So does Mr. Stewart seriously think it's the customer's fault for cooperating with his staff and being delayed, instead of telling them what to do with their unexplained request?

If the staff were so concerned with protecting their victim's privacy, they'd have minded their own business to start with.

Mr. Stewart should remember the adage, "When you're in a hole, stop digging".

I wonder how many companies are now planning to advertise their app by gaming Apple into rejecting it temporarily, and then informing the media.

If you put an idiot or complete novice in charge of Fort Knox, attackers won't attack the building. They'll simply con the idiot and walk in. Then the idiot will blame the building for its lack of security.

This service tests whether the wireless network has an idiot or complete novice in charge of it. They are not cracking proper passwords. By proper password, I mean something that can't be readily guessed and added to the dictionary that's being used.

If your neighbour is using a password like "letmein" or something else likely to be in the service's dictionary, then this test can be used to warn the neighbour. But don't expect the neighbour to thank you. They might just be alarmed, change their password to something equally dumb, and complain to the police that you've been hacking them.

If you're using a more secure password like "jaootns&33dsf", don't bother wasting your money using this service to test it. All the service will tell you is that your password couldn't be figured out because it wasn't a dumb password that's in the dictionary.

Senior people involved in the new laws about file sharing should take note because their wireless passwords are sure to be tested.

When drugs are criminalised, criminals make money. Lots of it. Organised crime is very happy to support those lobbying for stricter controls. It's a huge industry and should be treated as such.

At the sharp end of this business are the victims of burglary and robbery, and higher prices for many goods and services due to theft and fraud committed to feed addictions. Any government that's serious about crime would be serious about choking off the supply of money to criminal enterprise. That means decriminalising where practical, and introducing walk-in centres for addicts to obtain fixes.

Then perhaps our jails wouldn't be quite so full with addicts and there'd be scope to increase the lengths of prison sentences to levels that offered greater protection to the public.

It must be soul-destroying for police offers to catch people who have caused harm and distress, knowing the offenders will soon be released to reoffend.

It could be that the P2P software was merely used as a scapegoat by the worker who was traced or that this is a convenient cover excuse while they investigate the security breach.

Secret documents should never be stored on home machines. Whoever allowed that should be fired.

18300, Apophis is not expected to be in the plane of the equator when it passes through geostationary altitude. Even if this freak event were to happen, only one satellite could reside at the point of intersection and it could easily take avoiding action well in advance. However, I predict there will no shortage of portents of doom at the time.

We might actually deliberately put something in its way to study the composition of the debris from the collision.

Though aimed at Mac users, the fanless Studio II drives appeal to discerning PC users too (I guess Mac users are deemed more up-market), and they're supplied with Windows drivers. You can select RAID 1 (mirroring), if you wish.

I was hoping that WD could produce drivers that would work around XP's inability to handle the type of partition table required for more than 2TB, but their web site would indicate otherwise. :( Of course, MS won't supply an upgrade for XP.

This is one reason why I expect drive manufacturers to wait as long as possible before releasing drives larger than 2TB that are aimed at ordinary PC users connecting with USB. They won't want to deal with large numbers of support calls from people who are still using XP.

Carl, this new group of three arrived by Soyuz so, of course, there's now an extra one.

Gene, how does it feel to have paid part of the tens of billions of $ on this white elephant, while the UK has wisely decided to spend money more effectively. Just think of the space science and exploration of the solar system that could've been accomplished for the same cost as the ISS.

Assuming that the primary object of the station is to pump money, it's no surprise that the end of construction will mark the beginning of the end for the station.

Did Shanghai Daily attempt to translate something that sounds like "zombies"?

Maybe the ingenious Chinese know something about poultry power that we don't. :)

You can't have too much storage, but if they haven't built one yet, it's going to be years before they can come to market. By then, portable 2.5" hard drives costing £50 will have much more capacity, with no expensive extra player required.

They should get back to us when they can talk about achieving greater areal density than today's magnetic storage.

Murray, I didn't know whales could fly. Probably a result of evolutionary pressure from exposure to Infinite Improbability Drives.

Could the trojan also send its own address as a gateway at the same time? Extra traffic through the infected machine, but allowing redirection of DNS or anything else?

That's the lowest I've ever seen. This would explain why the price is being reduced.

It's not very mobile if it's got to be plugged in to the mains most of the time.

Maybe it was the absence of a working backdoor that first alerted the authorities to the problem. :)

It would be cheaper to trigger a big volcanic eruption every few years, maybe with some help from a nuclear bomb. It's always fun to make things go boom.

Then we'd have lots of sulphate particles high in the atmosphere reflecting sunlight and cooling the planet. As a bonus, we'd have great sunsets to watch as we relaxed with our drinks.

I've long searched for a desktop keyboard with a decent-sized left shift key, since I'm right-handed and don't need a shift key on the right. The person who made the small left shift key a UK standard must be a left-hander having some revenge on the majority.

Who makes desktop UK Qwerty keyboards with a wide left shift key, eg by having the backslash key in a better position? Even better if they have Enter and Backspace keys with a decent width too.

Is this a bluff? They must realise that laymen regard Jodrell Bank as something of a national icon, and hence MPs will take an interest in averting closure. Are they saying to government, give us more funds or we'll make the cuts that will cause you the most damage? If so, it's a dangerous game.

Of course, this all helps the American headhunters, looking for able people. The more stick applied by HMG, the less carrot they need to offer.

Oxo, It might have popped out the far end of the tunnel into air as it finished accelerating. That would also allow measurements of performance in air, which was presumably the object of the test.

However, these things don't enter the record books without independent adjudication, I think.

Switching providers when you're with Virgin is a lot harder than when you're with other companies. To switch broadband, you need to switch the phone (ADSL is tied to BT's phone lines) and switch TV (effectively tied by Virgin to the phone), so customers only switch as a last resort, after gaining an awful lot of experience with Virgin's inherited administrative incompetence.

Once customers switch, (as I recently did), they're likely to stay switched for a generation, assuming the company survives that long. Can the government afford to allow Virgin Media to fail?