Posts by Sceptical Bastard

What has this story taught us?

1) Vanilla Ice is an ageing wigger knobhead

2) Chatham, Gravesend and Stoke are generally considered to be shit-holes

3) We should NOT mess with The Moderatrix

Horrible ...

... Just horrible!

If I saw that vid on my seatback I'd be heading for the emergency shoot pronto.

It was godawful then...

... and it'll be godawful now.

The Professionals seemed to have two principle locations: Southall gas works for the 'industrial' scenes and Black Park (near Slough) for the 'countryside' scenes (plus a few streets in west London for the 'town' scenes).

The acting was similarly limited. And as for those naff Ford Capris...

Gone but not lamented.

As bad as each other?

While I agree that the Mexicans seemingly can't take a joke - albeit a piss-poor one - it is hard to champion the sort of deliberately confrontational oafishness of Top Gear and the trio of excruciatingly bloke-ish Neanderthals who present it.

Ask yourself this: would you rather be stuck in a pub with a 30-year-old female jewellery designer or Jeremy Clarkson?

Mine's the blanket with a hole in it

@ ShaggyDoggy

"This is beyond weird"? No it isn't, it is merely a coincidence. Get a grip, man.

Like other commentards I can't see any IT angle in that press release about the death of a minor pop performer.

Captain Beefheart (a much more significant, talented and influential musician and artist) died last week and I didn't see anything about that on El Reg.

Totems of illiberality

So 13,200 issued cards wasted £292m? Unless my pocket calculator is malfunctioning, that is approx £22,121 - TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND QUID - for every card issued. Not exactly great value for money in a time of economic crisis was it?

It might be tempting to dismiss the punters who paid for cards as fools or dupes. But even so it is disgraceful that a government effectively sold those poor bastards worthless goods and then refused to refund them.

That creep Burnham still thinks that the failed ID card scheme was a 'good idea' eh? Perhaps he and the rest of his discredited and loathed colleagues still don't understand why we booted them out even though the only alternative was Cameron and his cronies.

Epic fail

Ludicrous illiberal unworkable 'ideas' like that remind us why we gave that bunch of lame freaks the boot. Trouble is, we then elected another bunch of lame freaks.

I remember Amstrad's call centre

Sauce for the goose, "Lord" Alan.

Back in the day I used an Amstrad (a PC 1640 if I recall) and it was a dog of a machine. I had to call Amstrad "tech support" once or twice. The call centre was based at Brentwood, Essex, and I remember it was one of the earliest occasions I encountered a premium rate phone number. Needless to say it was pretty much useless as a helpline but the BOFHs there were very good at keeping you on the line as long as possible.

It is beyond belief that such a bombastic egregious opinionated bullying jumped-up barrow boy ever got to be a 'celeb', let alone front a television show. A truly hateful spiv.

Sod the story

"Man says Droid exploded mid phone call" has got to be the best El Reg headline in years!

@ Code Monkey,

I don't care who it's performed by or whether it's an accurate rendition of Cage's meisterverk. All I want is for it reach number one.

I don't want that because " some wonk on Facebook told you to." I want that because it sticks it up that bog-brush-haired smarmy scumshite Cowell and the trite synthetic garbage that fuels his rich-boy life while impoverishing the culture the rest of us live in.

I intend to put my 79p (or whatever) where my hate-filled mouth is even though I obviously don't want a 'recording' of silence.

Christmas? Bah. Humbug.

If he wants to impress us ...

... the egregious hirsute money-grubbing bastard could try sorting out his appalling over-priced Virgin Trains. The man's a hateful robber baron, a self-aggrandising publicity junkie and a first class shit.

I couldn't resist writing to Stagecoach...

... and here is the transcript of the email I sent to their PR chief.

Dear Steven Stewart,

I refer to a statement you allegedly issued to The Register online IT magazine.

Speaking as a poacher-turned-gamekeeper - I'm a former broadsheet journo and now work in PR and IT - I am rather surprised that, having reached the dizzy heights of Director of Coms for a major public-facing business, you could act so ineptly. I was taught that half the skill of good PR is knowing when to keep shtuum. There are times when by far the most effective comment is "no comment". And to compound your failure in this case no comment had even been sought. Tie down that jerking knee, my dear fellow.

To get a measure of your own goal I suggest you read the 90 or so comments which readers have appended to The Register's story. Needless to say, you - by which I mean Stagecoach - do not come out well.

Instead of badgering The Register perhaps your time might be better spent trying to persuade your security staff that they, too, have a responsibility to protect and uphold your company's good public standing. Reputational management involves every single employee (and that includes outside service providers).

Sorry, old boy - you get a big 'F' for fail.

Toodle pip

Witch-hunting crypto-fascists

I heard the witchfinder general (aka Jim Gamble) bleating on BBC Radio 4 this morning. This bloke is the sort of nutty obsessive that gives nutty obsessives a bad name, the sort of ranting bigoted Ulsterman who gives... well, you see where I'm going there.

His line reminded me of Bush's "You're either with us - or you're against us". Gamble seems to think that any website or organisation that doesn't fall over itself to do CEOP's bidding is somehow in league with the paedophiles.

The only value of CEOPs latest outburst of Microsoft shill-ery is that a few more people might upgrade to IE8 - not ideal in itself but a damn sight better than leaving them swilling around in the cesspit of IE5.5 and IE6. But that's an IT win, not a child protection benefit.

"Oh won't you think of the children!" No, Jim, because I'm not neurotically obsessive about children - mine or anyone else's. They can look after themselves by and large - just as they've had to do for millenia. What's more, I don't want to fuck the children either. Nor do most other people. You, however, seem to think most people do. That is alarmist wolf-crying.

This morning, I listened with incredulity as Gamble boasted about educating five-year-olds about the danger of online grooming. Eh? Which kids would those be? The five-to-seven year-olds who can conduct fluent lucid IM 'conversations' using developed skills of typing and reading? Christ, at five they can barely point-and-click let alone type and read. I know: I've watched the little bastards. Or maybe, Jim, you mean that the perve hordes are skyping their prey or using voice chat? In which case it aint the kids who need 'educating' it's the parents who leave their little darlings unsupervised with a computer and headset.

The trouble with crying wolf - as the fairytale teaches - is no-one listens to you when a real wolf comes along. In that regard, Gamble (and the rest of the cynics and fanatics who make a good living out of hyperbole about endangered child) do more harm than good. Far too much of the child protection industry is a racket, not a service.

Give us reliable information, Jim, not hysteria. Some impartial, properly-researched, evidence-backed authoritative statistics would be a start. And I don't mean "information" from Esther Rancid or the even madder Lucy Faithful Foundation. Oh, wait a minute - evidence is the last thing Jim and Co want because it simply doesn't support the Daily Mail / CEOP scenario of an ever-increasing army of perve strangers murdering and raping our children.

Forget social networking. Forget stranger danger. Keep it in the family, Jim. Any plans for a browser with a "My step-dad's been fiddling with me" button? Nah. Thought not.

FFS

Third-rate scientific minds peddling third-rate science. Still, they got themselves in the news (which, I suspect, was the aim).

As to the slyly inserted "The biggest risk is to young children...", here we go again! It's the pernicious hand-wringing "Oh, won't anyone think of the children" mantra which the child protection industry exploit to impose their fanatic paranioa on virtually every area of life. Did anyone hear that nutter Jim Gamble on Radio 4 this morning? I rest my case.

As to Paul Murphy (above): "The above is my opinion". Yes, and a particularly intolerant priggish self-righteous one so keep it to yourself.

It's all a 'fail'...

Rock You, you fail on all levels - SQL injection, clear text storage, no password policy

But the debate here is about the analysis. Some commentards are gloating that lusers are morons. Yes, yes - we know that. (Actually, of course the majority of computer users may not have finely-honed security skills but they are no more moronic than the population at large... oh, I see what you mean!)

The problem is not stupidity per se - it's practicality. As others have noted, people can remember words and phrases in their own language better than they can remember meaningless character strings. So we end up with dictionary words. FWIW, substituting numerals for lowercase letters is better than nothing but not much use against a decent Rainbow Table.

Length, of course, is important (if my passwords were as short as my willie they would have been pwned years ago). The way Windows LAN Manager hash split passwords (until Vista, I believe?) meant that 16 chars became the minimum for the really paranoid and that attitude seems to have stuck among sysadmins. But it's counter-productive if a helldesk instructs lusers to use 16 random chars - virtually no-one has a clear idea of 'random' in this context and virtually no-one can remember 16-char strings.

As to horses for courses, of course it makes sense to use stronger passwords for banking or business than for wanking about on FaceAche or on Twatter (I wonder if Stephen Fry's password is 'Fat Smug Know-all'?). But human nature being what it is, people simply can't be arsed to remember more than a couple of passwords.

The taboo against writing down passwords is not always helpful. Obviously in a non-secure office environment sticking a post-it note to the screen with 'Passord: Bgx1#dw"£$' written it is insecure: having it written, perhaps back-to-front, unobtrusively in the back of your pocket diary is far less so.

So what are my solutions? What insights can I offer you? The answers are 'none' and 'none'. IMO, crap password security is a problem we are stuck with for as long as ordinary people (as opposed to geeks) use computers - in other words for ever

PS: I recently had to advise a home-office-computer-using client that having their pet's name as a password for everything from log-on to email to online banking (where, to be fair, the bank insisted on other characters as well) *and* as their security question answer was probably not a good idea.

What's the date?

Oh. It's not 1 April after all.

Why give this risible rubbish the oxygen of publicity? Until now, I'd never heard of Lewis PR (which, it seems, is a "Global Public Relations Agency, offering SEO and Social Media PR"), Now I have. But I didn't want to.

My advice to the compilers of the survey (and to so-called search 'optimising' businesses) could be summed up as "Why don't you either just FOAD or get a proper job doing something that's actually of use to society, you parasitic leeching wankers."

Anyway, who the hell does Tim Berners-Lee play for?

@ Rattus Rattus

Fucking brilliant, Rattus - made me spit my coffee out :)

Word of the decade? What about 'jjihad'? Or 'islamist'? Or 'Al Quaeda'? Or 'tsunami'? Or (in Britain at least) 'Maddy'?

Or how about 'fat egregious know-all fucker on twitter' - spelled F-R-Y

Beggars belief

It's the dickheads at IPS who seserve crucifixion - a bunch of complete tossers!

In shock

Sod the ID card scheme, sod the NHS system, sod trojans and card scams, sod terrorism... Guinness at three quid is the most upsetting headline I've ever read on El Reg.

Mine's the black mourning garb

The reason I'm concerned is ...

... less to do with the hapless McKinnon's individual case (though the glib Mail-esque heartlessness of some commentards is stomach-churning) but more to do with the obsequious sycophantic toadying to the USA by Blair and, now, Brown that led to this lop-sided and draconian extradition treaty being signed in the first place.

To those who think we should roll over before the world's biggest bully and abandon McKinnon to his fate, remember "First they came for..."

@ Chris Parsons

Yeah, and come that revolution, Gamble and his CEOP Stasi will be the first ones against the wall.

Oh, sorry, I forgot -they'll be behind the 650-odd MPs and as many Peers at the front of the queue (behind Blair, of course).

If zealots like Gamble had spent a bit more time looking into the murky reaches of the Catholic church instead of obsessing about the internet, dozens - probably hundreds - of children could've been spared from a priestly fiddling. Not to mention all those Uncle Ernies who like to keep it in the family.

When Thatcher ruled the roost, many of us naively thought things couldn't get any worse - how wrong we were!