Oi, you don't work here, Mr Anything But incisive – get your grubby mitts off ou rreaders

CoTW This has been a glorious week in the sacred history* of this column: we caught a rival's reporter trying to use The Register's own comments sections to find a story.

Enter stage right Jack Gilbert, a reporter with a website which we're not going to tell you the name of (why? Screw giving them free advertising, that's why) – but which we will say is owned by media conglomerate Incisive Media.

On Friday morning Jack, who appeared to be struggling to find people to talk to him about Bitcoin and the channel, registered so he could post this question:

What made you think you'd get that past pre-moderation?

Just in case you're viewing this on a small screen and can't see the text of poor Jack's comment, here it is in full:

Hi Taylor

I am currently writing an article about Bitcoin within the IT channel and was wondering if you might want to tell me some more of your thoughts on it?

Jack

Your ever-vigiliant backroom gremlins here at Vulture Central spotted Gilbert's comment – as is normal with all newly-registered posters, it went straight into pre-moderation – and we noted his email address with great interest. If you're going to try trawling a rival's publication's comments section for story leads, Jack, at least try to avoid doing it under your own name where a quick Google tells us exactly who you are and who you work for. (PS. If you really wanted to write things on El Reg - and, y'know, get paid for it - you should have applied to work here while the latest job advert was open.)

Moving on to actual commentary, this week's winner of the Golden Vulture Dropping of Hilarity is Evil Graham, with this pearler on one of our stories about the nude celeb picture hack ...

It's difficult to remember all those passwords So I like to use a handy aide-memoire, such as the name of my dog. That works very well, but now I am having trouble getting &eT6x_!"%pZ#12 to come back when I call him.

We can fully appreciate why 72 of you, at the time of writing, giggled like loons at that one. Hell, we almost spilled our Friday afternoon desk beer ourselves.

Meanwhile, picking up the Wooden Twig of Fail this week is jake, who, while commenting on Microsoft's decision to tell everyone not to bother with basic password security measures, said:

So basically, MS says ... ... clueless idiots running MS products are clueless? I can live with that. I won't work on it, mind, but I can live without it.

This one made us giggle too, though it seems 39 of you don't agree with the comedy aspect of this one. Perhaps there's some truth to the nuttier commenters' view that a load of you really are M$ shills ...

A close runner-up for the Golden Vulture Dropping of Hilarity this week is Ralph B, who quite neatly filleted the stupidity of CNN declaring 4chan to be a singular person, probably a sysadmin, who likes to hack:

"We've all done these things ... in front of cameras" said the CNN "technology analyst". Have we? Really? Am I really alone in never having taken a nude selfie? I think you've all gone mad.

We assume that there's at least 70 readers (based on downvotes) who presumably do have lots of naked selfies of themselves floating around the interwebs, not counting the one who keeps trying to link to her blog full of highly explicit naked selfies and writings.

A sad contender for the Wooden Twig of Fail was the ever-eloquent Anonymous Coward, whose rather neat sarcastic post about St Julian of Assange collected 32 downvotes from the, ahem, less satirically aware:

Good article, but why cover this when my, I mean Julian Assange's story is still playing out. Sure Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, are important, but people die all the time. It's not new. The day-to-day life inside the Ecuadorian embassy is not easy and that's real news. You should be asking what it's really like for a 43 year old Australian to defend liberty and freedom for all while cooped up at Flat 3B, Hans Crescent. You remember Bradley Cooper and the way Wikileaks supported him with a collection to cover his legal fees? That money will get to him soon to aid in his trial defense. We need to hear more about that! No wait a sec. Let's more [sic] on to more interesting items. That Edward Snowden bloke is just so last year. People want to hear more in-depth reporting on the impact of Julian's releasing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables...

You can read the full thing here.

Yet another Anonymous Coward posted about the problems he has with his password:

"Just went to log in to upvote a comment"

Tried many passwords. Realised mine was indeed "password". I like to increase the complexity based on the importance of the data behind it. I guess I don't value posting comments on the register too much. Think I'll still change it.

Here's hoping he actually changed his password before posting on t'Reg, and that the g-men weren't slurping all his internet data to identify his account.

And finally, Red Bren sums up the whole shebang:

You read El Reg, you're definitely not normal!

He sure said it. ®

Tardnote

* Look, three weeks is a long time on the Internet, OK?