Pff! I wouldn't get out of bed for that. No wonder they're complaining it's not enough ;-)

Surely you'd want to download a movie through your camera, not your speaker, wouldn't you? ;-)

No - not true. The merchant bears most of the risk. It's entirely wrong, and I'm amazed it's even legal, but that's how it is.

If you set up an online shop, you'll find that you are asked to take on the risk of fraud, yet you don't get the card number or card address from the purchaser. That means you have no reasonable way to verify if the purchaser is fraudulent - even if you had a list of all the stolen cards or whatever, you still couldn't make that judgement. Instead, the card company does that fraud check for you, and tell you the card is good to go. You'll then ship product, after which they come back to you to say "sorry, that card was stolen". They then take their money back off you, and you're left without product and without money.

I wonder if this sort of thing is even legal in the UK any more. Financial companies now have to treat customers fairly (under FSA/FCA rules), and I'm left wondering if this would hold up as "fair" if it was challenged. However, until such a time, the merchant is almost entirely liable for any card fraud.

I'm sorry, I have to pick you up on this.

I use Tor for shopping, banking whatever. The reasons I do this are many and varied, but I don't see why the retailer needs to know my IP address and therefore current location for me to order something. Sure, they know where to send it, and they know where I live, but they have no business knowing that I'm at the dog track, or visiting my mistress or goofing off at work, or out of town for a few days on vacation or anything else.

And so, yes, there are very good reasons to hide your IP address, even if you're subsequently giving away personal details.

Good to know - I'll look into it...

Did you?

Here in the UK, BT (nee the GPO) had the monopoly. The regulator now forces them to rent their cables, telegraph poles and cabinets to their competitors. It's a long way from a perfect system, but it's how I, who live in the South of the England can use Plusnet, a Yorkshire based company in the North of England's services. Plusnet are able to put equipment in my local (BT) telephone exchange, and if BT ever get off their arse and dig some fibre, Plusnet will be able to use that too.

Use one of the country specific googles - eg. google.co.uk - it seems the torbots don't hassle the countries as much as they do .com, so their IPs don't get blacklisted quite so easily.

One thing I find really funky is logging onto the like of Yahoo and co via Tor - they (incorrectly) assume you're in Germany and so show you the page in German. They're not at al unique at this either - it seems the world of webdev has a long way to go before it understands Tor.

As a not-American, I'm always impressed with NASA for stuff like this. I just wish the ESA would do more like it :-)

...and think about the utter crap they'll put on a CD for you.

Like many people, I've bought HP printers because they were always really solid and just did what you wanted. These days though, the sort of stuff you can buy in shops comes with an enormous behemoth of utter crapware you have to install on your windows machine. On my wife's PC I deleted as much of the "Buy HP Supplies" software that no one with an IQ over 100 would ever want to use, and then turned off all of the "fast start helper" and "discovery service" crap too. Time to install it all: about 10 minutes. Time to clean up the mess: 1 hour+. Happily her PC runs more or less as it should now, not much slower as HP would have it.

Contrast this to my Linux machine: I installed no software at all, and can print just fine. I was hoping for the same on Windows, but sadly, that's not possible any more. I've yet to find a way to scan via Linux, but I do it so infrequently that I'll just use the Windows crapware to do it.

I'll never buy an HP printer/MFP again. Shame - they used to be good.

A little too much efficiency leads to a police state, or a surveillance state, or a security state.

The great irony is of course that by keeping his file secret, they had a problem. Had they had less secrets, he might have been found out and stopped. Of course, had they had less secrets, he wouldn't have been a problem in the first place, and wouldn't have needed stopping.

TractorBarry is a raging homo/lesbian/paedo/other, who likes nothing more than to take advantage of vulnerable young people. he's predatory, merciless and ruthless.

TractorBarry lives at 123 Fake Street, Springfield, 90210. If you happen to be in the area, pop over and tell him how you feel about his homo/lesbian/paedo tendencies.

TractorBarry is an abomination, and will hopefully contract cancer and die really soon. He's the product of a mother who was hooked on crack and gave blowjobs to just about anyone so she could get her next fix. His dad was a $country hating fascist/socialist/marxist/communist/capitalist who would think nothing of screwing over his fellow man just to steal a quick buck.

Now, tell me again how any of this is a worthy addition to the actual subject at hand, or how it adds anything useful to the discussion? It could equally have been written as "but you may find people use the most base, degenerate and inappropriate insults when proper prose would be more useful". One form is acceptable, the other is not. In slashdot world, one form gets modded +1, the other "troll". The latter gets hidden for the majority of readers, thus avoids polluting the conversation needlessly.

I understand this ruling probably has unintended consequences, but there's no need for newspapers to leave the truly inappropriate on their sites. Heck, if I can remove them from my little blog which makes no money whatsoever, newspapers who make money from their sites can sure remove them. The judgement makes this activity a cost of doing business if your business is soliciting comments from the public. Seems fair enough to me (on the surface, at least).

To get those higher speeds outside the lab, you'll need some wifi spray

Since he is/was a big swinging dick in the NSA - why wasn't he on a constant road show to said Fortune 100 companies to talk to them about how they can improve their security? After all, the NSA must be the national authority on the subject, no?

Oh yeah... it was because he was far to busy fucking the people over to worry about maybe helping anyone out.