Posts by VulcanV5

The only obscenity is Ms Smith. . .

Never mind debating the actual programme, how about asking on what grounds the BBC decided to waste licence fee income on publicising a shallow shoddy over-promoted and finally chucked-out ZanuLabour politician?

It surely couldn't be that Ms Smith is still in the address book of all those sycophantic luvvies running the Beeb whose familiarity with what is laughably described as the "Westminster Village" makes them feel so very, very important?

As there are infinitely better reasons for *any* poster on here getting a BBC documentary of their own ("a personal view", as the simpering Beeb describes it) then I'd be obliged if El Reg could contact the BBC now with a view to setting up 50 or so documentaries exploring the "personal views" of El Reg readers. These could range from topics such as: "are paper aeroplanes the future of commercial aviation?" to: "are failed Home Secretaries entitled to any kind of platform other than that of a railway station's during a train strike?" to: "should Stephen Fry be now sold off as a national treasure to the lowest bidder?"

The fact that El Reg readers are instantly disqualified by virtue of being rational, articulate, competent and honest will ultimately count against 'em but that shouldn't stop El Reg from asking.

Me and my Nokia

I'm a Nokia user. I have three of 'em. One is a mobile phone. It's black with a kind of gold finish trim that's still under its protective wrapping. It has a small greenish screen on which black text appears. I have no idea what its model number is. Perhaps a 9-something-something. I bought it new as a treat for myself in April 2003. It's been in constant use ever since.

It makes and receives phone calls. If I can be arsed, it sends text messages. It also receives text messages. It runs on standby for up to 10 days. It powers up from flat empty to full steam in 45 minutes. It has never let me down and it has been all over the world.

My other two Nokias are a matched pair. They're Nokia wellington boots. Nokia made boots before it ever made phones. My Nokia boots are green with black trim and the word Nokia emblazoned on them. I bought them in 1983. I wear them in the garden. They are still as good in 2011 as they were in 1983. In December's ice and snow, my Nokias kept me on the move when all about me, people were falling down. They are the best mobiles around.

My Nokia boots will -- in the eys of some -- be technologically flawed because although they are a stable platform, they don't make phone calls. But that doesn't bother me because I have my shiny black and gold wotsit.

So then. Before all the experts on here finish Finnish burying, could they kindly note:

1) A lot of people use phones for phone calls and aren't remotely interested in pockets stuffed full of apples, blackberries, oranges, or whatever the hell else is out there;

2) Nokia's expertise in making wellington boots was and remains far greater than Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Samsung put together. It is perfectly possible for Nokia to return to its core business and make enormous profits.

I hope that's set the record straight.

PS: I have been trying to figure out how much my Nokia boots have saved me in 28 years of wear. Lesser boots fail rapidly, so it must be more than a hundred quid I've saved. I've also tried, though failed, to calculate what I've saved by never needing to buy another mobile phone since 2003. The black-and-gold Nokia cost me £205. Since then there've been almost eight years of mobile communication (talk-speak, message-speak) at an annual contract rate of £00.00. Must be £hundredss? £thousands??

Wake up at the back, please

C'mon El Reg. Wake up at the back. Your latest update is just a leetle lacking in, er, detail, viz:

1) The Judge has tumbled to what's going on and is Not Impressed.

2) Those who once sought fortunes out of all this are now in deep, deep doo-dah. This is because Lee Bowen, formerly associated with everything from psychic telephone line services to being the Public Relations representative of a drunken bonker on a Dubai beach, has claimed his oddly-named Mediatwat represents the rights holders of materials claimed by Crossley's ACS: Law to have been downloaded illegally. . . But Bowen has never proved it. (Nor was ever asked to, the Norwich Pharmaceutical orders to pressure ISPs into releasing customer data being pushed through without any question of proof being sought from Crossley and his associates.)

3) If Bowen's Mediatwat has not been specifically instructed by each specific rights holder, or if it does not own the rights itself, that would mean, er, that ACS: Law has not necessarily been acting for any rights holder when sending out its threatening letters. And that's really, really naughty, tst tst.

4) If Bowen / Mediatwat had been able to get away with this sudden attempt to withdraw from the proceedings, then no doubt the whole issue of who-owns-what would've been swept under the carpet. Thankfully though, here's a Judge with a functioning brain. Not only has he refused to allow Mediatwat to vanish into the undergrowth, he wants to know who the real rights holders are and proof that each and every one has instructed Bowen's 'enterprise' to represent it.

5) Mediatwat and ACS:Law have gone from being flavour of the month (when racking up all those lovvly lucrative NP Orders) to being distinctly unpalatble where M'Lud is concerned, particularly in regard to Crossley's description -- in his pay-up-or-else mailings -- of mediatwat as "a copyright protection society", as if it's some kind of trade association rather than the work of the Beach Bonking Public relations agency. His Honour thinks a lawer (Crossley) falsely describing something as a 'Society' is really not very good at all, hmmm?

6) Meanwhile, Crossley has suddenly gone from being Britain's most brilliant lawyer to one of the most accident prone (and victimised.) Where the latter is concerned, even bomb threats have been involved. Oddly, the police seem to have no record of any such threat. As to the recent car crash which Crossley suffered, perhaps in his Ferrari en route to his home in Monte Carlo (it's all in his background stuff scattered over the Web) then it's truly sad that this should've happened just at the time when he would have so liked to appear in Court himself, instead of having to leave poor Bowen to go it alone. Just where, when and how the car crash happened isn't yet known, but perhaps M'Lud will delve into that, too.

7) Crossley let it be known to the Judge that ACS:Law has nothing to do with the mysterious GCB. Yet letters issued by Crossley in December to many on ACS:Law's hit list are stuffed full with details about GCB and how to pay 'em.

8) Such is the panic surrounding this that the firm of accountants who set up GCB for an unnamed client now say they know nothing about its antics (and have published a disclaimer on their home page.) And now Crossley says GCB isn't chasing anyone, either.

9) So. . . Ye situation is this: Crossley faces a long, long, long overdue Court scrutiny, as well as the SRA, as well as the ICO, and now -- last but not least -- another firm of lawyers, Ralli & Co, acting for what they describe as "hundreds of consumers in relation to a group action for harassment following letters from ACS:Law accusing those individuals of illegal filesharing and copyright infringement".

The several fates that seem now about ready to befall him are so various and so severe that it'll take more than sudden illness (which occurred the last time he was fined by the SRA) or motoring accidents to side-step. Naturally, he has the sympathy of every reader of El Reg.

Streetview jobview

Gordon Bennett! The outfit that has sent a camera scurrying around an over-priced over-crowded and over-rated dump called London obviously doesn't look at its own Streetview.

Plus: Gordon Bennett 2! How wonderful (not) to see that a business whose founders have long blathered on about being 'leading edge' and, er, 'innovative' has got no further than the early 19th Century in its call for peasants to quit the land and take a daily ride aboard a wheeled conveyance into The Big City.

It's presumably accpeting job applications only in something called an "envelope" with something else called a "penny stamp" affixed to the top right hand corner.

Amazon v LoveFilm

A couple of years or so back, when Amazon announced its DVD rentals operation was to be "taken over" by LoveFilm, I was one of a number of people -- or so it turned out -- who complained to the Monopolies Commission about LoveFilm's domination of the marketplace should the deal go through.

At that time, I was an Amazon customer. Also at that time, the Internet was stuffed full with complaints about LoveFilm -- and not surprisingly, either: LoveFilm didn't police its affiliates operation, and it seemed that whatever forum you visited, some moronic LoveFilm affiliate was spamming it.

LoveFilm's "incentives" were also unbelievably bad in the way promises made were never promises fulfilled: the company was amongst the most complained about in the UK in any sector, never mind DVD rentals, for its business practices, and especially the way hundreds of people were trapped into auto renewing of trial memberships which, though cancelled in time, were said by LoveFilm either to have never been cancelled at all, or notice of cancellation was, er, "received too late" to be acted upon.

As to promotions, the Great LoveFilm Boots Voucher Campaign remains one of the worst examples of mismanagement -- or worse -- of recent years, with Boots itself dragged into the mess as hundreds of angry LoveFilm sign-ups demanded to know where their vouchers had gone.

We had been subscribers to Amazon's DVD rentals service for quite a while before the LoveFilm take-over, so we were ready to quit as soon as the deal went through.

Oddly though, Amazon stopped talking about a "LoveFilm take-over" and began referring to it as a "transfer". Then it stopped talking about that and instead assured all existing Amazon DVD rentals customers that they were *still* Amazon customers. Weirdly, the LoveFilm website log in always led to a page saying "welcome, Amazon customer".

So. Nothing changed. Our Amazon payment plan -- £6.99p a month for 4 DVDs, of which 2 DVDs can be at home at any one time -- is exactly the same as it was five years ago.

The service is still the same, too: we live over 250 miles from the Amazon / LoveFilm despatch centre but without fail (and this included the chaotic period of the December snow) we can post back a DVD on a Wednesday, receive an email confirmation of receipt / notification of despatch of the next DVD on a Thursday, and have that DVD on our doormat on Friday.

We have never, ever, had anything other than the best service (at less than £7 a month including P&P for 4 DVDs, it's hard to see how that value for money could ever be beaten.)

This latest development -- "Amazon buys LoveFilm" -- is the latest twist in what to us has been a very odd story, seeing as how "LoveFilm buys Amazon" DVD service was what caused all the concern not so long ago. But if all it means is service as usual, that's fine with us.

South Yorks. . .

Where Yorkshire's concerned, isn't it the case that cameras of any sort are in widespread use as a result of some kind of plod collective memory?

As prompted by, amongst others, members of the local citizenry including "The Crossbow Killer", "The Black Panther", and, er, "The Yorkshire Ripper".

Of course, not every one who lives in Yorkshire is a homicidal maniac. However, at a rate per head of population etc etc dee-dah-dee-dah-day. . .

Quite a revelation

And there was I, thinking that every political position in the USA was available as a BIN.

To boldly go to Vulture 2

One small step for Man. One giant leap for Vultures.

Re Vulture 2. The National Geographic channel spends a fortune on a series called 'Air Crash Investigation', the point of which is to remind viewers it's safer to walk everywhere on foot and especially on a motorway than fly.

The current series of ACI has come to an end, and the producers appear to be having some slight difficulty in finding new crashes of interest.

With a budget of over half a £mill an episode, ACI is surely going to be the ideal partner for Lester & Co, beginning with an episode which documents and re-enacts this first flight.

Lester and the team would benefit from the fees paid by ACI and ACI would likely get the biggest audience it has ever had. The fees received would fund Vulture 2 and the subsequent documentary of Vulture 2 would fund Vulture 3. The Wright Brothers never got this kind of sponsorship.

Meanwhile. . . awards, medals, Buckingham Palace garden parties and Gawd only knows wot else to all involved in the Paris project: at a time when the world grows more dismal by the day, we need Vulture just as much as we needed Sir Walter Drake to discover the potato and so invent smoking. Well done, El Reg!

Unintelligent Intel

Intel's decision to buy a tatty AV product with a terminally tarnished brand name was pretty weird before and is even more inexplicable now. Though it might be contended that anyone daft enough to actually use and pay for McAFuckup is never going to be bright enough to understand how wunnerful Bill's little app truly is, nevertheless there's no excuse for the witless inertia of McAFuckup when it came to addressing the reputational damage inflicted on WinPatrol.

I know Bill's not the sort of person who flies readily into litigation but out there in the US where the money tree can be shaken by merely walking into it, there's surely a good chance of $100,000,000 damages for this in view of Intel's bottomless pockets.

Go on, Bill. Give 'em the big Woof!

PS: Loved this bit in Dan Olds' El Reg report (August 20th) about Intel's aqcuisition of McAFuckup:

"I don’t see any reason why Intel would do anything to change how McAfee is currently doing business. According to both Intel and McAfee, it’s going to be business as usual for McAfee."

I am outraged.

No way should Lester have been allowed to use a word as long and as multi-syllabic as 'terpsichorean'.

Who the hell does he think he's writing for?

Plodding on.

Policing in the UK has been all to cock for many a year, but this latest confirmation, though belated, is welcome nevertheless. The gardener in this instance should count himself lucky though; others have been shot for less.

40% of all amateur PRs catch fire.

Tesla's PR flack needs to demonstrate professionalism rather than come across as a shouty amateur. Despite the lady's self-proclaimed brilliance, she seems about as recommendable to a corporate client as more Indians were to Custer.

There are two things even the most junior PR learns to appreciate when dealing with media:

1. If a publication doesn't carry advertising from you, then you need it more than it needs you.

2. As (1)

The flack in this case is in the business of trying to get as much in the way of beneficial free column inches as possible because advertising's expensive and an ad merely raises awareness, it doesn't actually sell anything. (Anything else a flack says about her / his work is bullshit: 'reputation management' etc et al. )

Patently nervous about the ability of Tesla's corporate PR to handle, well, anything awkward at all, this flack's tactic is to (a) insult media's intelligence by refusing to advise of anything even slightly discomforting (including product recalls) and then (b) bitch-slap a particular Organ of Illumination for having the nerve to play out at Tesla's expense.

Combine the two together, and you have a classic illustration of how Public Relations in the wrong hands really can lose friends and antagonise people.

Anyway. Carry on regardless, El Reg. Mouthy PRs are not what the profession needs, and especially PRs who imagine they have some kind of power to wield when as any fule knoweth, media only trembles when the Ad Manager announces the loss of a megabucks advertiser because of those daft twats in Editorial.

Trotter's Totty

"Sex work expert Henry Trotter agreed, noting that most World Cup fans weren’t interested in paid sex."

WTF is this? The legal defence rehearsed by some sad plonker who trawls red light districts in search of quick relief?????

Ah well, that's a new one to add to The Big List of Epithets, as in: 'A right Henry Trotter he is."

PS: sod the dictionary definition quoted earlier by El Reg pedants, a prostitute is one who trades sex for commercial gain. 'Sex worker' can be some pimply yoof working behind the counter of a dirty book shop (well, if there are still any.) Or some pimply yoof organising an Ann Summers party for fat illiterate retards breeding for Britain on a Council estate.

El Reg's insistence on calling a spade an excavation implement is as inexplicable as it is depressing, and almost as tragic as that Jacobean revenge play written by John Ford 350 years ago entitled "Tis Pity She's A Sex Worker".

* Paris, because she's a JCB.

wotsit all about alfie

The article makes no sense to me. We've never been early adopters of anything so missed out on the joys of spending £000s for early-days crap and instead stuck with our 10-year-old £300 JVC CRT until it expired in June.

At which point along came that nice Mr Sony, and the almost as nice Mr Tesco, offering the latest £850 Sony 37 inch with built-in Freesat HD. Mr Tesco knocked £200 off our local Sony Shop's price for the same model, and Mr Sony knocked another £200 off on the proviso we took our deceased JVC telly into Tesco's and left it with Customer Services (it was all part of some seasonal promotion relating to some obscure football game or other.)

So we PX'd the JVC and for the princely sum of £450 have a Freevsat HD telly that's an absolute joy, hooked up to a sat dish that cost us £50 purchase & installation.

We recommended some friends who were hunting for a decent LCD TV to go buy the Sony and PX their 12-year-old 14inch portable that's stuck in their holiday caravan and manages to get two channels in mono. But our local Tesco store had run out of the Sony and when they tried every other Tesco source (Tesco Direct, Express catalog etc) were told that all stocks had gone.

According to the store manager, Tesco alone had shifted thousands of Sony sets with inbuilt Freesat HD capability. So how "85%" of buyers this year have missed out escapes me.

* PS: as we know sod all about TV technology, we've been astonished to find that somehow, our rental DVDs played on our ancient Daewoo DVD player (circa 2003) seem to be screened by the Sony in high definition -- or at least, something that must be damn near to it. A knowledgable friend grinned and said yes, the modern tellies can all do that, no need to spend a load of money on that "upscaling DVD player" con trick.

I was going to sign this off as Smug Git.

Not so much a list as totally sunk

English language movies they may be in that "top 10" but that language certainly doesn't figure in whatever rationale prompted those choices: the word "suspense" seems to be beyond the ken of the hit pickers.

Neither Spielberg nor anyone else with a functioning brain cell would regard "Jaws" as a horror flick: it was an exercise in suspense, a natural progression from that same director's TV-to-theatrical release "Duel". Hitchcock similarly would never grubby his hands with "horror": "Psycho" is there to scare an audience witless -- which it did. Not "horrify" them.

Interesting to see Carpenter featuring as both a list-maker and list nominee, for if ever an early talent was sadly dissipated it's his: "Assault on Precinct 13" is still one of the best "suspense" movies ever made, and still one of the best-scored (by Carpenter.) By contrast, "The Thing" is a nauseating over-the-top indulgence.

Of course, being nauseated by a movie is what so many seem to think "horror" is all about, but if that's the case then this list misses by a mile: "I Spit On Your Grave" and "Driller Killer" are as nauseating (in the most literal sense) as it gets, even though both are actually directed with skill and intelligence and are original in their own right -- unlike the past 35 years of me-too slasher and schlock films which seem to have been (a) made by psychotics for (b) the entertainment of other psychotics.

The list fails entirely to define what it actually means -- "horror": what is it anyway? -- so is worthless. And even including "Wicker Man" wouldn't change things: "Wicker Man" is suspense, not horror, as well as being a wonderfully whacky celebration of the era in which it was made.

As to what might more appropriately have figured on that list -- that is, movies which build suspense to scare (tell-not-show: implicit) and then go on to horrify (show-and-tell: explicit) --then likely nominees like "Late Night Trains" are a world away from all that big-budget commercial fodder the list-makers seem so predictably obsessed with (well, with one notable exception: Ken Russell's "The Devils" is as repellently horrific an entertainment now as it was on first release.)

Grrr, lists!

LateRooms, Booking com

Never read so much rubbish in one El Reg thread for a long while. Being retired, my wife and I use, and have used, Booking com and to lesser extent, LateRooms, for several years, for hotel bookings throughout the UK and Europe.

On not one single occasion out of over 100 in the past five years has our credit card been charged to Booking com or LateRooms.

The "hoteliers" posting on here are anything but. So just what are they hoping to gain from such fictions????

Stop whining

Gawd's sake, stop whining about the US actually doing something to combat these scumbags.

Had the UK authorities been involved, the guy would've been brought to this country and on the Home Office's recommendation given a job with Phorm or a management position at British Telecom.

Ejukashun, ejukashun.

The increase in pie consumption is actually attributable to the state of the UK's education system and the A Level Plus Maths question this year (which if answered correctly, actually earned the respondent a degree):

"Are you familiar with pi and who d'you most closely associate with its discovery?"

Of the papers I have marked this year, 100% of the students answered the first part of the question in the affirmative, whilst the second part was answered as follows:*

1. Tesco 28%

2. Lidl 22%

3. Me Mam 19%

4. Bloke who runs the chippie down our street 16%

5. Argos 9%

6. Steve Jobs 12%

7. DHSS 11%

8. Mr M. Mowbray 5%

(* I appreciate, the sums may not add up, but that doesn't matter at A Level Plus.)

I was looking for Archimedes, but screw that, then.

Why we need Trident. Why we don't need accountants.

This is an instance the anti-Trident mob would love to hush up. . . because it demonstrates, beyond doubt, why this country needs to spend £billions on Trident.

Only nuclear missiles from a hidden submarine are going to be enough to deter failed accountants with Belfast girlfriends from executing their terrorist plans on UK soil.

We have the technology to track down these people. And in Trident, we have the means to wipe 'em out -- and they know it!

Yes, there may be some collateral damage.

But that surely is a small price to pay for defending beacons of Liberty such as Robin Hood Airport, Doncaster.

From which, or so I learn, EasyJet has just absented itself after arriving there amidst much hulabaloo in April and will now not fly anyone to anywhere if it's from Doncaster.

Had there not been all this uncertainty over renewal of Trident, I am sure Easyjet would still be there.

Yet again, an accountant is at the bottom of all this.

Robin Hood fought long and hard tol build his airport there. As a nation, we should hang our heads in shame.

Er. . . so wot?

I've never heard of this person so have no idea if I'm missing out on some particle of information vital to the enrichment of my existence. Kudos, though, to Lester for this update: El Reg will be even more valuable if Lester can post a daily round-up of the latest news about people no-one's heard of or gives a bugger about.

Perhaps mention might be made of Peter Dewbottle of Northampton, who has just added the 357th stamp to his album? And Mrs Nettie Sopwise from Hendon, who went to Sainsbury's this morning to do some shopping and is now safely home again.

There. I told you it was interesting.

PS: Is it possible to add a Nettie Sopwise posting icon? Be a damn sight more useful than that weird thing relating to a receptionist at some French hotel or other.

Truecrypt. Yeah. Right.

TrueCrypt fanbois really should wake up to reality, because all this stuff about hidden files / containers within hidden files / containers is pretty much dreamland.

It takes less than a minute with even a dumb piece of freeware to analyse a hard drive's contents: no, not their nature, but most certainly, their extent. Alternatively, it takes Windows Explorer (XP) even less time to search by file size.

So here's this encrypted file which, despite its innocent-seeming name, is inexplicably 3Gigs (or more) when any fule know it should only be a few Mbs.

And here's Mr Clever Truecrypter, providing the key to open the outer container, and thinking how-brilliant-I-am, no-one will ever know there's a secret, inner container.

Only. . . the size of the outer container's contents don't remotely match up to the size overall.

Well, maybe it is possible to come up with some kind of explanation: after all, two years spent in quiet contemplation is surely long enough to be creative.

Where Truecrypt is concerned, the old saying continues to hold true: size matters. If you don't want stuff on your hard drive that might be a source of future embarrassment then. . . don't have it on your hard drive. Simple as that.

Goodbye, Stephenson.

Many years ago -- and I do mean, many -- our then local PD came in for criticism for the way a handful of officers were displaying bumper stickers on their personal cars: "When in trouble, call a Hippie." (It was reported that San Francisco's finest were actually running patrol cars with the sticker, but I never saw any.)

The point was, law enforcement folks were pissed off with constant references to the-pigs-do-this and the-pigs-do-that. The breakdown in relations between the police and the policed was never more graphic.

Candidly, I've often been surprised that a variation on this sticker hasn't appeared in the UK: not on police officers' official or personal cars though, but on those belonging to the citizenry.

Fact is, whether you're thinking Birmingham, Guildford, Mendez, Lawrence, Tomlinson and many another high profile case, or simple straightforward police/civilian encounters, the record of police conduct -- doesn't matter whether it's the Met or anywhere else -- is so tarnished that the time-worn cliche about the barrel of good apples with but a single bad 'un at the bottom is downright laughable.

But perhaps the problem is insoluble: put someone -- anyone -- in a position of authority, and they become authoritarian. Recruit someone -- anyone -- without regular assessment and profiling, and it's inevitable that their perception of themselves and their role becomes so skewed over time that they cease to think of themselves as enforcers of the Law but as embodiments of the Law.

I wish it weren't so. To judge from this latest episode, however, it all too plainly is. Stephenson's repugnant defensiveness says it all. Turfing him out of the Commissioner's comfy apartment atop New Scotland Yard would be a great way of sending a message to those a lot lower down the Met's food chain that they get paid to protect and serve, not persecute and ego-trip.

Elastoplasts for The Titanic.

Worth noting that when any ship is listing so badly that it will inevitably sink beneath the waves, every second gained in staying afloat means a greater opportunity to launch the lifeboats and a greater chance of escape by those on board.

Though SS Phorm (the initials can be taken to represent whatever you wish) has been toppling over in slow motion for almost two years, it has managed to limp to a couple of foreign ports in hope of attracting more passengers. It has also had its ballroom extensively refurbished and a new orchestra hired.

But nothing can patch the hole beneath the water line and nothing can bring back the £100m that was spent on everything but life-boats, this despite the way the best-equipped of those vanished over the horizon with former First Matey Stratis Scleparis at the helm. (Incidentally, Scleparis has now gone back to what he used to be -- Albert Brown -- as there's no longer any need to compete with Phorm's CEO in the Really Silly Names competition.)

The £2m now being sought is the last whip-round amongst onshore friends and relatives who've been led to believe this comparatively trifling sum is all that's needed to keep SS Phorm afloat, in much the same way as donating Elastoplasts for The Titanic would've solved its own difficulties with the iceberg.

All that's left to ponder on now is how many lifeboats are fit to be launched -- and will that renowned financial genius Norman Lamont get one all to himself?

Phorm. About to become the deepest packet of 'em all. Glug. Glug.

Big Nob eBay.

Years ago and far far away, many believed eBay was A Good Thing.

Whereas today, they don't because it's not.

Of the £6 million eBay says it spends on anti-fraud measures -- including shill bidding -- around £5.9 million is probably invested in producing corporate Public Relations news releases about how £6 million is spent on anti-fraud measures.

Fact: the nob in this case used two almost identical IDs and the same address and IP details.

Fact: the nob in this case would've been pretty much instantly identified as a shiller by other eBayers a few years ago.

Fact: eBay stopped other eBayers from identifying and reporting shillers by introducing ID masking.

Fact: eBay makes its money from commission on items sold, so the higher the price, the higher the commission. Having to act on reports about shill bidding -- it never did anyway, but that's by-the-by -- means acting against eBay's own interests. The introductionof ID masking thus spared eBay both the embarrassment of dealing with shill bidders whilst simultaneously protecting eBay's income stream.

Fact: eBay didn't spot this shill bidder (or, if it did, then as usual it hoped for the best and ignored it.) even though this particular nob has to be one of the thickest and most amateurish scumbags ever to get an eBay ID.

Fact: eBay is now desperately trying to exploit this court case to its own advantage in exactly the same way it exploits everyone who uses it to its own advantage.

Fact: the nob in this case could've been fined £5,000 per offence but wasn't -- so no, El Reg's feedback rating is utterly misplaced: should've been a neg. Not a pozzi.

Fact: the nob in this case isn't the only nob who uses eBay. By definition, anyone who buys anything on eBay is a nob -- unless they're a shiller, in which case, welcome to eBay.

Fact: a P&P-free 12-month guaranteed brand new product from Amazon UK will in 90% of cases always be a better deal than the same product flogged second-hand without warranty on eBay and posted to you in a black bin liner at a P&P cost of £4.99p to cover the seller's "inconvenience" in having to, er, pack and post it to you.

It's just a thing.

Well it's hardly a surprise that Jobsworth & Co are so defensive that evasion and obfuscation have become par for the course. Their company has invested huge amounts of money in this phone-thingie.

No surprise, either, that those whose lives are unfulfilled if they can't parade their acquisition of this phone-thingie are similarly defensive. After all, they've spent huge amounts of money on the damn things too.

All of us with fourteen quid PAYG Nokias would extend our sympathies but it's too much bother.

Singalonga Norm. . .

When Norm joined Phorm the company thought itself even better positioned to succeed in the UK. After all, mention the name 'Norman Lamont' to anyone and they'll immediately get on their knees in a show of respect for the great man's genius (and network of amazingly powerful contacts who can, er, Open Doors.)

Of course, what the company didn't realise -- though everyone else did -- was that Lamont was remembered in the UK solely for his centre-stage presence during a major, or even Major, economic disaster, after which he took a bath and sang a lot.

So now there is perfect synergy: Norm is yet again centre-stage at another financial disaster, and Phorm's taking a bath.

A tragedy on this scale must truly bring tears to the eyes of every reader of El Reg.

Secret Saucepan.

Is paranoia more in vogue than ever?

I've just run a Pipl search on a dozen names of UK-resident family and friends.

Pipl didn't find one.

I also ran the same search on 192.com. Nothing there either.

As for Google storing stuff, well, er, it always has. As for it 'reading' Gmail emails, ditto.

I never use Google to search for anything, but Scroogle instead. And my gmail accounts are operated on the basis of a trade-off: I get an excellent mail service for non-essential, non-confidential correspondence, and Google gets the chance to sniff around and make of it what it will.

Yesterday it was probably possible for Google to read a highly sensitive email to me from Amazon UK, advising of the earlier than expected despatch date of a new saucepan. Should Google wish to cynically exploit that data, the implications are horrendous: it will be able to conclude that we have a kitchen and that we eat food.

However, such conclusion is wrong. The saucepan is actually for my mother in law. She doesn't eat food nor has a kitchen and intends to use the saucepan as a fly swatter.

So that's several $billionsworth of hi-tech surveillance stuffed, then.

Sometimes the Orwellian nightmare gets just a wee bit over-stated.

Up to the minute research

"Market watcher" DisplaySearch is bang on with its research.

I was down the market not long ago and it's true, that's the place to spot emerging trends -- if you know what you're doing.

For example, I encountered a bloke selling Sony Betamax units. According to him, they're set to be huge success in 2012.

As a confirmed early adopter, I've bought one.

I think it will be especially useful with all the new TV channels coming our way -- BBC2 imminently, and there's a report (which DisplaySearch will doubtless know more about than I do) that the Independent Television Authority is considering the creation of something called "Channel 4".

As to DisplaySearch's comments about LCD, I'm no expert like they are.

But I can tell you: that LC Tanner in the new serial called "Coronation Street" from Granada TV, Manchester, Lancashire, is quite something.

I'm off to more markets (and a couple of car boot sales) next week so if I acquire further commercial intelligence of the calilbre relayed by DisplaySearch, I'll post here so Reg readers get it first.

Paris, because when back-lit she's still one of the best displays around.

Very inconvenient

All this faffing about with passports -- do I refuse to hand mine over, or not? -- is hugely inconveniencing.

Either Israel wishes to welcome me on my intended holiday there. Or it wants to nick my ID to kill people.

Still and all though.

My inconvenience is as nought to that of a group of people known as, er, 'the Palestinians'.

I mean, they there were, enjoying life in their own homes, their own land, and along comes some bloke in a foreign government (clue: headquartered in London) who bows to a pressure group to accede to the founding of the State of Israel.

Created from, built upon, and still being built upon, Palestinian land.

So. . . nah. Forget that proposed holiday. Best to continue to keep well clear of Israel.

* Paris. At least she's never swallowed an entire nation.

Just to inject here. . .

Glad to see eBay has rolled over on this one: the way it was so blatantly trying to push up its profits by raking in commission from a compulsory in-built P&P component was one step too far, and one step too bloody objectionable, for too many (including me.)

But let's not confuse eBay's climb-down with anything to do with customer service. eBay works in its own best interests and when that work back-fires -- as here -- then it's time to have a re-think.

And let's not cite the original implementation of this compulsory P&P scheme as evidence of eBay's anti-scam stance. Because it wasn't.

As to other posts on here about the scams that continue on, well, er, that's eBay reality: the company hasn't enough people on the payroll to police its websites so relies upon others to do the job for it -- only it hasn't enough people on the payroll, either, to handle the sheer volume of reports that those others have so thoughtfully provided.

No wonder that continuing inadequacy signals a continuing vulnerability, and no wonder, either, that this vulnerability grows steadily worse.

Recently, I had to warn eBay's tech people of a genuine listing which, when opened, flashed up but briefly (a second, no more) before being replaced with a scam listing for a similar item.

The scam looked 100% authentic, the item number, seller's ID, 'star' ranking, etc etc. The text was persuasive and there was no give-away insofar as the listing required prospective buyers to communicate by hotmail or mobile phone only.

The less experienced could easily have fallen for the error screen that occurred when clicking on the user's feedback history (it looked like eBay was having a temporary technical difficulty, and reporting so) and after clicking on the Ask Seller a Question link, such a user might well have accepted that the message box that opened was entirely genuine.

The original listing, of course, had been well-nigh instantly overlaid in an injection scam, the kind of thing that's not supposed to happen but evidence that unless eBay commits far more resources than is currently the case, then it's still as open to abuse as it is open to business, free P&P or not.

Paris: the injection's entirely genuine here.

First Church of iPod Presbyterians buys El Reg

Consequent upon the change of ownership -- and why the hell weren't we told of it first? -- what else will be sensationally upgraded by El Reg to oblige the new Puritanism now enshrined here?

Porn surfing indeed.

No sign anywhere of an erotic coupling on a Bondi board coming off of a full swell.

Frankly, I'm disgusted.

Name of the game?

Sorry, meant to say in my earlier post:

Andrew Crossley's ACS: Law is, as any fule know, to be found at acs-law.org.uk.

And this info is to be found at lcn.com:

".org.uk domain names give UK specific nonprofits organisations and groups the benefits of creating a unique British web identity. If you run a non-commercial entity based within the UK, then the .org domain extension is probably the most suitable for you. With a .org.UK domain name your website will benefit from both a very high localised and trusted identity."

Now, two possible explanations exist as to why a commercial outfit should have a domain name with the potential to mislead people into thinking it's something other than what it truly is:

(1) The org.uk domain doesn't mislead. Mr Crossley is a solicitor, and certainly wouldn't have a domain in the org.uk sector were the profits rolling in. So ACS: Law isn't making a profit at all.

Or:

(2) Mr Crossley's enterprise is indeed blatantly commercial, and has only finished up in the "charities" org.uk category because he is following the example of others who are, according to lcn.com:

"seeing the benefits of protecting their brand name by registering a .org domain to lend credibility to the activities of a charitable arm of the business."

This latter puts a wholly different slant on things.

The .org.uk address of ACS: Law is not there to mislead or confuse or, well, anything.

Rather, it's all about the "charitable arm" of Andrew Crossley's enterprise -- presumably, a pretty substantial "arm" at that, given the overheads that the rest of the ACS: Law business is having to fork for its serviced office accommodation at 20 Hanover Square, Mayfair.

(Oh, and please don't anyone say the address is one of those let's-pretend-it's-real things offered by specialist providers like, for example, Davinci Virtual.

(ACS: Law is hardly likely to be in the business of pretending to a posh address in order to acquire so impressive a letterhead on the stuff it mails out as to make the recipient think he or she is dealing with a correspondent of substantial wealth and substantial resources.

(I personally can't see any British law firm doing that kind of thing.)

As to the org.uk status, I hope El Reg will be able to discover from Andrew Crossley how many charities are benefiting, and to the tune of how much, as a result of all those mass mail-outs from his Mayfair headquarters / org.uk domain registered location.

It only takes just one elderly person wrongfully accused of a "crime" to fork out £500 or more and gosh, that's another charity -- somewhere -- that's probably all the better for Andrew Crossley's benevolence.

So then. C'mon, El Reg.

Though he seems to be shy when it comes to answering your calls, I'll bet that if you persist -- on behalf of El Reg readers everywhere -- Andrew Crossley will be more than happy to talk about his charity work, his days as a disk jockey, his ambitions to be a musician, his org.co domain registration, and his legal career to date.

And whatever else it is that has made him into the kind of legal practitioner he is today.

* Paris Hilton. Now there's a posh address.