Alien invasion cancelled due to TV licence restrictions

Denial of service attacks will come to a screeching halt all across the UK as laws are written making them illegal. Phew:

"to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer," Does that include the rather peculiar "retract this mail" 'feature' of MS Outlook/Exchange?

John

"Impair the operation of a computer" sounds like it would also cover mal/ad/spyware. Consider NewDotNet, which often causes issues with DNS lookups ('netsh wins reset' to the rescue in most cases.)

Alan

Isn't Microsoft guilty of all of these by default just with their base OS install? Not to mention their patches (epsecially by automatic update)!!

Simon

Two further points on the risk of little green men attacking. The first for the sake of completeness, and the second because it contains some good questions, and slides us neatly into our next topic...

Fun article on being 'wide-open' to alien invasion. I don't have much of interest in this stuff, but this sounded half-credible. So I did some searching.

You may be interested in this: a pretty clear-sighted debunking of the Cosford "incident".

I doesn't show Nick Pope in the best light, either. Credited to the Fortean Times, which I suppose is reputable as these things go.

Cheers, Rob

I'm intrigued by Mr Pope's comment about hundreds of people phoning in sightings.

Who does one phone in this instance? There's no entry in the Yellow Pages for reporting aliens flying overhead. The two blokes with moustaches give you the number for Lunar House in Croydon, and there's no point phoning the Police because they are always out.

So who does one phone? I really need to know, especially as we only seem to have a few days left and the rechargeable battery in my wind-up torch has failed.

Yours in mild Panic, DT

Poor DT gets into a state of less mild panic (presumably a panic Madras to his previous Korma) upon seeing the large swirling hurricane at the pole of Saturn. There were some predictable jokes too. Observe:

Cassini snaps hurricane

Ahh! It get's worse.

That's not a hurricane, it's an alien's photograph of my bellybutton. They're closer than we thought.

No wait a mo, that's not my bellybutton, it's a close-up of my arse. Where's my ray-gun?

yours in ewven greater panic

DT

That's no storm! Anyone can see that Saturn is the original Cyclops opening its eye to see who the suitor is - it's CICLOPS! Giovanni Domenico.

[aka David]

Nice picture. But is it Saturn or is it Uranus? <ducking for cover>

Bert

That'll do. Back on Friday with more. ®