Only the INQ can save us now

"According to an RAC report from May, teleworking and technology could cut commuter traffic by up to 10%, as well as cutting down lorry journeys by up to 16%."

Could some explain how teleworking would remove 16% of lorry journeys? I would have thought it would increase them as they have to deliver 27,000 extra water coolers.

Steve

Subject: The Sender ID

"The Sender ID technology requires domain owners to publish so-called Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records, a list of IP addresses used to send email. Microsoft claims about five million internet domains have adopted Sender ID."

Actually, Sender ID requires domain owners to publish "Sender ID" TXT records. SPF is a competing and slightly incompatible standard invented by Meng Wong et al. Most of the 5 million records are SPF records, not Sender ID.

Jasongurtz

Subject: Microsoft re-pitches anti-spam standard

You forgot to mention that in order to use this an organization must also sign a covenant to not sue MS for any reason at any time in the future. Thus a company could implement this than find that MS has then stolen code or patents from any of the companies other products and have no recourse to pursue the issue.

Real winning deal there, for MS anyway. Open season on any codebase or technology they want.

Subject: RIAA

Rather than pander your site to the "news" of the RIAA, the MPAA, and the like, why don't you used the might of the Inq and its geeky followers to join the global consumer effort to CRUSH the illegitimate corporate IP movement.

I mean really. If I can listen to a song on the radio, it is fully decoded into analogue (did I spell that correctly for the Britons to understand?) before it gets to my ears. Do I not have full permission to record any sound available to my ears? Same for television. If I can look at it without getting yelled at, why can't I record it?

Come on people! Let's be realistic. If you don't want someone to copy and redistribute your work, DON'T PUBLISH it. That's the ONLY way to prevent it. MPAA, feel free to film as many chick flicks as you want, but in stead of publishing them & putting them in the hands of pirates (arrrrrrr), lock the originals in a vault, weld the door closed, pour reinforced concrete over the thing, 10 meters in all directions, then destroy the originals.

This policy will prevent piracy all together. And...it's definately cheaper to do the vault in concrete than to pay your lawyers to make themselves work, so...it will probably cost you and the consumer less to enforce.

We don't need protected from ourselves by your rules & the government's laws, the governments of this world should be protecting us from you.

End of rant.

Bert

Subject: Working from home

I've been trying to convince my boss of this for years now. I could do all my work from my apartment, he unfortunately still insists I trudge to, and from work every day.

Mattmanno

Subject: Accountants

Please put more effort into cheesy pun delivery. This story begs the question how ants become counts, and would be at least as interesting and relevant to IT as the origininal piece.

Voodoochilli

Subject: Firefox 2.0

After reading your article on Firefox 2.0, I went to aforementioned site & downloaded the update... When I installed this program, I ran across a problem...

XPCom... When I shut down my system for the night & walked away, I discovered my system did not shut down.. There was a window stating that XPCom was still running... The only way to shut my system down was to respond to this.. The problem did not go away with future shutdowns...

I deleted 2.0 & reinstalled an earlier version of Firefox... Problem gone...

Duane Ellison

Subject: Piracy

Indeed.

Seems as though they're trying to catch up on all the years of VHS, Cassette and other sharing. Now they have the judical system taking up some of the slack for them, so they ran with it.

How can a song be played in several different places at once, for free and still charge $20 for the same song (because the rest of them blow) on CD? We're talking Sirius, XM, Online videos, TV stations and now ONDEMAND videos whenever you want them... FOR FREE!

In the meantime, they complain about losing money because of pirated products, when in all reality, they're charing outrageous prices for complete garbage albums (Metallica's last albums for example). People have finally gotten fed up with paying tons of money for trash.

Granted, you're going to hear them talk about the prices raising because of P2P hurting revenue, but wasn't it $15-17 for a CD before P2P was readily available? Plus, exactly how much money does it cost them for a CD... 10 cents? And how much to pay for the recording studio and producers?.... $10 a CD? Get real. Granted, we don't have to buy it... but, ...... well, we don't have to buy it, is the point.

I honestly buy ANY music that I really deem worthy, straight off the shelves because it's original and they deserve it. For anything else, I'll Usenet it up or listen to it repeat every 5 minutes on TV, Radio or Shoutcast. The music they make should be charged for, but not anything higher than $10. Whatever happened to using your media as a selling point for concerts?

We all know why, it's because those who can't sell CD's... SUCK in concert.

Mataroo

Subject: Parental control

hey,

read your story and thought of the tv ad linked below:

http://www.klicksafe.de/common/presse.php?site=spot

richard, Austria

Subject: oops

"Users will also be able to allow others to contribute to their own index page, if they wish"

Sounds like a possible backdoor for mayhem and exposure, as far as I'm concerned. And tied into the biggest Internet Search engine of the world, meaning that any mistake is published to the whole world faster than you can blink.

Thanks, but no thanks. Until Internet companies can demonstrate meaningful safety statistics for more than a month at a time (right, at least a decade), I'll refrain from indexing my hard disks, putting my personal pics on remote storage, and just blindly installing any newfangled thingamajig that some besuited exec dreams up. I've got nothing to hide, and I'd very much like to keep that away from prying eyes.

Pascal.

Subject: Parents

I'm guessing parents should keep an eye on their children no matter what they do. At least, until they're able to be responsible for their own actions and tell you they hate you on a daily basis.

We recently had a story on local news about a 2 year old being hit by a truck while he was outside playing. The guy apparently said he was backing out of his garage, as he did every day, heard kids screaming, to find a kid under the truck... dead.

The news channel did "experiments" about how people should double check their blind spots while backing out of their driveways, etc. They put cones up and showed how women are more likely to hit kids before men, because of their size.. blah blah blah. The funny thing is, nobody acknowledged the fact that this family had a TWO YEAR OLD running around OUTSIDE by himself, with NO supervision!

[I'm simply horrified to think about what would happen to my 2 year old if I let him play outside in the street unattended.]

Nonetheless, it's the same crap everyday... go after the television stations for broadcasting shit that you shouldn't be letting your kids watch in the first place (same goes with internet). The television now has to be the babysitter, and cable boxes will eventually have to change diapers while parents go to work.

Mataroo

Subject: Stupid users and security

Sorting out an office password is a thankless task, and sometimes self-defeating.

In my company we have several tech savvy users, who have passwords with mixed case letters and numbers. Personally I generate mine in my head from bits of my postcode, phone number and registration number of my favourite car. All nice and easy to remember, and even if you did a bit of social engineering (8 pints of stella please) and extract all 3 from me, I'm still the only one who knows which bits of each one are used to make the password, and in what order. When it becomes time to change password, I just take a few more characters from one of the sources, and a few less from another.

Unfortunately we also have people in the company who will insist on using the name of their pet dog. After shouting at these people a few times and getting nowhere, you end up having to introduce some server rules. Password must be at least 8 characters, must have a mixture of cases, and contain some numbers, and eventually you resort to the random generator and “user cannot change this password” method of enforcement.

Next thing you know, the infamous post it note appears stuck to the screen, or if they're really 1337, stuck on the underside of the keyboard. (Cue banging of head against brickwork!).

However, some users can actually be rather imaginative. My favourite being the one that had obviously heard about the infamous post-it note under the keyboard, and actually set their password to part of the keyboard serial number (not the first 8 characters either!). I was actually rather impressed with this ingenuity; right up until the day their keyboard got replaced!

So in summary, if a user gets to pick the password, it will invariably be about as secure as a cardboard padlock in a thunderstorm. If the system admin sets the password, all the nice secure properties will be rendered useless by the post-it note. I wonder, does this mean 3M falls fowl of the laws regarding the production of something that assists unauthorised access?

Steve.