* Posts by Nick L

78 posts • joined 13 Oct 2007


Hulu headed for subscription service scheme?

Nick L

no ads please, we're british.

if anybody thinks i am going to pay a subscription fee to watch adverts they are seriously deluded.

US raygun jumbo jet now firing live blasts in flight

Nick L

Is it me ?

or does that jumbo jet look like a shark with a frikkin ray gun on its head ?

Remembering the true* first portable computer

Nick L
Thumb Up

grammar !

an original (i hope), interesting and fascinating article about computing, marred only by the grating use of the word "that's" as a possessive. 10/10 compared to much recent register reprinting of press releases !

Tories, LibDems under election day cyberattack?

Nick L


Don't forget to claim the expenses on your round trip - if it's OK for MPs then it's OK for us.

ISPs frosty on Jacqui's comms surveillance plan

Nick L

Jaqui's opportunistic whackiness

And how exactly is deep packet inspection going to reveal the contents of SSL/TLS encrypted streams ? Unix users have had Opportunistic Encryption for years of course, but it's about time someone wrote an opportunistic encryption module for Windows. Then anyone can have the ability can make a secure connection direct to any $REMOTE_SERVER that advertises an OE capability, regardless of whether the application protocol is encrypted or not.

EU backs advanced network tech to boost resilience

Nick L

ipv6 cracker proof ?

I'll believe it when ipv6 has 20+ years of worldwide internetworking implementation without any vulns being exploited.

ISS stuffed with full staff of six

Nick L

They're going to get this thing firing on all cylinders ...

... just about in time to de-orbit it with extreme prejudice ....

Russian blows off ex-boyf's todger with firecrackers

Nick L

I'm just curious

to know the nationality of the various commenters. Some of them seem to be lacking in the traditional British ability to extract irony and black humour from any situation, however unfortunate. Is it possible that we have a few overseas readers in our midst who, as is apparently traditional for them, have Missed The Point ?

3 has no place Like Home

Nick L

no place like $HOME ?

> Roaming data remains prohibitively expensive

Perhaps someone should introduce them to this thing called "The internet". I believe it has facilities to send data cheaply to strange countries these days.

XSS flaws poke ridicule at entertainment industry

Nick L

iWhat ?

Are iFrames what the iPod browser displays ?

Sacha Baron Cohen scars Paula Abdul for life

Nick L

Copyright be damned

URL to the Youtube video, if you please !

Koreans cook up glow-in-the-dark beagles

Nick L

~ac 10:32

And after that - glow in the dark hippies ...

Private ID scans leave fetish club-goers feeling exposed

Nick L


Ah, I remember it when it was just an underground car park which was rented out for parties.

then it became a proper underground club - The Drome. Memories of many happy nights there ...

then it became a mainstream club - SE1

and now it's just another arm of the government.

Thanks for the warning guys, I'll know not to go to any events at SE1 any more.

Who snapped first?

Nick L

Title of some sort

I almost posted to your story last week about the Met's own warnings of anticipated police-v-crusty mayhem, that it was nice of them to let us know in advance they were going to beat up protesters - unlike in Edinburgh where it was not advertised in advance, but peaceful marchers were herded into suburban streets and beaten up anyway by the Met's finest on tour.

Unfortunately I didn't, so I can't say "I told you so" ....

The Quick - and the Dead in the Water

Nick L

Pesky photographers to blame again

Bang the lot of them up, it's the only way to be sure.

Spies hacked US electrical grid, says WSJ

Nick L

"planting software that can be used to destroy key components."

You mean they maliciously installed Internet Explorer 8 ?

Lies, damned lies and inflation statistics

Nick L

Unlikely story

Bread - 25% dearer over the last year

Milk - 25% dearer over the last year

Cooking oil - 25% dearer over the last year

Catfood - 25% dearer over the last year

Wine - 25% dearer over the last year

Inflation zero ? Pull the other one.

IBM turns back on server history

Nick L

Return of the high performance general system ?

General purpose systems ?

Domain-specific application accelerators ?

Compute-intensive acceleration ?

High-speed, network traffic optimization ?

Hey, maybe we could call them something innovative like, umm, mainframes ?

Mormons demand ICANN plugs net smut hole

Nick L

Let them do it

Let the loonies block access to port 80 in any other country of the world. Why should we in the rest of the world care if they once again choose isolationism ? We can simply block their port 25 in return, and halve the rest of the world's spam problem.

Apple intoxicated with ex-Vista chief's musical stylings

Nick L

A little bit of this and a little bit of that ?

Isn't that the album where the artist says he had trouble deciding what styles to leave out and that he could have done another album with the rest of them ?

<paxman> Yerrssss </paxman>

Microsoft - quantity is better than quality.

Upper-atmos ion drive dart sat launch delayed

Nick L

Stable doors and bolts

They forgot the magic words - "Open the pod bay doors, HAL"

DNA database includes nipper and nonagenarian

Nick L

With apologies to EssBee

"DNA swab, citizen !"

Illinois restores Pluto's planetary status

Nick L

edication, that's what you need

And they'll be working out its orbit using the state-mandated value of π = 3

Comet Lulin poses for NASA's Swift

Nick L

X ray spex ?

And of course it won't be pink and purple unless you're viewing it in X-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090221.html

Beta-blocker 'erases' unpleasant memories

Nick L

More years-old news

Whilst it's always valuable to have research peer-reviewed, this is by no means the first discovery of this effect. Researchers at Harvard were studying it five years ago: http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/03.18/01-ptsd.html and in Montreal three years ago: http://www.chrcrm.org/main/modules/pageworks/index.php?page=002&id=1374

Geekerati brace for Unix timestamp milestone

Nick L

Y2038 is here again

"It was then noted by a perceptive person that the servers all failed on or before exactly one billion seconds before the end of the Unix epoch in 2038" : http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24.34.html#subj3

Y2038 is also a factor for present day financial calculations: a mortgage taken out just five years hence will expire in 2038, and life insurance taken out now is likely to continue well past the end of the 32-bit epoch.

Immortal Dr Who jellyfish poised to rule Earth

Nick L

Only a big as a fingernail ?

In other news, an alien invasion fleet today was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

TJX closes book on infamous security breach with sale

Nick L

TJX Special Offer

Customer account details, $5 per 100,000

Breakthrough paint blocks top-end spectrum

Nick L

Teraherz security scanners ?

Mine're the trousers with the thermite lined codpiece ....

Cows can't detect earthquakes: Official

Nick L

Re: what is the speed

First assume a spherical cow ...

iPlayer finally makes friendly with Mac and Linux

Nick L

just what exactly

does this new downloader give me that iplayer-dl doesn't ?

Yahoo! mocks Google Privacy Theatre

Nick L

cookies ?

You mean there are some people who allow Google to set cookies ?

Government plans emergency extranet

Nick L

Oxymoron ?

Will it be any more resilient than their existing resilience feedback page, do you think ? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/09/uk_resilience_website_easy_pushover/

How can I image the drives of an Acer Aspire One fleet?

Nick L


We use PING, as suggested by Tony, though to be honest it is somewhat clunky (e.g. its tendency to scrawl stderr messages over the top of its own dialogues). PING also has problems with LVM volumes, and I have found that it fails to restore disk labels on swapfile volumes (so your restored image will probably end up running without swap).

I haven't tried Clonezilla yet but it's definitely on my todo list. As another partimage-based distro I would expect it to be at least as capable as PING, and it claims to support more ghost-like features such as multicast restores.

Ariane 5 greenlights fat pipe net satellite

Nick L


A good idea for bulk transfer, but the *propagation times*, my dear ...

DARPA seeks Hitchhikers Deep Thought program

Nick L


> I would Disagree and would Posit IT has been Done.


Merseyside plant to punch out Chevy Volt

Nick L

Back to the future ?

Ooh look, a government pouring money into helping manufacture a new and untried car. It's just like old times !

I still see a Delorean running around this area (though there's a sad absence of fiery skidmarks on the road ...)

Google - your source for FREE Adobe gear

Nick L

Zer0 G00gle taked0wns

Anyone who has ever reported a spammy Googlemail account or spammy Blogger blog knows that they will do the square root of sod all about taking it down. Why exactly should I expect them to do anything about taking down spammy Google ads ?

New address spoofing flaw smudges Google's Chrome

Nick L

Designed for insecurity ?

So do we get the impression that security is designed into Chrome through its architecture, or do we get the impression that it's an implementation add-on which depends on its programmers noticing the vulnerabilities ?

US forces want man-hunting robot wolfpacks

Nick L

the entire building or neighbourhood ?

" ... or we blow up this entire planet and possibly one or two other we noticed on our way out here!"

El Reg in Street View drive-by snooping

Nick L

Extreme privacy measures

I see from your pix that one of your neighbours even wrapped their building in polythene to avoid being Gooviewed ...

Hubble fired up and ready for action

Nick L

"self clearing short circuit"

Yeah I had one of those last week on a more modern motherboard. My desk now has brand new scorch marks ...

Wikia layoffs ground Jimbo's imaginary jet

Nick L


Well I tried metacrawler after a break of a few years ... and four of its top five results were Google ads. And only one of them was to do with the search terms.

Nick L

re:'Is it possible to Out-Google Google?'

>You don't go off and do loads of searches - just the one that wanders off and looks by itself.

Kind of like Metacrawler used to be ? Have to admit I've not used metacrawler for years - might go off and see how it performs now ...

Link spammers set up shop on GMTV sofa website

Nick L

Not necessarily "taken over"

Many domain vendors turn expired domains into a link spam page automatically. It's quite familiar to anyone who often uses search engines, when a domain expires and a tantalising text fragment in Google's cache is all you now can find about Venezualan beaver cheese.

If the domain is now popping in and out of existence it suggests that this is what happened, as DNS caches slowly update their idea of the web server's IP address from the real one,. to the hoster's holding link-spam page, and back to the real server again.

Google: 'We are Meltdown proof'

Nick L

@Who clicks on ads

Several times I've found that merely viewing Google ads results in cookies from the advertisers' sites being sent to my browser. As a result, and out of pure spite, if Google does accidentally send me a relevant looking advert I now make a point of messing with the ad results by cut-and-pasting the URL into the location bar rather than clicking on the link.

Perhaps I should call it Adtarding, in line with El Reg's rule that if something is free, it's retarded.

Google stock in weird, spurious plunge to $200 mark

Nick L

Pleasing symmetry

Last month: Airline share prices whacked by "erroneous" items, thanks to an automated system run by Google.

This month: Google share prices whacked by "erroneous" items, thanks to an automated system run by the stock exchange.

Next month: RoTM makes share prices irrelevant ?

Brits happy to hand over password details for £5 gift voucher

Nick L
Paris Hilton


I would cheerfully tell someone a false password forming scheme in exchange for an M&S voucher. You can always exchange it for "not just" M&S chocolate and underwear for Paris Hilton.

BOFH: Remote access malarkey

Nick L

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Jim lad

I remembers the days of three pints with chasers at lunchtimes, and I remembers the days of BOFHs articles likes this ones.

Now I just needs to gets backs to the three pints at lunchtime capability ...


Adobe yanks speech exposing critical 'clickjacking' vulns

Nick L

onclick ?

Is this actually anything cleverer than <a href="goodsite.com" onclick="location.href=http://dodgysite.biz">Please enter your password</a>




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