Posts by bertie bassett

Router Costs

Given the average user has no chance of changing their router username/pw combo then you're looking at new routers if you want them to swap to your broadband. That's another £35 quid inc shipping (ex VAT) even for a fairly average thomson router, plus ooodles of e-waste.

What's ofcom going to do about then.

speakers

Just a 2011 update to the 'psst..wanna buy some speakers' con that's been running for a long long time.

sucker and their money

'adult' filter working well.

Good to see they didn't get the obvious fail on adult terms - even clever enough to cope with 1st word acceptable, 2nd word = dodgy. Managed not to fail on scunthorpe or even some film about a couple of girls. even copes with foreign language terms

Good work oh google overlords

21 in the USA

Back in the day was on a 6 week college sports trip (aka bender) round the good ole USA. Unfortunately wasn't 21 and didn't really like carrying passport everywhere to get a beer. Those were the days where you could get an international driving permit from the AA which had a photo on it (some gray paper document) - you filled out a form with the details you wanted and voila...

No issue when 10 brits turned up wanting a beer, got served every time...

Frikking olympics

Some of the athlete blogs leading upto 2008 were fantastic, a real behind the scenes look at what goes on in the mind of an olympic athlete. Then come the start of the games not a bean - not cos the athlete was more focused on performing but they weren't allowed to blog, and then post olympics a restriction on what they could talk about / post photos off..

And we thought wacky jacqui wanted a police state - no thats the IOC

Good for Pompeys Player

Well that'll be handy when Pompeys player go to claim their benefits for being unemployed. No problem sir - just hand over your ID card and you were on what £50,000 per week - sure we can do that for you...

Think of the opportunities

for cr4p tv shows - cops with cameras, cops on the beat, cops on patrol, worlds wackies police arrests and more

Oh wait - bin dun...

still would be nice (not) to see how equally stupid US crims are compared to our boys...

Dudes where's my xmas break?

Assuming the changes happened over the weekend of 5/6th Dec strikes me as a bit dumb really. The could have started it come the weekend of the 19th/20th and given UK PLC does no work from around 15th Dec to 10th Jan, then no one would have really given a flying fig whether their email worked during this period - they'd have either been down the pub or at home with the family...

And yes I appreciate this has impacts on IT staff - Due to circumstances outside my control, I once had to move a whole company on the bank holiday Monday that we got instead of New Year which fell on the Saturday

stupid webmasters

Of course webbies are likely to have never heard of phishing emails and will be much more likely to click on links with lines such as 'update your details now', 'buy cheep viagra', or 'hot russian ladies waiting for you'

FFS

Under Lyme?

Last time I looked 4u were in Newcastle under Lyme not Newcastle on Tyne. i.e. they're somewhere close to Stoke on Trent and nowhere near that bunch of championship geordies...

Immigration ploy?

ok so the bombing's were pretty horrendous, but it could also be a bit of an immigration ploy. Quite a number of illegals working in Madrid & Barca and other cities as maids/pool boys and other manual work. If you get a maid thru an agency you even get asked whether you want a legal (costs more) or illegal. No doubt they don't rush to register theri phones

Better shutup b4 nulab get anymore ideas - although here we arrest illegals and then let them go again

The Morgan Flyer

In the days before ebay Morgan was the place to get end of line kit and much much reduced prices - I've visited both their London and Brum stores (when I was in the area) and it was like walking into a timeslip - generally older stock but some interesting bits and pieces and I reckon I probably bought 3-4 items over the years. Remember buying a pre-cursor to flash drives - 2gb of diskspace stuck into a PCMCIA card format - toshiba IIRC and it felt like a bargain at 40 quid or thereabouts when had been going for 100 or more pre-Morgan. Staff were great - really knew their stuff and seemed to be enthusiasts rather than wage slave monkeys you get at high street stores nowadays. The flyer always got a good browse too, but surprised it doesn't seem to have made it into my email in-box. anyway I guess rents for Oxford street etc are just too expensive for a low-margin, low ticket items so that's probably the end of the stores, but nice to see the website will still be running!

A database - the panacea for rubbish.gov

yeah let's make a database..one for all the pedo's, one for all the could possibly be pedo's. One for the DNA of the 9 year old that nicked a tube of smarties from the corner store. One for all our websurfing. One for all our citizens and one for everyone entering/leaving the country. Of course this will stop all crime and the terrorists from getting into the UK for sure.

How long before every plod is allowed to stop you and say "Papers please?"

Easy Fight Back

Run 2 torrent clients, one for the good stuff with encrypton and one we'll call Mandy. Set Mandy to point to a 'mandy' directory which you then stuff full of open source files e.g. linux distros, or just text files containing 'mandy is a pillock' repeatedly. Rename these files to latest britneyspearssong.mp3 or similar and make em available. When plod/mandy/isp or what have you comes knocking to turn you off, take em to court on the basis they can't prove you've shared anything.

Laugh like a hyena

Is is time for a Mandy icon?

OS?

Hope it runs android :lol:

reg Fail: UK not the US

ok so PPP sound's like some kind of medical insurance company but it's actually the regulator for premium rate here in the good ole UK

what about the IPR

No mention of the IPR issue - didn't Zennstrom / Frijs claim to have not sold the IPR when they did the original deal, can't imagine VC's would like that...

C'mon reg tell us the whole story..

nick some real villains.

shurely they've got some better things to do, like nicking the thieving scrotes that did over my sister's van last night - some 10K's worth of bits nicked/damaged. Pikeys..

Who cares if some idiiots are stupid enough to fall for fake footie tickets scam sites - morons..

Bang goes the volunteers

All I can see that the the gov achieves from yet more meddling is that it reduces the ability for 'casual volunteering' - 'Fred could you come and help run the footie group/computer class on saturday morning?". Currently no problem I'd be happy to help is the logical answer, but in future it might be oh I need to be CRB checked.

The impact on sports clubs and other societies and events could be dramatic..and as other have said does this really make any difference to the kids safety?

118800? (oh look titles that are numeric/symbols only don't get through!)

C'mon 118800 knew their database to be the pits so they've done a deal with the chocolate factory so that they can rape 'n' pillage the numbers of gmail wannabees.

Don't be evil?

why photo frame?

Electronic Photo Frame - something you put on display in the lounge/bedroom etc to show to yourself / friends pictures of family, friends and places

Router - something that is plugged into the ADSL filter on the BT Master socket, often under the stairs, on a sheld or otherwise hidden away from view as the layout of the house requires.

What next TV's on Fridges?

It's how voicemail works

Dial my own mobile number, let it go to vmail, press #, enter my pin and listen to my messages being played back.

Simples.

Apart from the duckwit 'celebs' that never changed their Vmail PIN's - more fool them then. Can't really see it's worthy of the term hacking nor a visit from Inspector Knacker

Surely at some point a celeb/politico got a bis sus when he heard "you have 0 new messages and 27 read messages.."

Losers...

Epic Fail

Surely ebay didn't spend 2.6bn without obtaining the rights to the IPR - that would be one of the biggest tech takeover fails of all time if they did...

Nipples

"Human nipples, when attached to female bodies, are clearly pornographic"

Only in God Bless America - go to any beach in the Mediterranean this summer and you'll see hundreds and thousands of nipples none of which are porno, just getting suntanned (or burnt!)

Gave up dabs before BT

well it wasn't BT that ucked it up IMHO they'd managed that themselves quite spectacularly before being taken over. Can't remember the details now but they seriously screwed delivery on an order for a start-up I was involved in, so off my buy list.

Obviously they won't get a second chance having been bought by BT so most of my buying was from the likes of ebuyer or misco.

and Expedia and the others

Hmm looks a bit like Expedia, ebookers, skyscanner and the others.

How original of Kayak to give punters a choice of locations to fly from and too, and offering what dates are available, then asking would they like hotels, car hire and the rest..

If there are 100 independent travel sites (complete random guess) and the functionality of all of them is the same then they're going to look similar innit

Quite Liked New Store - not a complete fail

Went into a local store they'd revamped the other day - much much better layout and actually finally trying to make things 'playable with'. There branding seems to be a bit confused though - PC world was full of tellys and hifis which I thought was dixons territory with currys being for the white goods. Personally I reckon they should ditch one of the brands if not two of them, as the overhead in having different branding must be huge and the cross over between dixons and PC world was vast anyway.

As to the pricing well some of the opening offers weren't too bad e.g. netbooks at around 30-50 more than the best of the web prices. But as usual the cables were a complete rip. £24.95 for the 2m Cat 5 Cable and an unbelievable £34.95 for a 3m USB cable.

Got to love the sales unassistants opening line "what did you come to the store for today" - ok so it's trying to be helpful so she could direct me to product x - but I had to work really hard not to reply with a 'none of your goddam business'

Always good to have a shop where you can go and fiddle with the hardware - to see what you like the size/style off, only for you to leave without inserting credit card and order from your favourite webetailer - although I did by a microwave whilst I was there - does that make me bad?

B2B Play

Isn't this product more of a B2B play - if a company moves into an office and finds that the network coverage on their network is poor (happens quite frequently) then perhaps a femtocell would be a nice solution. OK so the company could switch networks, but there might be a number of reasons whilst that might not be immediately possible (e.g. contract periods).

In this case the £150 cost and a bit of usage of the internet connection is pretty immaterial

on a smilar note

Chick who runs the sandwich bar across road from where I used to work previously spent some time working as a chalet host, once had a boisterous group in that had a habit of bring home souvenirs. As she generally got there at 7amish to setup for cooked brekkie, then she usually saw whatever trophy they brought home...

The morning after their last night, the bus had left resort super early, so she went up to the chalet at the normal time wondering if they'd left any more souvenirs, and nearly got knocked off her feet by a St. Bernard dog which was that nights souvenir!! Of course she then got the job of returning it back to the owners in the town it came from!!

IWF List Analysis on WikiLeaks

Have a read of this article on wikileaks - which does an analysis of the IWF list and points out ways in which you might be able to reverse-engineer the details some of the sites black-listed.

http://tinyurl.com/l7lx4l

not just our coppers then..

good to see it's not just wacqui jacky's storm troopers that know how to beat up on defenceless citizens

Not much on at trend this week then?

"Ferguson's write-up of the hack, which uncovered flaws in poorly-written code, can be found here"

So that's a report on flaws in an imaginary game on top of annoying platform. If he's not got anything better to do then surely he could run for home sec - at least being a technologist he might have more of a clue than soon to be ex wacky jacqui...

really workable?

Is this really workable? consider these cases

1) open access point.

2) FON type service - does that give fon guests a different IP to the base IP?

3) Kiddy surfing on daddy's broadband connection.

4) Coffe shop / bar - WiFi Point - how many McD's will get there's closed down?

What will they actually block ?

a) My account with ABC Ltd - ok I'll just sign up with XYZ Ltd

b) My phone number - ok so I'll just cancel phone service and get a new phone number / DSL connection

c) Me being able to use the internet - fine well the connection will just go in my wifes name (fictitious or otherwise)

d) me from taking out a USB dongle subscription / war-driving to grab my movies..

good to see french politicans are equally as stoopid as our lot though probably less corrupt..

Software Piracy - FFS just doc templates.

Dunno how you can reckon that ACS are guilty of SW piracy? - oh it's the fact that when you look at the document properties then it says company Davenport Lyons therefore ACS must be using their software.

But if you read the article it says "we have given permission for ACS Law to use documents originally created by us, in the file-sharing work they undertake"

So if ACS is using DL's document templates (as per the article) then thats probably why the document's properties say DL, and is nothing to do with whether ACS is using licensed or unlicensed software which as a media firm I very much doubt..

as to reporting them to microsoft and FACT - epic fail

Doesn't have 3g

Check you're facts el reg. Doesn't have 3g.

@Trygve Henriksen

simple - just use one of those mifare based contactless card readers..

Dimensions are ridiculous..

ok based on historic data that I am aware of (no names no pack drill) we saw mobile customers averaging around 250 call records per month (phone call, text, mms, GPRS session etc). So extrapolating that to 60M mobiles in the country would require a dbase to hold and process 15bn record just for one months data.

Landlines seemed to genarate more call events (2x mobile as per my figures) but I think there are less (say 30M) which is another 15bn call records. So ignoring web sessions, voip calls etc, you're looking at 30bn call records a month, or 350bn records per annum.

Having not developed dbases on that scale can anyone shed any light on how big a USB key I'll need to be able to put the data on so I can lose it, before the gov does..

Hmm does anyone else think "M15 watching great terror plot unfold" reminds you a little of the day the sent the tanks to thierfrow.."get them scared and they'll sign away their rights'

Time to leave?

well time to re-read 1984 and brave new world and then remind myself of where we are today relatve to those works of fiction?

- 28 days imprisonment without trials

- CCTV everyywhere

- ANPR database linked to all the cameras (and data held for 5 years)

- National Database of every phone call

- All ISP's logging who emailed who for 2 years

- People being refused the abillity to protest/demonstrate anywhere near the House of Commons

- Man arrested and charged for writing a story (shades of thought police)

- 2 years for forgettin your encryption key..

I'll get my coat and foxtrot oscar somewhere less totalitarian...

£20 K fine - got to be worth it.. for nike/rbk etc..

Buy up every poster site in london for the whole games...do a London2012 ad and then stick your logo/product on the bottom.. Pay the £20K fine and smile sweetly... all the punters will think it's your product that's the official product...

Given that some of the events won't be taking part in london..and that will be known within the relevant sports then some specialist media advertising might work well for the smaller player withouth breaking this rule - e.g. Weymouth 2012, Wimbledon 2012 ertc

The irony of it all

Hmm now in the USA there is a great service whereby you connect your mobile via WiFi to your ADSL connection and then make Mobile Originated calls at home at landline rates - called hotspot @ home, and not that different from the VoIP service that sipgate provider.

The network operator providing hotspot@home?

T-Mobile

New Firmware?

Why not just blast the device with new firmware to get back BB Maps...who cares if it's the orange version or not it all generally works fine...