* Posts by Nick L

78 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Oct 2007

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Qantas phone check-in to take off next year

Nick L

Gee

Telephone checkin ? It's almost like the 1980s again.

Bury council carries can over spycam binmen

Nick L
Go

tick for "no publicity"

It's entirely possible that the council is legally forbidden to tell you how much they settled with the bin men for. This is one of the options you can choose when making an Employment Tribunal claim to open a case against your employer, and the bin men will have just ticked the "no publicity" box when they submitted their ET1 tribunal claim form.

However this does not extend to the council being forbidden to tell you how much money they wasted on their own legal costs and other expenses, outside the terms of the settlement. I think El Reg should perhaps press them a little harder on this.

DARPA funds radical disco-copter concept

Nick L

Disco rotor ?

Somebody's been at the disco biscuits ...

Virgin Media ADSL punters suffer 2-day email meltdown

Nick L

Where's My Cows ?

You're right, The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software is a damn silly name for an ISP ...

Police detain Tariq Aziz's cigar case

Nick L

War crimes

So Bozza reckons theft and looting are "morally ambiguous" ... hmmm.

Wasn't the country under martial law at the time ? And the penalty for looting under martial law is .... what ?

SANS sounds alarm on Debian OpenSSL flaw

Nick L

Small earthquake in Debian, not many killed, reprise

So this would be why the Debian updates yesterday shipped a) a list of vulnerable keys, b) a util to check your keys against them, and c) an option in openssh (enabled by default) to automatically reject them if they are actually used ?

Thus spake the Moderatrix

Nick L

Re: What a disturbing turn of events

What is even more disturbing is that henceforth, whenever I wait with that frisson of nervous and slightly moist excitement to see whether the Moderatrix will Approve my dubious and desperate choice of title or will merely Cast Me Into Utter, Utter Darkness, I will always experience a flashback to that first fresh first printout of file LISA.LISA ...

USAF Colonel goes on the offensive with botnet destroyer plan

Nick L

So what he's saying is ?

> "there are real questions about whether the owner of that computer is truly innocent."

So what he's saying is,

"It will be necessary to destroy the IT village in order to save it"

Rowling ruling bolsters privacy chief's view of data protection

Nick L

Chiiiildruuun

Ah, the "think of the chiiildruuun" plea. A good sign that someone hasn't any better-argued points to make.

You can read the ECHR at http://www.echr.coe.int/NR/rdonlyres/D5CC24A7-DC13-4318-B457-5C9014916D7A/0/EnglishAnglais.pdf

Article 8 is short (only two sentences) and it is clear from it that the expectation of privacy belongs to everyone, whether adult or child and whether or not either they or their parent is famous.

If this ruling leads to fewer examples of the paparrazi promoting their own cult of photo-celebrity I feel it can only be a good thing.

Murdoch sees MySpace miss targets

Nick L

Hyper-targeting hyper-marketing hype

"The big hope for the site is its "hyper-targeting" system, which sells the interests users list in their profile to advertisers."

Fascinating, captain. You mean there are still people who fill in all those details ?

Harman hack horror has blog backing Boris

Nick L

Spark up

She's obviously had some of Boris's toke and thinks she's back at University (when weed was of course 9746103 times weaker than the evil 21st century witches' brew so it was quite OK for them to smoke it ...)

US court waves through border laptop searches

Nick L

@G R Goslin

>Why did'nt he burn all the controversial stuff to DVD and post it to himself?

It would probably have gone missing in the post and then turned up at the Inland Revenue ...

Nick

Smith plans 300-strong force to tackle UK radicalisation

Nick L

Missing the point, part 427983

The idea that the Government should combat radicalisation by not p***ing off peaceful citizens to the point of radicalism has clearly not crossed Wacky Jacqui's mind ...

The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons

Nick L

@Paul Webb

>Now then, what would you do with 1200 Stobs?

Hmm, so many choices ... well I'd start by installing Linux on 1/3 of them, BSD on another third, Windows on another third and MacOS on the last third (shurely some mistake ?). Then I'd get the whipped cream and chocolate spread out and .... err ....

+++ERROR IN FANTASY, REDO FROM START+++

NO CARRIE[[[_^QQQz

IBM hopes to patent 'dealing with chaos'

Nick L
Joke

09/11, 07/07 or 01/04 ?

Somebody please tell me this is a belated April Fool ...

Bell Canada chokes BitTorrent traffic on someone else's ISP

Nick L

Contention at the wholesale level ?

So are Bell Canada saying that they have over-sold their wholesale pipes, so that if an ISP actually tries to call on all the bandwidth it has rented they will throttle it down?

Google red cards Privila for gaming search engine

Nick L

Google entirely happy to index Privila

Richard Clayton first wrote about the Privilia link-spam network in August 2007 (http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2007/08/30/the-interns-of-privila/ ) and again in September 2007 (http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2007/09/03/mapping-the-privila-network/ ).

Google were entirely happy to index it and present it as relevant content for over six months despite the fact all sites in the network carried identical content specially to draw search engines to the links.

I am sure that the fact these pages also carried Google ads - making money for google - was of course wholly irrelevant to Google's decision to carry on indexing Privila after the network's workings became public knowledge.

I am equally confident that Google have now deliberately dropped these link spam networks, and I am 100% sure it is not the case that they just don't show up because of the blank results Privila now serve up to Googlebot and other search engines.

#include "large-pinch-of-salt.h"

ICANN finds no evidence of front running

Nick L
Pirate

Perish the thort ...

... that some miscreant might do domain lookups on NetSol's website for as many dictionary combinations as they can fit in before their IP gets blocked.

It would never do if nobody was able to register any .coms anywhere because NetSol had pre-emptively protected all those domains from being tasted by anyone else, would it ?

That sort of thing might be counted as a DoS and I think it would be a very bad idea ...

Champion of competitive CAT-5 untangling is crowned

Nick L
Black Helicopters

@fraser

You are indeed the cable king. There wouldn't be parties without you guys. Respect ...

Nick (black helicopter symbol cos it looks like a laser in the woods)

Nick L

Re: amateurs

And when they've mastered patch cables (which are after all easy because they don't kink badly and they slide over and through each other), they can move on to trickier tangles like:

* Christmas tree lights (extra bonus if all the lights still work when untangled)

* tiny silver jewellery chains worth about 60p but which somebody wants to wear to the function we should have left for ten minutes ago

* and for a gold medal, tackling my garden hose after it's woken up from its winter sleep in the shed.

That would sort the men out from the pimply faced youths ...

Forget passports - teachers and kids are the new ID card targets

Nick L

Not news

It's been obvious for some time that schoolkids are being softened up to be used to presenting smartcards / fingerprints / retina prints / RFID for everything via implementations in school. The Government ID cards team must be rubbing their hands at the thought of all these youngsters accustomed to being tracked by all means possible.

Intel gets all HUGI

Nick L

Believable graphics ?

I'd have thought "graphics so real that they were believable" would have been the standard to aim for, not "almost unbelievable".

Is he basically talking about GPU functions on the CPU, or is there some less obvious advance here, I wonder - though not wondering very hard ...

Wigan man traps todger in metal ring

Nick L
Paris Hilton

And

the Paris Hilton angle is ... droopy ?

Seagoing satellite launch stymied by La Nina

Nick L

pix

Since I looked them up ...

Platform en voyage

http://www.boeing.com/special/sea-launch/mission_thuraya3/mission_album/page7/page7.html

Erecting launcher: http://www.boeing.com/special/sea-launch/mission_thuraya3/mission_album/page11/page11.html

Doncha hate it how this page doesn't wrap when someone posts a long URL ?

Boffins report lightning on Venus, our non-identical twin

Nick L
Boffin

Different

Different FROM

Similar TO

Ayethengyow

When antivirus products (and Internet Explorer) fail you

Nick L
Dead Vulture

Re: NULL ^= NUL

Actually as every SQL beginner knows, the test is

IF nul IS NOT NULL

ayethengyou

Putin tightens his grip on Russia's internet

Nick L

Alternative roots ? What alternative roots ?

http://icannwiki.org/Alternative_Roots

Oh, *those* alternative roots ...

I've said this before - surely there must be someone on El Reg who knows more about DNS workings than Mr. Hansen ?

Red Hat, Novell sued for patent infringment

Nick L

More prior art

I haven't found the actual patents yet to try and work out what they claim, but the earliest one is as late as 1991. Desqview of 1985 and other EMM programs like 1984 Topview would in many ways seem to have offered a "User Interface with Multiple Workspaces for Sharing Display System Objects".

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