only person who read the word 'nuke' in the title as a verb rather than an adjective?
Icon seems appropriate.
Re 99.9 Uptime?
5 nines or 9 fives?
Browser independent HTML, anyone?
Great. Next, we could have special images to put on web sites to indicate "Best viewed with <insert browser here>".
Sorry, have I just woken up back in the 1990s?
Posted in Prolific worm infects 3.5m Windows PCs
@Andy ORourke
You missed "I read it as '3.1 Windows' and wondered who was still using it."
In case you are wondering, yes I did.
Re: <smacks his head>
The problem now is that people were being encouraged to switch to alternative browsers. This was, after all, the main reason for kick-starting the development of IE to produce version 7 after many years of neglect.
Standards
Can someone please explain whether this is because IE 8 follows web standards better than previous versions, and so it is seeing all the problems other standards compliant browsers have been seeing for years, or because they have broken things even further? I hope it is the former, but I fear it is the latter.
Word 2007 documents
Simple solution; Tell everyone not to save documents in docx format.
Can't think of a title
This is what happens when the government gets too involved in education.
@ Myself
OK, I admit it - I fired off my first comment after seeing just the headline and not actually reading the article.
Can government not touch *anything* these days without losing sensitive information?
Posted in Google fixes world's most stupid bug
Simple fix
Text message:
cat 0 > /proc/features/stupid/most
@Solomon Grundy
And how is this different from what venture capitalists do? The shell out huge amounts of money, sometimes for several years, knowing that it is entirely possible that they may never see any return on their investment. You may not think that it makes sense, but many start-up companies depend on it.
Posted in Next Windows name unveiled: Windows 7
Vista SE
"... to stay firmly rooted in our aspirations for Windows Vista ..."
So Vista Second Edition it is, then.
Posted in Did the width move for you, darling?
No comment
I liked the old and I also like the new.
I think the Facebook comments were references to the fact that they have recently changed their layout amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the users.
Posted in Ubuntu zoo preps for new arrival
@Jerome
Sorry, but Duke Nukem Forever will not be ready in time for your 5G iPhone ten-finger touch with telepathy control, but it will be out soon!
@Martin
Is it a coincidence (koinsidens?) that this article has just appeared:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/08/english_spelling/
Opinion
David McLeman
My 25 years of comical IT buzzwords
Tim Worstall
Time to take a sniff at the coffee, perhaps
Chris Mellor
Will they have to drag him back like last time?
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