You, Mr. Nick Farrell, are a low-life

Judge didn't have "Beatles moment" after all

Yes he did. The "Beatles moment" was glossed in precisely the same way. I was going to call you idiots, but it's quite unusual for L'Inq to forget bits like that. Maybe a "Senior moment" for you?

RWT

Subject: Russia's cyber war with Estonia rocks Nato

Just one of the few battles that has reached the "news". WorldWar3 started about 2 years ago. Im surprised this has not been picked up before now. I could tell you so much more but that would probable be the cause me to dissapear. It is getting scary and I believe is will only be a matter of time before this "netwar" turns from trojans to cruse missiles. May God help us all.

D Carr

Subject: AACS keys

The key that had the leading role in quite a bit of internet drama a couple of weeks ago was not a volume key. Volume keys are only good for getting at the unscrambled contents of a single AACS (rhymes with AIDS) protected release, and are generally not something that the AACS LA would get all in a huff over. "Killing" volume keys comes at no cost, since no players need be updated and new sets of volume keys are generated for each release anyhow.

No, that key was a "process key", something that can be used to open every AACS-using release since day zero until, presumably, that key is "killed". Likewise, what was gained through this latest crack was a processing key rather than the more pedestrian string of bits.

This mistake was originally made by the Ars Technica writer, surprisingly enough as Ars did get the distinction straight during the previous drama.

K Sands

Subject: 4 billion loss

Who lost what? My shares are worth more today than they were yesterday.

As for Apple having something to hide, they damn well better be hiding it. They are the only ones in the MP3 player and personal computer industry that are doing any innovating. They are breaking new ground in the cell phone industry as well. They had better keep these industrial secrets out of their competitors hands as long as possible. That's my assets they are protecting.

You, on the other hand, have no right to publicize industrial secrets that jeopardize my nest-egg.

Alan

Subject: Tool tip on your link of the day...

... doesn't appear in Firefox. Only noticed cos I switched from IE, and always used to read your little witticisms!

Keep up the good work,

Alex

Subject: Apple only has itself to blame...

Yeah, right. And all of a sudden you (bloggers, so called journalists) aren't to blaim ? You're the victim, right ?

As in the case of Lady Diana, you're far too eager to score a few points for yourself. And you will use any oppertunity to do so.

You want to succeed in life through the misery of other people and you like/encourage this kind of behaviour.

And by publishing such an article, you Mr. Nick Farrell, confirm to me that you are low-life and only published this to - maybe - score a few points for yourself. You want to climb up the social/career ladder?

Write a piece of journalism that matters; don't try and creep up the crowd's asses.

Th. Sanders

Subject: Hitachi floats 200GB Blu-ray disk

I agree but it would make one hell of a computer backup disk. On second thought the unprotected caddy-less disk would be untrustworthy. I would still use a nice external HD instead.

Have a great day,
Glenn

Subject: Do you give health advice too?

The quotes you have are very funny, very poignant. So I thought I would add one by Mark Twain that I came across. By the way, 225,000 people die each year from medical mistakes in the US.

Regards,
Ron

Subject: Apple Stock Rant

Nick: This was probably a maneuver to flush the leaky sources within Apple. As insecure Apple is (is there any real Apple info, or is it *all* PR?), it would seem to me this is their style.

The thing that caught my eye was that the "fake" letter was sent to a limited set of people within Apple.

That was a method detailed in the Tom Clancy novel, "Cardinal in the Kremlin" where different sets of false information is tossed to specific subgroups of people and when the news leaks to the press or other sources, it is easy to see what subgroup leaked the information.

And if not, it certainly is fun being paranoid about how paranoid the flaming Fruit of Cupertino can be, no?

James

Subject: Plusnet suffers hack attack

Dear The Inquirer,

I am plusnet customer, while their service is usually very good they are a bit lax about security but *only* to the same level as BT.

Example - both BT and plusnet have only max of 8 characters for a password. Maybe this is not a problem since 8 chars is quite a lot of combinations. I pointed this out to both a few years ago, but I guess it wasn't a problem as they seemed happy about it.

The "spam attack" email tells customers to keep our software up to date (anti-virus, operating system patches etc), a bit of joke when its Plusnet that aren't doing the updates! ;-)

Perhaps you could find out why they were keeping usernames and passwords in an unencrypted table on a server with missing patches and known weaknesses. Do they seriously expect us to believe that they didn't know the served needed patching?

Why didn't they patch it? They say the patches have stopped the exploit, so why the heck didn't they patch it? Are there any other servers at Plusnet that need patching?

The only way these guys will learn is if there is a penalty for them. We need a financial/criminal penalty to protect our data in their hands. I've now got to change my password on my email, username-logon and get my family to do the same. What a kerfuffle! ;-)

Thanks for the ranting space,

TR

Subject: Dell Don't sell 64bit Vista

Dell do sell 64bit Vista, in business flavor at least. We ordered 2 quad core machines, with 8 gigs of RAM etc and they came with 64bit Vista Business Edition installed...

Perhaps they [Dell] don't think the home market wants 64bit O/S?

Peace

Phil

Subject: 4 billion dollars

Stop saying absolute amounts of money when talking about the stock market....it's not real money! no, seriously, it's *not* real money.

Saying 4 billion dollars gets people's ire up (yea, I know that's your business), but 4B is less ~5% of apple's market cap of 93B. Market cap is another semi-meaningless number.

This is all because you can't take all those shares to the bank and exchange them for cash...when someone starts selling the value drops and people start jumping out of windows. Its not real money, don't believe the hype. the stock market, which I partake in, survives on this fundamental idea.

BTW: I know AAPL hasn't dropped that much because my smug ass friend owns a ton and I don't own any. And if they did delay a bunch of stuff (as I believe will happen after readin all of this) I think it'll drop more than a measly 5%. It's up 20% this month. SELL SELL SELL. =)

Glen

Subject: Dell in retail

Hi,

Just want to inform you that I saw Dell notebooks for sale in a normal retail shop in Budapest last week. Doesn't that mean they have gone retail already?

Regards,
Mat

Subject: hospitals...?!

Let me get this straight- hospital pirates Windows because they're already going under from being sued and fined by the incompetent American justice system. Employee who pirated Windows is sent to prison for life. Hospital, unable to afford even the most basic equipment, is also short-staffed, so when the terrorists who are busy NOT being caught by homeland security (because they're too busy searching for pirating hospitals) release a biological weapon on the city, everybody dies because the hospital is unable to treat everyone. god bless america.

NP

Subject: Foxconn P35

Hi,

Foxconn do make decent boards and contrary to what you have suggested, use decent caps. I don't think you could go wrong with Nichion, Panasonic FM or United/Nippon Chemicon.

It is not fair to tar somebody without proper evidence. Also, just using Aluminum cans alone guarantee nothing. Apart from Sanyo/Oscon, most other brands can't match up in terms of ESR (for Al cans).

Regards,
Super Nade, OCForums.

Subject: Pirating = Life Sentence in USA

In Regards to the draconian measures the US has proposed, it's a required step in order to stop their economy from tanking, only through replacing physical goods with 'Intellectual Property' can they maintain any sort of trade given how outsourcing and offshoring has decimated their industries at home.

For a unconventional look at how/why such measures are being pushed by the 'IP' industries, I would recommend you read the following article (or recommend it to your readers)

http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/finance/ip-vs-inflation.php

Regards,
Creidim

Subject: So what ?

So Passport does a billion checks a day for Hotmail. Well I'm sorry but I wouldn't touch either with a 10-foot pole anyway. Am I biaised ? Of course I am ! Even so, Microsoft's security record is not good at all, and that's a matter of public record.

But, independent of the fact that MS is the most common name in all vulnerability exposures (and it doesn't matter that "it's the most common, so it's the most targeted" - it's still the most common), the thing that prevents me from trusting them is the fact that their security process is not public and up for review.

It has long been demonstrated, publicly and sometimes unwittingly, that a truly secure process is one that has been devised under public scrutiny. A truly secure process is one that cannot be broken even though you know exactly how it works. You want proof ? RSA. When people talk about cracking RSA keys, what they really talk about is cracking ONE key, not the system itself. The job has to be redone entirely for the next key. A system that is broken is broken for all keys, not just one.

Counter-examples ? Too many to list. Remember the CD protection that could be bypassed by holding down the Shift key under Windows ? That was a system devised privately. No matter what the system was, no matter how many discs were sold with it, a simple Shift key defeated it every time. Another example ? That other system you could defeat by blacking out track 0 with a felt-tip pen. Another ? Well XP's first-generation authentication key was pretty quickly done in, but it must be said that, if there is a key generator for XP SP2 that works, it's pretty well hidden on the Web. Nonetheless, any system that is vendor-protected and not published for peer review is a system that is highly susceptible to be broken.

Microsoft does not publish the code that makes Passport work (trade secrets, intellectual property and all that gunk). Fine, they don't have to by any means.

Unfortunately, until I've read a comprehensive debate on the Internet that goes through the code, breaks it down and discusses the merit of each part, all done by non-Microsoft people, I will not trust Passport any farther than I can fly.

There are many very, very good security-conscious developers whose expertise is freely available - all you have to do is publish your project entirely and let them have at it to find a weakness. Those who do not do that are depriving themselves and the world of a much-needed reality check.

I am all for a universal, uncrackable ID system for the web (that still let's me be anonymous when I don't care to be known as me). As soon as someone publishes a method that resists to white hat hackers scrutiny, I'll sign up. Microsoft doesn't, so I won't. It's as simple as that.

Pascal

Subject: Software pirates still making a killing, says BSA

Of course, the amount of money they quote is derived directly from their ass. First, they come up with how much pirated software is out there, which itself is created out of whole cloth. Then they multiply that times an inflated retail price because the higher the number the more important they seem. For the most part, people will pay money for something they feel is worth it. I was one of the people selling software at a retail outfit lately and the number of copies we sold of Office for Students and Teachers were through the roof compared to sales of Office Standard. Why? Maybe because people just weren't willing to pay $300 to $400 dollars for a single copy of software at home, but WERE willing to pay $150 for three copies.

Perhaps the problem isn't that too many people are pirating it, maybe the problem is that it is priced at MORE then the machines they are running on. What does an average machine run right now, without an OS? $400 to $500? What does a copy of Vista and Office together run right now? Somewhere between $500 and $1000?

I've already started going open source, just because I'm tired of all of the BS that they put us through.

Mogbert

Subject: Wait a minute

From what i understand, by buying ms meII you can legally install XP without charge as well as any inferior of vole's o.s.es (or what ever). At least thats what I read somewhere , so installing 64 bit XP should be fine by the eula as long as you own a legal copy of meII. Just don't blame me if you get locked up for life if im wrong.

Missingxtension

Subject: Optimus OLED keyboard costs $1,564

$1,564

Come on.....

It doesnt even support Linux :S

Haq

Subject: Open University courses

I'm particularly intrigued with Mathematics course MSXR209_2. I'm pleased to see that knicker technology is being built on a firm theoretical foundation.

Monty Brandenberg