Posts by The Other Steve

This is your country on drugs

"Clarke said "renegade" countries need to be pressured into acting on cyber-criminals through a process akin to the way in which countries who tolerated the laundering of drug profits through their banking system were brought into line."

Yeeees. Erm, just remind me, how's that whole war on drugs thing going again ?

ZeuS baddies copy Conficker tactics

I think the Conficker guys should copy ZeuS and get some hot Russkie Jailbait on side. There's just not enough glamour in the organised cyber-crime world these days.

"Kristina Svechinskaya, 21, has been dubbed the ‘world’s sexiest computer hacker’ after being charged with being part of a gang aiming to steal $220million (£139million).

In leather boots and skin-tight jeans, she wept during her court appearance. Today, she is due in court again, charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and false use of passports."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1320184/Worlds-sexiest-hacker-appears-court-charged-35m-scam.html

I'd say "you couldn't make it up", but I've seen fan fic of it, so that would be wrong.

Paris. D'uh!

Carbon capture, storage, transport problems ? Try new improved Dry Water!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100825174102.htm

"Cooper and co-workers found that dry water absorbed over three times as much carbon dioxide as ordinary, uncombined water and silica in the same space of time. This ability to absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide gas as a hydrate could make it useful in helping to reduce global warming, the scientists suggested."

Methane also. Nifty.

As for the whole plan, it will never happen if it has to be done by government fiat, because no matter how carbon neutral it is, it still involves the words 'oil' and 'consumption' and is therefore raping Gaia. And therefore hysterical baying mobs of Guardianistas will gather and demand the death penalty for all who support it, irrespective of any real world benefits it might have.

Who closed the mines ?

Scargill and his ill considered attempt to bring down the government of the day by means other than democracy. That's who closed the fucking mines.

I don't have much love for old Maggie, to my mind she was the embodiment of the horrible pseudo Victorian morality and creeping authoritarianism of middle England. She had a lot of time for Mary Whitehouse*, for instance.

But I'm afraid that the closure of the mines and various assorted industrial wastage can't be blamed on her. And lest we forget, she won three elections, so let's not pretend that was universally unpopular.

*I knew MW when she was alive, she was a complete bitch, and she absolutely fucking hated children. True.

Except

"Windows has no significant role in a serious datacentre."

Except when it does. People who know stuff are laughing at you.

Yes, yes you are.

You aren't allowed to be sensible, you have to become all hysterical and shouty and adopt an extreme position. And then cling to it in the face of any inconvenient incompatibilities with reality.

This is apparently mandatory.

Unfortunately, since you haven't, you can now expect to be attacked by foaming idiots from either extreme. I still don't know why. If someone would forward me a copy of the minutes of the meeting where we decided those were the rules, I'd be most grateful. Tx.

Fuck off graun commentards

Please go back to touching yourselves while looking at pictures of Monbiot and Milliband, and leave us alone to our pointless bickering about Microsoft.

PS yes, I know who you are. Apart from anything else, continuing to insinuate that anyone who disagrees with the point of view you have been spoon fed is a Telegraph reading Tory - as if there were something inherently wrong with either of those - is a dead give-away.

Schneir states the obvious, but ...

... only because there are so many people who still don't understand the nature of the relationship that they are entering into with the providers of "free" internet services.

In any other sphere, Facebook - to take just one example - would fail the smell test: if something seems to good to be true, then it probably is.

Facebook is way to good to be true, that's one h'll of a service for free. And of course it isn't, but because people have the expectation that everything on the Internet should be free, they fail to apply the same scrutiny.

It's really that expectation that's the problem. Funny really, since it only came about due to the time lag between the internet going mainstream and someone figuring out how to get money off people over it. In that gap - and it wasn't even a long gap - the seeds of 'the new economy' (remember that issue of Wired ?) were sown.

And only now are they truly bearing fruit.