Posts by Nick Palmer

Scumbags...

...and scumbags who need to read an effing dictionary at that - "which is not the number we use internally to identify the user anonymously"? If you "identify the user", even with a reference number, then they are no longer "anonymous", you retard.

Opt out is insufficient anyway, even if it were on a per connection basis rather than the phoney opt-out discussed here that's dependent upon each machine on a connection opting out and STILL sends your traffic to NebuAd, just like Phorm want to do here. If they want people to accept this, then it must be explicitly opt-in - and by explicit I mean they tell you what they are doing, ask for your informed consent, and if you don't give it, they LEAVE YOUR CONNECTION AND TRAFFIC THE FUCK ALONE. Of course, the lying thieving rat-bastard scumbags who run operations like Phorm and NebuAd know that if they ever DID seek such consent, they'd be told to fuck off and die. That's why they have to build their "business" upon deceit, evasions and outright lies.

I swear, the only thing less edifying than the spectacle of watching these fucking parasites weasel their way out of giving straight answers or lie when they DO answer is watching the supine ineffectuality of our own government who forced that abortion known as RIPA onto us, told us it was for our own good, and then when confronted with a clear and inarguable breach of it by Phorm and BT, a clear opportunity for them to actually use it to PROTECT THE PEOPLE THAT THEY FOISTED IT ON, the people that they said it was there to defend, respond with a "couldn't give a monkey's" shrug and a "not my department, mate".

PHUCK 'EM ALL, the Cretinous Useless Negligible Tossers!

@Not the first time

We had an IDE driver update that stuffed a load of beige PIII Optiplexes that were running 2K as well.

@Eh? It's worth noting that these are the same 'tards that decided to handle comms over USB with their own Mobile OS by (and I still have to suppress a nervous tick and a slightly insane giggle when I think about this) treating it as a virtual network connection and communicating using TCP/IP... Of course, anyone using sensible firewall rules was instantly STUFFED, but someone obviously thought it was a good idea...

Joke alert, because I assumed they were at first...

So...

...I haven't looked at one of their mailshots recently - are they still calling it "Unbreakable", then?

PH, because apparently she's exploitable locally and remotely too... :P

12GB vs 20GB

They've saved on the storage to ensure that the XP and Linux variants launch at the same price point, after factoring in the license cost for XP. XP and Office can be installed into a lot less than 12GB, so I don't see that being a problem, although I can see Daniel's solution being the best option - 20GB + XP Pro SP2.

Personally, I think it looks like a great update.

He was arrested for...

..."making terroristic threats"? Frankly, I'd be more inclined to award the kid a prize for being able to write a comprehensible and coherent list in the first place, given that the background illiteracy count for the area seems to have gone through the roof.

Somebody hasn't acquired a ****ing clue yet, have they?

"It is clear that customers have become increasingly promotion- and deal-driven,"

No, they're becoming increasingly driven away by the fact that the service is appalling and the staff woefully ignorant. Sometimes the prices can be very acceptable; recently picked up an Asus laptop in the local PCW, and the price was fine - might have been available for a few quid cheaper online but the friend wanted to go and get one there and then. Getting served on the other hand was a fscking nightmare, and the level of ignorance on the part of the staff was appalling. Another customer was asking about an Asus machine; non-technical type of fellow, and he was told - with a straight face "Oh, they're a new company, they've only just come on the market"! ASUS, FFS!

@Jamie

The reason stories like that make the news is because they are the exception rather than the rule. Has it occurred to you that the kid might be mentally disordered? Pyromania and firestarting is frequently also associated with abuse.

Good on SK, by the way; he's always struck me as a very sensible man :).

Obvious fake...

...it looks nothing LIKE the Unreal Tournament map!

(Mines the one with the shield belt and minigun holster...)

Colonel Gadget?

"GO GO CYBER-SPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED!"

What a bunch of cretins...

...and I speak as one of their customers, though probably not for much longer, being as I'm on a monthly contract with them. 3, eh? Must go have a look...

You pay...

...for a contended connection to the internet with a usage policy attached. It used to be the case that this was unclear, but bluntly, anyone who doesn't know that by now probably uses a wobbly X as their signature. The BBC, whose license fee is ALSO supposed to cover the provision of distribution methods, are demanding that ISPs either choke their existing network with a massive increase in traffic, charge all their users for a honking great upgrade to network capacity, or go bust. They, of course, hope to remain entirely unaffected, and are likely to do so, since for all their snivelling about horrible ISPs not giving enough bandwidth to support them, they only allow streaming from their own servers and over their own bandwidth (that's the stuff they pay for) of low bitrate poor quality video. The high quality version, they expect YOU to distribute for them via the abortion that is Kontiki. Easy for them to play consumer champion when either way they don't have to bear the cost of it, isn't it? I particularly liked the way that that sanctimonious prig Highfield claimed that iPlayer's impact was negligible, until the stats came in and proved he was talking through his hat. Still, at least one has the wonderful spectacle of watching a queue of turkeys lining up to vote for Christmas...

Suggested rewording for phuture press release...

"we were a little over zealous in our efforts to <b>spy on your internet usage,/b> and we erroneously <b>retained thousands of customers' data which we then pimped </b> ignoring some relevant items in the <b>consent</b> process <b>like our need to obtain it</b>. These were quickly <b>deleted to cover our asses</b>. We will endeavour to make sure that <b>we don't get caught doing this</b> in the future."

@AC: Re: A few points (some flamebait)

A masterly summation of our social ills, effortlessly asterisked - nomination for FotW?

And yes, you're absolutely right.

I have the 20-key Touch Dual...

...and I am absolutely WELDED to it; 320x240 may not be ideal, but I use Opera Mini anyway, and the excellently handled zoom on that deals very well with browsing and page navigation. I've used VGA resolution phones (we just had an Eten Glofiish M800 arrive at work) and bluntly it's just NOT that much (if at all) better than the TD or the TyTN II. WiFi's just a needless ball-ache when you have HSDPA and a decent browsing add-on to your mobile tariff. The TouchFLO UI and Cube are superb, and the keypad (especially the 20 key version) makes email/text composition superbly easy. OK, not as easy as with the TyTN II's or S730's full QWERTY keyboard, but I'm happy to give that up for the reduced bulk. An absolute essential, IMO, however, is SlideActions, available at http://puna.net.nz/wm6/ - it's freely downloadable, but bung the fella a few quid, it's a very useful utility. Personally, I think this phone's a winner.

Comedy gold...

...or it would be if the retarded bint wasn't serious. I don't know which is a better idea, letting her carry on making herself and the rest of the government look like idiots on the basis that it'll help get shot of the régime, or sewing her gob shut to stop her embarrassing us all by association...

So sort-of successful in parts then?

OK, so the gun-cam was perhaps a bit daft (especially without an "upload direct to YouTube" button, I mean what were they THINKING?), but the fact that it's being used and is proving helpful albeit in a slightly different and more limited role than originally envisaged shows they must have got something right-ish?

@madra

Yeah...errr..."vapourware"...that means it'd have to actually not exist, as opposed to being hardware supplied to the FCC for certification, wouldn't it? Considering that it's already there, working enough to be certified, and indeed features no more than functionality which has been incorporated into machines since well before the Air was even dreamed of, that'd be some pretty solid "vapour". Also, considering that this'll be a (small) fraction of the price of the Air, I'd say Asus FTW on this one...

PH for her prior art in gesture-based touch controls...

Objection!

"Sure, he might damage his brain..."

Assumption of facts not in evidence.

Errrrr....

This would be the same Adobe Reader LE and Flash Lite that my HTC Touch Dual arrived with weeks ago, yes...?

@Phorm

"Phorm and its ISP partners have all stated repeatedly they believe the system to be 100 per cent compliant with RIPA and the Data Protection Act."

They can believe in the *&%$ing Tooth Fairy, for all I care; it doesn't make them right. What they propose is an illegal wiretap - we shouldn't even be discussing this, we should be screaming for the ISPs' and Phorm's diectors to be arrested if they so much as try it.

On this basis

Can we ask that responsibility for the NIR and its attendant breathing license - sorry, identity card - be handed over to the MoD, please? If they can mange to lose 11,000 of their own there's every chance that they could manage to misplace the entire scheme...

They already HAVE...

...lots of Wiki-thinking

1) Casual disregard for the truth

2) Equally casual disregard for expertise in favour of faux-democratisation (if 50 numbskulls say one thing, but an expert in the field says another, the numbskulls must be right - look at Jacqui Smith's stance on the National Identity Register)

3) Championing of mediocity over excellence (lots of stupid people are better than one smart one)

4) Willingness to rewrite history into more palatable form

5) Inability to produce truthful results

6) Conviction that the solution to their inability to manage the data that they have is to acquire more

7) Fiscally incontinent managment

Do I HAVE to go on?

So far I'm missing the bit where that actually does us any favours...

Now showing at £339 + P&P

Allegedly, this is being supplied with OEMs of Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003. Given that the former is probably worth about £47 (looking at current pricing) ex VAT and the latter (even assuming the most basic version) about £100 plus, is anyone else looking at this and thinking (taking into account the base cost of the Eee and then the cost of the upgrades) "HOW hooky is that...?"

That's going to...

...make MS's resellers happy; having encouraged them to build a business around hosted Exchange and Sharepoint (and the cheapest I've found is about €7 per month), MS are now going to completely shaft them by massively undercutting their pricing structure. Either they have to cut to compete with MS (but MS can always cut further), or they lose all their customers. Nice.

Why's this being compared to the Eee?

Aside from size, I mean? It has a completely different feature set, is obviously aimed at a completely different market, and has virtually nothing in common with the Eee. Subnotebooks existed before the Eee, wonderful piece of kit though it may be, and comparing every subnotebook in the universe to the Eee gets, well, boring after a while.

Ye flipping gods...

Philippe Martin needs his head removing from his crack. It's ALWAYS been about the National Identity Register; the amount of data collected, the intrusion upon our privacy and the inherent risk of data loss or corruption.

"Hillier said that the number of institutions were too many to list..."

****ing WONDERFUL; so we're back to local authorities' parks and gardens departments having unfettered access, as well as anyone willing to pay an access fee, just like they do with the DVLA records and census data.

"...but any organisation requesting access would have to prove it needed the information as part of an ongoing investigation."

By saying "We really REALLY DO, honest, really..." just like DVLA and census data and anything else they bloody feel like.

Can we have some form of "Jacqui Smith is a ****wit" icon, please?

@Mark

No, "Vista Ready" was supposed to mean "can run all the bells and whistles", "Vista Capable" was intended for the poverty spec machines that couldn't run Aero. That said, I agree that the labelling was abysmally poor and probably left a lot of people misled. We have quite a few "Vista Capable" machines, but we don't care, cause, hey, we run XP, but the average user would be very easily confused.

OK, they are officially lying scum

When the initial reports came out, I attempted to register a petition at the 10 Downing Street site, as follows:

" We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to: 'Abandon

plans to deprive people of internet access on the basis of

"suspicion" of illegal downloading'

It is reported by the BBC and the Times that the government is

considering requiring internet service providers to cut

internet access for people "suspected" of illegally downloading

copyrighted material. The monitoring that this policy would

require is an invasion of privacy; further, there already exist

legal avenues for media companies to take action against people

who unlawfully share copyrighted material.

If a media company has a "suspicion" that their material is

being unlawfully shared or downloaded, then let them use the

law as it stands to prove that and then have action taken to

stop it.

This proposal gives private media companies an utterly

unwarranted privileged status and reverses the burden of proof

to the detriment of ordinary citizens who may well be perfectly

innocent of any wrongdoing, yet be punished on the basis of no

more than "suspicion".

Internet access is extremely important to a massive number of

people in this country, and to suggest that it should continue

only at the whim of media companies and their "suspicions" is

utterly unacceptable.

We call upon the Prime Minister to abandon this draconian,

intrusive and fundamentally unjust proposal."

It was rejected as follows:

" Hi,

I'm sorry to inform you that your petition has been rejected.

Your petition was classed as being in the following categories:

* Potentially libellous, false, or defamatory statements

Further information: No such proposals have been put forward."

Which is, fairly obviously, an outright lie.

@Andy Barber

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense

"Look at the monkey! Look at the silly monkey!"

Oh **** off

If you freeload off someone's WiFi connection, you know damned well that a)they've paid for it and you haven't, b)unless specifically authorised to do so you're not supposed to, and c) that it's illegal to do so. Look at flowers all you want, Steve; you're not depriving anyone of anything, but when you consume a service that someone else has paid for, you're either depriving them of the bandwidth that you're using, or (in these days of "fair use" and traffic management) may well be consuming their allowance. And Rich? It IS theft; theft of a service, specifically, just the same as theft of gas or electricity. Perhaps their WiFi network should have been secured; that doesn't excuse stealing their service.

@Network Socialism

Odd title when the situation has arisen because unregulated market economics allowed Comcast to swallow or freeze out competitors meaning that they now have an effective monopoly position in many areas, which they can and obviously do.

Predicatably enough...

"Nixon was fingererprinted, swabbed for DNA and had his mugshot taken before being released. "

And exactly how long would it take this completely innocent person to get these records, which shouldn't have been taken in the first place, removed? "Sorry for any inconvenience"? My *rse.

Great, but...

...when are Mozilla going to produce an actually working (I mean REALLY working) mobile browser? I only ask, because if things carry on the way they have, I may have to move to Opera on both mobile AND desktop (since the latest versions'll synch bookmarks and useful stuff like that).

Comes to something when...

...you'd rather be invaded by the Germans... There's no way that the data WON'T find its way to the US and as soon as it does, the yanks'll be through it faster than a bowl of prunes through a short grandmother.

Well, my letter to Nildram just went,..

"Dear Sir/Madam,

We received your letter dated 29th January advising us that unbundling to LLU would occur at the start of February. Quite how two days (assuming next day delivery) qualifies as "advance notice" I'm unsure.

We have not been asked whether we wish to be migrated to LLU, and given that should we wish to move suppliers after LLU we would be potentially subject to a £125 reconnection charge, an onerous condition which largely negates the benefit of paying more for a contract with a 30 day notice period, we should have been.

We are aware that following the Tiscali buyout the migration will actually be to Tiscali's LLU network, and are further aware that there are significant issues with this network involving traffic blocking or throttling, connection instability and connection speed.

We do not wish our connections to be unbundled, especially since we have some which are actually on fixed 2Mbit IPStream due to connection stability issues.

Consequently, we would like to know how we may confirm that our connections will NOT be unbundled, or if unbundling is unavoidable, we would like specific confirmation of this so that we may request MAC codes for our connections and move them to an alternate supplier.

Yours sincerely,

<me>"

@"Subsidies should be illegal in EU "

The problem is that subsidies are well-entrenched not merely in the EU but in the global market as a whole; companies like Dell get sweeteners to locate their facilities in different parts of the US etc. Remove EU subsidies and that doesn't mean you'll get a level playing field, it just means that the jobs and companies will go outside the EU to locations that still DO give subsidies.

"Actually, I rather liked it"

Said Arthur.

@night troll

Gordy's merry men are already doing it; "No, ID cards aren't compulsory - you just won't be able to learn to drive or see a doctor or get a library book or get <insert massive range of services that you're entitled to> without one. But they're not compulsory. Honest."

So, let me get this straight...

Having sold everyone on buying existing STBs and TVs with DVB-T receivers, Ofcom's wonderful idea is that we should shitcan all that equipment so that they can shoehorn HD into a tiny area of spectrum and ensure that it's only receivable by equipment that doesn't actually exist yet (mind, neither does the standard it has to conform to...). Meanwhile they can announce a huge success when they auction off the analogue spectrum so that we end up with hundreds more shopping/gambling/auction/lifestyle/quiz channels in glorious SD... Who exactly appointed these refugees from natural selction?

@Peter, Andrew Heenan and Steve Browne

Well said; the anti-smoking lobby (whose membership'd probably cause overlapping circles on a Venn diagram with the enviro-pillocks promulgating this ban) created a problem by kicking smokers outside, and now the same people want to punish them for not freezing to death while they're there. We've had the Lancashire Constabulary sounding off in similar vein as well, blaming smokers for being assaulted more often through being forced outside.

Oh, and @Iain Purdie; if nasty, misanthropic, smug, supercilious, spiteful gits like you hadn't ensured that the compromise of properly ventilated smoking areas inside pubs and clubs was nixed in short order, there wouldn't be a problem with your apparently infrequently laundered clothes OR a requirement for patio heaters.