Eideard

Police have been criticised for refusing to arrest a man who harasses motorists in a lay-by wearing nothing but a yellow hard hat.

The man, labelled “naked Bob the Builder”, is a familiar sight at the Hog’s Back lay-by in Puttenham, near Guildford, Surrey – a popular location for “doggers”, people who take part in outdoor sexual encounters.

Earlier this year it was disclosed that police spent £124.93 on tea, coffee and biscuits for sexual adventurers at the site in an attempt to “build up trust” and encourage them to report “hate crimes”.

Yesterday it was reported that the unnamed hard hat wearer was questioned by police at the scene, but was not arrested and was soon back at the lay-by.

He had been reported for indecent exposure by a motorist, who was approached when he pulled over to get a bite to eat at the Hog’s Back Cafe. The man said he called police after the hard hat man started rubbing himself on his car window. The man, who did not want to be named, said: “I got out of the car, phoned the police and waited for them. I told them, I’m definitely giving a statement, I want this man done…

A spokesman for Surrey police said: “A statement will be taken from the victim as part of the ongoing investigation.” Insp Tim Shaw added: It is vitally important that any offences of anti-social behaviour in the area of the Hog’s Back lay-by are reported to police as soon as possible.

“This will allow an appropriate response to be provided to capture and secure evidence.”

Har! Seems to me if you capture and secure the flasher you don’t need much more.

In a deep and sonorous study by the dating site OkCupid, there seems to be no doubt: iPhone owners have more sex than BlackBerry owners and a lot more sex than the worthy, solemn, dedicated purchasers of Android phones.

The numbers for women might leave some readers breathless–as they rush to their local Apple store to buy an iPhone.

For this analysis of 30-year-olds with smartphones suggested that women with iPhones had an average of 12.3 sexual partners (I am sure the 0.3 knows exactly who he is), while their age-equivalents who had opted to put an Android into their purse scored a mere 6.1. (It was 8.8 for the BlackBerry owners, but some might feel these more businessy types would most likely be having sex while still on their BlackBerrys, so that hardly counts.)

For men, the disparity was only slightly more narrow, which perhaps merely reflected a proportionate reduction in the width of their minds. Interestingly, though, Android-owning men seem to have exactly the same amount of sex as Android-owning women…

OkCupid’s calculations also offered that the sexual attraction that seems clearly to be offered by the Apple logo stretches to all ages.

Android owners from 18-40 seem to consistently droop into relative sexless oblivion by comparison…

There will be those who believe that the iPhone makes them look and feel sexier. Others will claim that only sexy people purchase an iPhone in the first place.

Cripes! Apparently, there’s no need at all to count users of smartphones running Windows Mobile.

Fake anti-virus software that infect PCs with malicious code are a growing threat, according to a study by Google.

Its analysis of 240m web pages over 13 months showed that fake anti-virus programs accounted for 15% of all malicious software.

Scammers trick people into downloading programs by convincing them that their PC is infected with a virus. Once installed, the software may steal data or force people to make a payment to register the fake product.

“Surprisingly, many users fall victim to these attacks and pay to register the fake [anti-virus software],” the study said.

“To add insult to injury, fake anti-viruses often are bundled with other malware, which remains on a victim’s computer regardless of whether a payment is made…”

Mr Cluley said that people should be familiar with their own anti-virus software and should “always be suspicious” if they were confronted with a pop-up telling them you need to download something extra or spend money to clean up a computer.

“If you already have anti-virus installed you shouldn’t need to do that,” he said.

Or – if you’re using an advanced Unix-based operating system and/or have your brain switched on – you won’t click on the links that take you into the spider’s lair.

“Please ignore that statue-looking thing on your left!”

Security rules imposed after the Christmas Day bombing attempt may diminish another one of the gee-whiz aspects of flying, the moments when the captain plays tour guide, pointing out landmarks to the passengers.

Immediately after the attempt to bomb the Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the Transportation Security Administration issued a directive to the airlines banning such announcements in the last hour of flight. The agency also ordered the airlines to turn off the maps on the in-flight entertainment system that show the plane’s progress to its destination.

The agency relented slightly on both issues a few days later, at the same time that it also removed an absolute ban on passengers standing up or using the lavatories in the last hour of in-bound international flights. It left decisions on all those activities to the captain…

A pilot on another international carrier said that he and some of his colleagues thought the caution against pointing out landmarks made very little sense. “The passengers can look out the windows,” he said.

Of course, those interviewed for the article were kept anonymous because – like most “security” directives since 9/11 – you’re breaking the law if you publicly acknowledge that there even is a directive.

The criminalization of the right to speak grows stronger by the day, regardless of which branch of the TweedleDeeDum party is in charge of the asylum.

I admit it: I’m a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can’t control it. It’s Apple. I don’t like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.

Seriously, stop it. I don’t care if Mac stuff is better. I don’t care if Mac stuff is cool. I don’t care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you’ve got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There’s a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER…

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That’s why Windows works for me. But I’d never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, “Hey, have you considered Windows?” Not in the real world at any rate.

RTFA. Witty, bright, insightful on many levels – even if Charlie Brooker doesn’t answer all of his own questions.

What – me worry?
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Microsoft released 10 updates to various versions of Windows, components of Microsoft Office, and a cumulative update to Internet Explorer on Patch Tuesday. The company patched a total of 31 vulnerabilities in the update, with some being highly exploitable.

The most serious one is the update for Internet Explorer, MS09-019: Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer. This update addresses a critical vulnerability on every client version of Windows. 8 separate vulnerabilities are patched in this update, including one which was publicly disclosed in 2007. While this very old vulnerability has been public knowledge for some time, there are no known reports of exploit code and Microsoft’s exploitability index states that functioning exploit code for it is unlikely…

There are 6 updates for Microsoft Windows…

Finally, a vulnerability in Microsoft Excel, MS09-021: Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office Excel Could Allow Remote Code Execution, is rated critical for Excel 2000 and important for a wide variety of Excel products including the Mac versions, the file viewers, file compatibility packs and the Sharepoint Server. 7 separate vulnerabilities are patched, 6 of them critical on Excel 2000. 4 of these are likely to produce functioning exploit code for remote code execution, but the rating is only critical on Excel 2000 because of mitigating factors in later versions.

RTFA. Grab the details. Phew!

Microsoft has finally revealed one of the “secret ingredients” in Windows 7, and it’s Windows XP SP3. This only applies to the Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions, and involves downloading the code from Microsoft’s web site.

XPM (for Mode) is based on Microsoft’s Virtual PC and includes a free copy of XP SP3. It provides a bit more functionality than simply installing your own copy of XP (if you have one that legally allows that) in Virtual PC, VMware or VirtualBox…

It will also be a big help even where companies don’t need XPM. They’ll be able to upgrade to the more secure and more capable Windows 7 with the confidence that they have a backwards-compatibility option if they run into an unforeseen snag…

It remains to be seen how well XPM runs on netbooks that don’t provide hardware assistance for virtualisation. But in any case, netbooks typically have too little processor power and not enough memory to make XPM attractive.

Uh, enjoy yourself, folks. Save it for some weekend self-flagellation sport.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

When it comes to customer service, PC manufacturers aren’t held with quite the same contempt as cable companies, health insurers and Internet service providers –- but they don’t have much to brag about, either.

Forrester Research’s 2008 customer experience index, a survey of some 4,500 consumers, ranked the PC makers slightly above companies in those other industries but below such perennial headaches as the wireless companies, airlines and credit card issuers.

Today, the research firm broke out its specific findings on PC makers, and the news was good for Apple and bad for everyone else.

Apple notched an 80 percent, or “good” rating, in Forrester’s customer experience index, which is an average of responses on topics like whether companies meet customer needs and make products that are easy and enjoyable to use.

Gateway scored a 66; Hewlett-Packard, a 64; and Compaq (a brand owned by H.P.), a 63 — scores that Forrester considers “poor” rankings in the customer experience index.

Dell got a miserly 58 percent, a “very poor” rating.

Bruce Temkin, vice president at Forrester, said the PC industry indeed bombed in the survey, but the low ratings were mostly driven by consumers’ views about Microsoft’s Windows ecosystem.

Though I spent decades in several Microsoft environments – cripes, I’ve been online since 1983 – I bought my first Mac, a Mini, just to experiment with OS X. Everything Forrester details matches my experience, from unboxing to style, from ease of set-up and use, to what little customer service I’ve needed – and the way it was handled. Which is why I gave away my last laptop, last desktop PC.

I loaded Ubuntu before I gave them to friends.

The Texas Senate has overwhelmingly passed a budget that includes a provision that bans Vista being used by the Texas government.

The Texas Senate voted 26-5 to pass the two-year $182.2 billion budget, which included a rider that would ban government agencies from upgrading to Vista unless the agencies get written consent from the legislature.

According to Computerworld, the rider was tacked on by Senator Juan Hinojosa, a Democrat from Allen, who proposed it because “of the many problems reported with Vista.” Computerworld quotes him as adding: “We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Microsoft, but the problems with this particular [operating] system are known nationwide.”

Hinojosa apparently hasn’t even used Vista, according to PC World, but that didn’t stop him from managing to get the rider into the budget. Ignorance, after all, is no hindrance to political fortune — given recent past experience with a certain well-known former Texas governor, it may even be an asset.

If the rider stays – and this becomes Texas law – Microsoft probably isn’t too worried. After all, they’re already working feverishly to replace Vista on the computers of the world on their own. Windows 7.

A new round of documents out in the Vista “Junk PC” lawsuit shows that Intel bullied Microsoft into saying an Intel chipset could run Vista, when in fact, it couldn’t run the most vital parts of the new operating system, such as running Aero. Intel had billions of dollars at stake, and Microsoft, in the words of one exec, “caved” in to Intel.

At the heart of Intel’s pressure was its 915 chipset, which was incapable of running Vista’s Aero interface. Intel had a significant number of those chipsets on hand. Because the chipsets were incapable of running Vista, Intel wouldn’t be able to unload them. That’s why they pressured Microsoft into putting “Vista Capable” stickers on PCs with 915 chipsets, even though those PCs couldn’t run Aero or other parts of Vista.

The latest filings are part of a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for a marketing scheme in which people claim that Microsoft misled consumers into buying “Windows Vista Capable” PCs, even though the PCs couldn’t run the most important features of Vista.

The dirt comes out and it smells worse than many thought it would.

Read the details. If you’re supporting Windows, this costs you money and time.