Posts by Ian McNee 436 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Mar 2007
Two NHS trusts collaborate to produce an open source solution in-house rather than spending millions on a system badly specified by pen-pushers and bureaucrats and badly implemented by money-grabbing private contractors.
I think that's a pretty fucking big story that large sections of the cash-strapped public sector could learn from: valuing skilled staff, delivering a good service and saving money not only for the institutions that developed the system but potentially for the sector as a whole.
Possibly a silly condition placed on them by GCHQ securocrats to enhance the mystique of these papers.
The nameless (again pointless security theatre) from GCHQ interviewed on Radio 4 about this was keen to stress the claim that Turing's papers could not possibly have been released any earlier because of their sensitive nature. We are supposed to read into this that GCHQ are: (a) diligently doing their bit to protect Blighty from code-breaking jihadis, Ruskies and Sino-hackers, and (b) emphasising Turing's total genius (while still brushing under the carpet the injustice of the British state hounding him for his homosexuality).
I don't doubt the importance of this work done by Turing and others at the time but it is farcical for GCHQ to engage in a PR exercise claiming they could not have been released decades ago.
@Andrew Orlowski: again with the tabloid journalist techniques - you conflate coding and computer science. When I did my computer science degree there was a lot more to it than just coding and though that was way back the 80s it is no different now.
Quite right. Mr Orlowski seems to be dipping into his pal Toby Young's tabloid journalistic toolbox, in this case making use of the false dichotomy. What most people are arguing for is ICT in schools to be more like computer science and less like ECDL.
Neither Rory Cellan-Jones nor Michael Gove have raised the paper tiger of compulsory coding lessons in schools but this article has certainly has its intended effect of drawing the fire of the Daily Wail commentards below lining up to shoot down not only compulsory coding but also any whiff of equality in education and possibly the return of free school milk too.
For the record: I have no remit for Michael Gove or his party - on the scale of over-educated chinless wankers he is right up there with Toby Young.
How else is some marketing wanker going to justify his/her existence if they cannot flog pointless expensive tat to the credulous middle classes?
Just be thankful that one of this ilk has not yet tried to "re-brand" (i.e. new name, couple of paragraphs of snake oil pseudo-science and triple the price) the "gadgets" that make sleep restful and pleasurable: quality pillow, mattress, duvet and sheets.
Alistair: just in case it wasn't obvious my futile rant was not directed at you :-)
And Aaron, did I mention spill-proof? Assuming you've not also flooded your USB ports I recommend a Cherry keyboard - made by serious Germans with plenty of that vorsprung durch technik thingamabob that they have.
Yeah mildly entertaining article that is occasionally original. But...
"My laptop is so fab it's better than your telly and has a hard drive so big that I backup the internet...yadda yadda yadda... *snore* ...and it's even colour-cordinated with my iPhad and has a dock for my iDrone and a slot for my coke spoon and..." Oh fuck off and die already.
My laptop comes in a large metal box with screen attached by a flexible cable rather than outdated fragile hinges, contains standard components that are fast, quiet, reliable, cheap to replace if they go wrong using a single standard screwdriver, it connects to a multiplicity of peripherals (full-size spill-proof keyboard, mouse, etc.) connected via standard interfaces without need of hubs or expansion cards. Oh and it has the unique property that I cannot take it to the sofa/pub/party/anywhere else and thus fails to annoy my friends/family by intruding on the time I spend with them.
I should add the my use-case is defined by the fact that I am not so important that the entire population of the internet has to be able to contact me 24/7/365 via Twatter, Farcebook et al so clearly my laptop would be no good for individuals less insignificant than me.
@diodesign: (is that you John??) Yes, from your article it does become clear to anyone vaguely familiar with Linux security and bug tracking that the problem was (it's been patched already M$ trolls!) with wicd rather than BackTrack. That was my immediate thought (having recently played with wicd after failing to get f***ing Network Manager to play nicely on a Fedora laptop recently).
The problem is that your headline: Student stiffs penetration tool BackTrack Linux with 0-day screams "Ooh! Clever InfoSec Linux White Hats Caught With Pants Down!" - and with your pedigree in reporting security stories recently we know you can do much better. We all drop the ball now and again :-)
@kirovs: read the article...
"...the group’s messages on Pastebin and posted on the defaced sites will largely have failed to reach their audience given that they were written in English.
Anonymous seems to be working on the latter issue, however, having sent a tweet out calling for help from would-be translators."
Chinese hackers? Perhaps not after all.
Both the anons and some of the commentards here seem to have a very naive view of Chinese society based on the one dimensional picture painted by western governments and media.
Whilst there is exploitation, repression and social unrest in China (ummm..and that's so different from the USA et al how??) there is also a lot of popular patriotic support for the country and the national government as well - largely based on the huge economic advances China has made over the past three decades.
That popular support is unsurprisingly reflected in the hacker culture within China e.g. the Honker Union. If I were one of the anons that participated in this rather futile defacement spree I'd be more worried about having my life pWn3d by patriotic Chinese hacktivists than some kind of reprisal from the Chinese authorities.
Rufus: you are clearly very confused - I don't think anyone is arguing that things taking on human form (anthropomorphic) causes climate change. Rather the argument is about human beings causing (anthropogenic) climate change.
On this point this review of the predictive value earlier models based on the premise that CO2 is a climate change driver is yet another convincing straw breaking the pseudo-scientific back of the deniers.
Yes, yes, yes JDX - we all know that, but it's not quite that simple is it?
The key information here is that exploits have been found in the wild so there has been a period of time when machines may already have been compromised and this compromise will likely not have been detected - certainly not by lay users who are the main target of this advice. In that situation using your banking website (or any other that uses sensitive credentials) at all is utterly foolish.
Even if the machine is currently clean it's a stretch to imagine most lay users will take this advice as meaning closing all other browser tabs and web-enabled applications that are potentially vulnerable. Any advice other than not using this software until it is patched is irresponsible.
"Some banking websites mandate the use of Java, in which case security-conscious Mac fanbois can re-enable Java for the duration of their session before turning it off again, the Finnish security firm suggests."
Really? Re-enable a critically vulnerable piece of software for which there are exploits in the wild to allow internet banking transactions?? I *HOPE* F-Secure are yanking your chain on this, that's the daftest bit of security advice I've heard in ages!
I'd be far more worried about some numpty getting frustrated stuck in traffic on his way home on a Friday afternoon and trying a take-off from the hard shoulder of the motorway - a much more likely scenario and just as likely to cause multiple fatalities/injuries and widespread disruption.
Andrew: surely the problem with the BBC (or parts of the BBC) moving towards one of the more commercial models is that the institution is them on the slippery slope to becoming A. N. Other content/service provider. In the current political climate that route may ultimately lead to wholesale privatisation of the BBC.
Instead the BBC needs to grow a pair and push itself as the excellent public service that it is. We can all find things that we detest about the BBC, whether it is crap shows on BBC 3, Jonathan Ross's (ex-)salary or the occasional office full of Nathan Barleys, but when you look at what the BBC provides in total and how much these services are used by people in Britain and beyond it is not only astonishingly good value it is also widely accessible. Even on a crude TV comparison with the likes of Sky and Virgin Media the BBC wins hands-down on the content it provides at the license fee price point.
However Ian Bonham's suggestion is interesting - though not going to happen with the current generation of free market politicians squatting on both sides of parliament. Hey-ho!
...in 2014 and beyond there will continue to be large numbers of people who are not "tech-savvy punters" who do not define their existence by "operating online through social network tech" and remian militantly indifferent to the possibility of tweeting the colour of their new shirt/latest turd/*insert pointless bollocks here* 24/7 from every location on the planet.
And I will be happy to count myself one of them. And my PC will continue to be a physical box of standard components.
</rant>
And so do other large corporations who are the main contributors to significant open source projects: IBM, Intel, Red Hat, Amazon, Oracle (grudgingly perhaps!), etc. - as Tinker alludes to, it is mainly vendors from other sectors, like the mobile manufacturers, who insist on bolting proprietary binary blobs onto things like Android to make it work with their hardware.
That's what I got the original Defy for and I'm still very happy with it: it does all the useful stuff with a handful of apps, has a good battery life and is not totalled by pocket fluff, being used in the rain or the occasional knock. And as it's not trying to be a games console or wide-screen telly or fashion-victim tablet it's quite compact.
One thing that does gall me is seeing Motorola subsequently bring out the Defy+ and now this Defy Mini both with Gingerbread while the Defy is stuck with Eclair (2.1) - yes I know there is CyanogenMod for the Defy but we ought not to have to resort to that. There are good enough reasons (such as the security enhancements in Gingerbread over predecessors) to expect that Motorola should pull their finger out and provide this kind of support in the form of official updates.
I think you'll find that "interopliation" is considered a clear sign of a debauched soul in many parts of the world and is even a crime between consenting adults in several less open-minded societies.
Interpolation however is usually just a marketing gimmick and therefore simply a crime against the Nathan Barleys of this world, i.e. barely a misdemeanour. Caveat emptor.
@Chet Mannly:
Like most FUD-merchants you repeatedly pedantically pick over the words of some one commenting on an issue rather than addressing the actual issue itself - because you have no *evidence of merit* to challenge the actual issue.
Picking apart the words of Prof. Phil Jones from a BBC interview or Audrey S. Thackeray here does not alter the fact that the BEST study (the most comprehensive and rigorous review of recent temperature data) showed that the planet continues to warm.
Add to this the recent NASA studies that demonstrate that it is non-condensing greenhouse gasses (CO2, methane, etc.) that are the major root cause of warming, in contrast to the amplifying effect of water vapour, and your alleged "open mind" is exposed for what it really is: denial by FUD.
The situation is worse than CAs with conflicts of interest and hacked CAs: if a CA sets out to do bad stuff it can pretty much go ahead and do it. By the time the act is discovered and certificates revoked millions or billions may have been stolen or people locked up, tortured or dead (think bad govt. controlled CA).
Trustwave has just been caught with its pants down on this (http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Trustwave-issued-a-man-in-the-middle-certificate-1429982.html) but naturally they are claiming that they only did it with good in mind and nothing could possibly have gone wrong, but they say(!) they won't do it again anyway.
Yup, I'm reassured too!
Quite right - and going on from that the most secure protocols are those that are open and used billions of times every day as then the inevitable flaws will be found and fixed.
The alternative is a bit of closed source code knocked-up by your bank who have a vested interest in claiming that it is secure and will use expensive lawyers against anyone who claims (or even demonstrates) otherwise. See Bagged and tagged's post above and the link to the truly excellent Light Blue Touchpaper security blog.
Give me a secure open source OS and a secure open source browser every time.
"Of course, it's a move that also means Google can finally start to plump up those user metric figures over at Google+" - the cynic in me interprets that as: "fluff the stats to pump our share price" al la Farcebollocks > $50bn nonsense.
Still Gmail, Docs, Android integration, Maps/Street View, etc. remain handy enough to sacrifice a chunk of one's privacy for. However I won't be sentimental if & when alternatives like YaCy mature and we can leave the Chocolate Factory behind. Glyn Moody had some excellent thoughts on this recently: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/What-should-free-software-do-in-2012-1401813.html
Surely one of the advantages of download music sales for content providers & copyright holders is that the distribution costs are substantially lower than for CDs.
And of course when it's revealed that net revenues for music sales rose as a result of lower costs the Recording Industry Ass. of America and the like will stop bitching about file sharing killing the music industry.
And then I woke up...
Try to engage your brain before you call someone else stupid. Yes we *ALL* know that mounting disk partitions in a filesystem is not aggregated storage.
Look up LVM - Logical Volume Manager. If you don't know how to use Google here's a link: http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Cluster_Logical_Volume_Manager/
LVM *IS* aggregated storage, it *IS* used in enterprise storage solutions, it has been around in Linux since the late nineties and has been a mature product for 5+ years.
The kind of features they are including with their "new" file systems put Windoze on a par with Linux in the mid-noughties as opposed to NTFS's equivalence to the mid-nineties.
Aggregated storage? Jeez! Amazing! I forget how long ago I first toyed with LVM on Linux!
So we may have to use our Windoze VM for a while to retrieve data from borked ReFS storage while waiting for stable kernel drivers. No biggie.
...but my impression (admittedly from a rather old TV programme about Soviet phage research and use - Horizon from the late 90s?) was that the major advantage of phage therapy with reference to bacteriological resistance was that the phages, being DNA-based organisms themselves, were also capable of adapting by random genetic mutation to changes in their potential host bacteria.
It would seem to me that the approach of the Israeli lab would be one that the drug corporations would be happy with ("Don't worry, we can genetically modify a new phage for that and charge you an arm and a leg for it!") whereas the Soviet approach was much more low-tech and capable of being reproduced in local medical facility labs: the cataloguing and storage of collections of evolving phages used to treat infections prominent in that locality.
However good this "endless supply of ammunition" is, it is the way in which it is used that will determine if it benefits the rich few who are already over-treated or the large majority of humanity who are genuinely at risk from infections like TB or simple infected wounds.
As I said I'm not a medical professional in any way, I'd appreciate some enlightenment on this. And Wikipedia is down protesting SOPA! Panic!!!
...for a compact it's so darned big!
I've been angsting over a new compact for a while and it was between this and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5. Both are excellent performers for image quality, features/manual control and build quality. I was tempted by the optical viewfinder of the X10 (the lack of which seems to me to be the LX5's only failing) but when you pop it in a moderately robust case to take into the hills, etc. it's enormous. Also the 24mm wideangle of the LX5 is very handy.
p.s. I know you can get a hotshoe optical finder for the LX5 - but it's £170!
Have you tried to get hold of A8 APUs over the past few weeks? Rare as rocking horse poop! Having built a box to order with a Fusion APU they seem to me to offer excellent value for all-round use but if AMD can't meet demand Fusion is not going to save them against Intel in the desktop market.
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