Apparently a big propane depot in Ontario exploded early this morning (around 3.30 am EST) - check the explosion in this video shortly after 1:50 -
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Archive for the 'news' Category
Here’s a story I just posted at work about Network Solutions holding domains to ransom:
It appears that Network Solutions are immediately registering all domains searched for. In what I consider a highly shady move, Network Solutions have started immediately registering domain names when customers search for them via the Network Solutions website, and holding them for 4 days - effectively meaning that if you checked whether it was available using their domain search tools, you now have no choice but to buy it from them, locking out all other registrars.
I tested it by searching for network-solutions-stole-my-domain.com which was previously untaken, and within minutes, they’d registered it - see a whois lookup for confirmation.
Continue reading ‘Network Solutions holding domains to ransom’
Surely this can’t be right - the FAA claims that the 787’s passenger compartment network is connected to the plane’s control systems!
From the Wired story:
The computer network in the Dreamliner’s passenger compartment, designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to the plane’s control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA report reveals.
The revelation is causing concern in security circles because the physical connection of the networks makes the plane’s control systems vulnerable to hackers. A more secure design would physically separate the two computer networks. Boeing said it’s aware of the issue and has designed a solution it will test shortly.
I find it hard to believe that the network to which passengers are granted access would have any link to the plane’s private control/navigation systems, but, if it is, whoever thought that was a sensible idea needs shooting!
It seems that, as of February 2008, Netscape Navigator will no longer be developed. Netscape may not be popular any more (certainly nowhere near the ~80% share they had in their heyday) but the Mozilla project owes a hell of a lot to the original Netscape codebase.
Netscape are recommending that all remaining Netscape users should move to Firefox - sensible advice 
So, farewell Netscape, commendations for playing a big part in the spread of the Internet (even if the 4.x browsers were often a real PITA for web developers), and RIP.
According to this report, Camelot have had to withdraw a scratch card because the general public are too thick to understand negative numbers.
From the article:
Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.
The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I’m not having it.
Apparently the family of a 13-year old boy who choked to death on a plastic pen lid are campaigning to ban them.
Now of course I have sympathy for the loss of their son, but I do think campaigning to ban pen lids is ridiculous. What next, shall we start a campaign to ban kitchen knives, because sometimes people cut themselves on them?
BBC News reports:
Premiership footballers who agreed to donate a day’s wages to a nurses’ hardship fund have coughed up less than a third of the money, organisers say.
Five months ago, 255 players promised to make donations to the May Day for Nurses appeal.
Big names, including Steven Gerrard and Thierry Henry, agreed to participate. More than £750,000 was pledged but just £200,000 has so far been collected.
These guys get paid ridiculous amounts of money for kicking a ball around a pitch, and can’t be bothered to fulfil their promise to donate a single day’s wages to help out nurses who do a worthwhile job actually helping care for people?
(Via Random Acts of Reality)
I wouldn’t normally bother to publish something like this, but the attitude that John Burns, Monster’s Business Development Manager in Ireland is shocking, and I think is worth drawing attention to.
To summarise what happened, Monster.ie harvested a list of email addresses of members of IT@Cork members and used it to send an unsolicited, spammy mail to. He then tried to “recall” the mail (which only works with clients like Microsoft’s Outlook which are insecure enough to accept a request to delete a mail from your mailbox), again exposing everyone’s email addresses by not using the BCC field.
Continue reading ‘Monster.com spams then threatens Irish IT Pros’
Been meaning to do this for a while, but I’ve finally set up a new public NTP timeserver.
It’s a stratum-3 server, syncing to several decent stratum-2 servers, and answers to the name of time.preshweb.co.uk.
It’s entered the UK pool.ntp.org DNS pool, and I’m seeing quite a few requests already - currently my stats show 4.2 requests per second.
NTP is a damn useful tool to keep system clocks in sync and I’ve been using it for ages on all my boxen; it’s nice to be able to help out by sharing the load a little.
Read more info about NTP or about the pool.ntp.org project. If you have a server somewhere and are willing to help out, the project needs more pool servers to share the load - read more about joining.
BBC News reports that a woman accused over a fatal dog attack on her five-year-old granddaughter has been found not guilty of manslaughter.
OK, this woman was supposed to be responsible for a 5 year old child. By her own admission she had consumed two bottles of wine, and smoked ten joints - that alone likely means she would have been in no fit state to responsibly look after a child. But, she then chose to allow a dangerous pit bull dog into the house, which then killed the little girl.
The dog was illegal (under the Dangerous Dogs act) and had already been involved in two previous attacks. The dog’s owner has been given a prison sentence but the woman has been cleared of manslaughter by criminal negligence. Why? Did she really think that allowing a vicious dog (pit bull terriers are banned precisely because they are vicious, dangerous dogs bred to fight) was a good idea?
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