Comments It's been a fairly average week, with the normal crop of lasers, abnormal cranial conditions and massively overpriced drinks. We'll start with an iPhone article. Don't worry, it's the only one. A vulnerability has been discovered in the iPhone, and an exploit devised. There's been less of a row than usual, but it's still there:

And where have all of these exploits come from? All the attention that Apple has been hyping for it's new phone. Can you hear all the security pros and novices out there, Steve Jobs? The reason Windows gets so much flak is because of the so many people trying to break it. And the reason so many people are trying to break it is because it's the most widely used operating system. Since the iPhone is so pushed and hyped, everyone's (term used figuratively) going to have one. And that's going to mean a lot of targets, especially if it can be used in a manner to record things!

David Eddleman

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Apple are probably happy as pigs in muck to have any kind of article written about the iPodophone. Choosing the web browser as the software platform for the device was a bad decision both from performance and securtiy perspectives. If apps all run at a privileged level then that is plain stupid.

They have the mach kernel, an extremely good API with Openstep and with Objective C a highy productive language for developers so they could make the thing secure, fast and open for developers, although they might have as much fun integrating a real time signalling environment with the toys as everyone else has had. But I suspect they just want to shift as many of the things as possible and they're probably enough fanatical customers out there who will just upgrade to the next one which will be "even cooler".

Charlie Clark

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What the article doesnt tell you is just some of the security measures introduced by jobs and co. Theres no 3G on the iPhone. The GPRS is so slow and the wifi so buggy that hackers are bound to just get bored and go play with something else. I mean if they want your bank details it's gonna take them about half an hour to get the phone to dial up!

Nice move Mr Jobs, now I see your thinking in releasing a phone with last generation networking.

Chris Morrison

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We're getting all hot and bothered over this??

Christ.....how many security flaws do they find in Windows each month, and we're getting our knickers in a twist over a single one in the iPhone. Has our sense of perspective gone on holiday? It's a computer. It's gonna have security flaws.

Electro Boy

A French civil servant was discovered to have only a thin sheet of brain tissue lining his skull - the rest of the space occupied by cerebrospinal fluid. Jokes about the intelligence of Frenchmen and bureaucrats aside, several of you wrote of prior examples of this sort of thing:

A woman in the UK was reported years ago as The woman with no brain. Years later when MRI resolution improved they discovered she too had a thin layer of brain on the inside of her scull. Like the guy in this report she had had a shunt installed when she was young.

She too was married with children and ran the household accounts as her husband wasn't too good with computers.

John Warlow

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Once upon a time, some french chap went to the Gendarmerie, since he needed to change his start train station, to go to military conscription (was mandatory at that time). The train ticket being paid by the public authority, it was based on home location, and the chap wanted to departure from his studying location. And the only military authority was Gendarmerie.

After explaining the problem, the gendarme went on to type on a very old Tryumph typing machine, the new departure place of the said chap, onto the train ticket. That was some 25 letters + signature.

No kidding, it took him 4 attempts to slide the sheet of paper in the typing machine, before having it correct:

- 1st attempt: typed in the name of the chap. Was baffled the machine typed on the verso of the inserted sheet

- 2nd attempt: same thing (yeah, it got inserted the same way ;-)

- 3rd attempt: the guy got creative, here, reversed the sheet sense, but same side, not good either

- 4th attempt: after what all witnesses thought would blow his brain up, he managed (took 30 s. of INTENSE thoughts) to insert the sheet the right way, and had the enthusiast look of someone that just discovered the secret of turning lead into gold, on his face.

The chap went outside, happy he finally did it.

regadpellagru

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Surely the first recorded example of Homer Simpson Syndrome?

Robert Grant

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Oh great, now the PC brigade will be telling us we can't say "no brainer" anymore, in case we hurt the guy's feelings...

Colin Sharples

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There was a bloke in New York who died at 35, worked for the local council and in the autopsy found the skull cavity completely full of spinal fluid, he also had a thin membrain of brain tissue on the top of the the base bone where the head joins to the neck.

He also had an IQ of 75 and was described as slightly slow but easy to get along with.

John Kirkham

Boeing is going to develop giant laser cannons for the US army, and mount them on similarly giant trucks. The idea is to shoot down incoming munitions before they can go bang. You debated the merits of shiny things (always a fun diversion) and how well the lasers might perform:

Are the Taliban going to be spending more of their free time polishing their ordnance with Brasso?

Dave

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First fire something at the laser to make a nice big bang with some smoke then fire some disco balls at them.

Everyone is looking up at the first shell bursts basking in the glory of their laser defence and suddenly they are looking at a little more reflected glory than they real wanted, ouch.

Robin

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If they can't develop spray reducing mudflaps and those barriers that stop card going under trucks, what chance do they stand of putting a frikin' lay-zer on the truck?

(I have driven in America on the motorway in the sh*tting down rain, I thought I was going to die every time I had to deal with a truck.)

Fraser

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An artillary defense laser has to put enough energy onto a metal round to heat it to destruction in a fraction of a second. Compared to that, your retina is less than nothing. Still the cool thing about a laser is that it delivers practically all its energy to a spot at the end of the beam. Scattered light probably won't be a worse problem than other things that go flash-boom on the battlefield (some of which are pretty severe problems).

On the other hand, a good solid reflection would put almost as much energy onto a secondary target as is on the mirror. Your defense here would be a numbers game. It's a big battlefield with only a few little eyeballs scattered about in it, so most of the time you won't be looking right at the thing.

I would kinda like to know if a shiny round would be immune. Imagine what a photogenic, futuristic battlefield it would be with chrome plated shells, colorful laser beams, and tough soldierly men (not women!) obsessively polishing their ammo. It'll be hard for Hollywood to top the special effects of the real thing. I predict a resurgence of kinghts-in-armor (in the UK) and cowboys-and-indians (in the USA) movies, with more manageable special effects.

Kurt Guntheroth

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A high-powered laser hitting an object does not cause it to burn or melt. (At least not with these kinds). The destruction of the object is caused by it absorbing far too much energy for it to dissipate. This is why it is possible to say, pop balloons or even light cigarettes with highend laser pointers. Polishing the thing won't help, because there's still too much energy being pumped into it.

Sean Nevin

Columnist Guy Kewney had a rant about Gmail, an annoying missing feature and his treatment at the hands of a lady at their press office. Most of you didn't receive it very well:

I raised this issue recently with a Google engineer. How long before someone takes issue with the "beta" label of one of the Google services in the courts? It's currently a get out of jail free card for anything on offer but at some point some numpty is going to rely on one of these services on something for their business: you shouldn't be doing anything related to your business on anything without a service level. You know this and yet you still do it.

Charlie Clark

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As anyone else reading your article will no doubt be thinking - why not just log into Gmail once and again to check your space, clear out junk mail, etc - and find something a little more worthwhile to lose your sleep over?

Anon

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So, you were recommending that people switch to a beta product, and are surprised that said beta product has minor issues that wouldn't be tolerated in a production release.

How, precisely, is this Google's fault?

Then, rather than follow Google's standard method of reporting a feature request online, you chose to phone Google and are surprised that they don't take feature requests over the phone. Hrm.

Ezekiel Hendrickson

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Be happy, Mr. Kewney, that your story isn't about Apple. As then there would be about 80 comments here by now and you would be accused of bad journalism, being a sleazeball, don't getting "it", etc.

However, Google and its followers are getting there.

Marco

And there they got. Head on over to the comments page to witness a rather impressive flood of vitriol.

Some rich twit blew £105k on booze in a London club on Saturday, presumably making the owner and suppliers very happy. This record-breaking splurge drew your derision and disbelief:

That amount of champagne couldn't possibly have been drunk by 18 people so I suspect a lot of it was sprayed... that painfully wallet-hurting extravagant sport usually reserved for Formula 1 drivers and very happy successful people with more money than sense.

Ian Ferguson

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Of course the club in question can prove that it was expensive champagne served to the customer and not some Asti Spewmanteeeeee rubbish costing them a fiver a crate.

Pete James

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This could only ever have happened in London. In the Real World outside the M25, you can buy your own pub for less than that!

A J Stiles

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A lot of these clubs often charge a larger sum of money due to the champagne spraying. These people with more money than sense like a good time, so there is also a hefty cleanup bill at the end of the evening too. Some clubs include the fee in the bottle price, some charge a specific figure before you start and others bill you seperately after the event depending on how much needs cleaning up.

Remember:- these clubs very often have to be ready for another rich mug to come strolling through the door the very next day, so cleanup has to be high quality, quick and most likely an overnight job, so it's damn expensive.

Rob

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Well, El Reg's hacks must have been there, sounds like their kind of thing (maybe a bit on the cheep side, but got to slum it sometimes), so there's the IT covered.

Only one question, where was my invite?

Anon

I'm afraid we gave all our spare invites to stunning totty. Wouldn't you have done the same? In any case, we're off to attempt to recreate this high-flyer's feat. We probably won't manage, being stingy bastards, but we'll have fun trying. ®