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Would you rather watch Titanic or Celebrity Big Brother?

Important questions, answered

And if you could crack any movie encryption you wanted, which would be the last one you'd choose? Probably Spice World, the Spice Girl movie:

While Spice World was probably a very bad movie, and Titanic was definitely a bad movie, they hardly qualify as anywhere close to "worst movies ever".

For the anglocentric crowd, one movie which pretty consistently rates as worst-of-the-worst is "Manos: the Hands of Fate". Made by a fertilizer salesman in 1966 as an attempt to do a low-budget horror movie, it sank into obscurity, revived in the 90s by the television show "Mystery Science Theater 3000". It's available on DVD in a two-movie pack called "MST3K: The Essentials" along with "Santa Claus Conquers The Martians", another movie far worse than anything on your list.

MST3K did approximately two hundred episodes. The vast majority of the movies featured were far worse than your top 10.

Cheers,

Charles


Perhaps I could also direct you to IMDB's 100 worst movies of all time which includes some lesser known "classics" such as House of the Dead - a live action movie featuring 16bit sequences taken from the game of the same name, Lawnmower man 2 and Thunderpants.

Click here to be enthralled.

Simon


Ford teams up with MS to do voice commands for your car. The obvious question is: what happens when it crashes?

Do the buttons on the wheel include Ctrl-Alt-Delete keys?

You left out the parts about the "ambient" lighting in 7 colors (including special lights on the cup holders) and the "text-speak" savvy voice that knows just how to deal with "LOL" and other yoof-oriented phrases and abbreviations.

Even though I worked for Ford for 30 years and saw a LOT of stupid things, this takes the cake. Worse yet, Bill Ford is proclaiming this partnership as the ultimate solution to Ford's woes since (he thinks) it will cause the yoof to flock to Ford in droves by being so kewl.

Barf!

Bill


Spam scammers appear to have resolved to send less email this year:

I think I know why the drop occured; it was all of the thirty-something geeks who went to their parents house for Xmas and were asked after the nosh "Could you take a look at the PC, it's been a bit slow..."

I know, because that's what I spent the better part of Xmas evening doing. I don't know why Dad needed a 'Day Of The Week Calculator' (Dad, you can do that in Excel, and you're good at Excel, remember?) nor do I know where he downloaded it from. I don't want to know. It's install folder had over 4Gb of what appeared to be temp files, and Proccess Explorer (thanks heavens for my keyring USB repair kit!) found this 'calculator' was causing a whole heap of email network traffic, as well as a pretty near constant 90% of CPU time. Small memory footprint though, but lots of disk activity.

My Dad got broadband around the time the spam storm started last year - and the spam storm stopped within days of me clearing out this nasty beastie. hmmmm.... think I just found a chunk of spam botnet...

The really sad thing about it all was that his PC was 'protected' by a store-bought, up-to-date AV and Internet protection suite that comes in a yellow box and has a name that sounds like a kind of famous motorcycle. It was installed by me on a fresh install of XP SP2 with full auto-updates at the beginning of '06 - a perfect clean system.

When will AV vendors take responsibility for not protecting 'ordinary users' - the ones who don't realise a sudden slow-down in startup or download times is very suspicious? Until they do, we will always drown in spam!

Adrian


MI5 tells the US about anyone interested in threat levels, in a round about kind of way:

Sort of reminds me of something that happened in Russia just after the Revolution. The Cheka (forerunner of the KGB) set up an anti-government group known as The Trust. Once they had sufficient membership, they arrested 'em all! Not exactly the same, true, but the uses of government security are sure manifold!

C. Alex


"Astonishingly, MI5, the Security Service, part of whose remit is supposed to be giving protection advice against electronic attacks over the internet, is sending all our personal details (forename, surname and email address) unencrypted to commercial third party e-mail marketing and tracking companies which physically and legally in the jurisdiction of the United States of America, and is even not bothering to make use of the SSL / TLS encrypted web forms and processing scripts which are already available to them," Spyblog rants."

WTF!!!WTF!!!WTF!!!

Um, surely the real story here is that MI5 is assembling a list matching email addresses against people's real-world name details? They don't need anything but the email to run a mass mailing list like they're proposing and have no need for personal data whatsoever.

I don't suppose they're proposing to mailmerge the whole run so that everyone gets a nice personalised letter "Dear N. Obody, just writing to let you know the terror alert level has been raised to OMFGSHITWEREALLGOINGTODIE. Hope the wife and kids are doing well. Thanks for your time, and have a lovely day".

Heh, well, with my AFDB off, I'd assume that was just an accident, that that's the standard way the mailing list hosting firm they've outsourced the work to sets their lists up. But MI5 (rumour has it) aren't completely stupid; I don't suppose they *set out* to get a list of matched names and emails, but I'm fairly sure they'll realise that that's what they have ended up getting, and I bet they'll think "Well, let's just make a spare copy of that, save it for later... just in case.... you never know".

Dave


The US Navy wants help blocking mobile phone signals Presumably it has already been contacted by Clarins:

If I were a terrorist, I'd be building radio detonators which rely on the presence of a signal now until detonation, where the loss of the signal initiates the charge. That way, if they jam my signal, the bomb goes off anyway. Obviously, you wouldn't arm it before it was in position, because then the military could conceivably blow you up by nuking the signal.

Karl


Regarding the article "US Navy seeks help in developing e-warfare systems":

So, now Bush thinks that he owns international waters, too? Add to that, what the US is asking for is blocking all mobile-phone bands! So, in their attempt to block "the enemy's" communication, they'll blocking everyone else's in the range!

Someone has to put a stop to this nonsense that the US is doing; It is as if Bush is the king of the world and that no laws or nations shall ever object to whatever orders he issues... All I can say is: "Meh"

Majed


And on that note, we'll bid you farewell, and good journey into the weekend. ®

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