Posts by Adrian

Serial eBay fraudster jailed for two years

20 and Father of two?

Should these people allowed to breed? Well I guess it's too late in this case..

Banks want data pulled from US

Swift

Swift is a goldmine of information, not just for transactions carried out by individuals, but also by companies. This information could be used as part of the 'war on terror', but much more useful is for commercial advantage. Information about the financial transactions of a company might tell you a lot, and perhaps give an advantage to a competitor.

Europe's banks must inform customers of US snooping

Solution?

SWIFT handed over their encryption keys to the US, which rendered the SWIFT sytem totally insecure. SWIFT uses a certificate based PKI (with SWIFT as the trusted 3rd party) for data transfer. So did they hand over all their users private keys, or just the transaction records from their database?

Reading the SWIFT website (http://www.swift.com/index.cfm?item_id=62260) I see that they will now store European data only in Europe, making it more difficult for the US authorities to get their mitts on the data.

AT&T sued by poor man's Formula 1

NASCAR and F1

The argument about who has the most money is moot. The truth of the matter is that both formats are crap. With NASCAR we have foot down and turn left and with F1 we have circuits where you can't overtake and if the driver on pole is still on pole after the first corner that's it.

Give me MotoGP bike racing anyday, it's far more exciting.

< Dons steel helmet, runs and hides..>

Privacy chief warns EU on terror laws

Clueless

"If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear."

I have to laugh everytime I hear this old chesnut trotted out. EVERYONE has something to hide, and not because of criminal intent.

I run a business, do I want to share my business plans, client lists and client deals with everyone? Of course not.

The vast majority of the anti-terror measures that have been introduced are pointless and don't make us one bit safer. E.g. Flying into the US has since 9/11 become a major pain, with all the checks. Will this security keep the terrorists out? Not at all. The US has 12,000Km or border and 20,000Km coastline, how are you going to protect that? You can't.

Secondly, do I trust the government with all this information, No not at all. They have proved time and again to be totally incompetant with handling large database projects, not just the design and implementation, but also the security and integrity of the data. God help the USA if someone called 'John Smith' finds their way on the no fly list..

There is no 100% security and there is always a risk that you find yourself in the wrong place and the wrong time. The liklihood that this happens is very very low.

I am not afraid of terrorists, and I don't intend to change my lifestyle one bit, because of a very small number of nutjobs. The attempt of our governments to scare us into believing that we are all risk and the measures they want to introduce are necessary, is simply an excuse to become more authoritarian and less democratic. This type of FUD must be resisted; vote these governments out.

One final point; recently in the UK, the security services bugged the phone of some Pakistani guys with some dodgy contacts in Pakistan, who came up with the scheme to bring liquid explosive on to aircraft. Well the scheme was hair-brained, with zero chance of them being able to do the DIY chemistry on the aircraft. The result: now we have all the stupid restrictions on liquids and are we anyway safer because of them? No.

Incidentally, have any of these 'bombers' been charged with anything yet?

Privacy International accuses Google of smear campaign

Privacy

Well, as Google's response was an ad hominem attack on the journalists involved with the study, it makes me think that what they claim is true.

I hope that Google does something about this, but then again have a they a need to do anything?

Creationists open biblical history museum

Dinosaurs?

If they are proposing that ancient man lived at the same time as dinosaurs, don't you think that Jesus's encounter with a 30 tonne Brachiosaurus would have merited a mention in the good book?

Endemol in 'win a kidney' TV show rumpus

Sign of the times

Unfortunately this shows how low the TV station will go to get ratings. It's no wonder that I watch almost no TV anymore...

Police raid ends allofmp3.com vouchers

Double standards

It makes me laugh, when I see how much effort is put into to shutdown this site.

The worse case of double standards is that of the Credit Card companies. They stopped accepting payments from allofmp3 because it was illegal right?

Yet when you hear of a major child-porn bust, more often than not the people are caught because they used a credit card to buy a subscription to the porn website.

So if I understand this correctly:

Buying child porn with a CC = Acceptable

Buying mp3s with a CC = Not acceptable.

Someone's moral compass needs resetting here I think..

Shaken student recounts geese mugging ordeal

I never knew geese had taste..

Geese attacking a trainee lawyer. Respect to the feathered assailants, they have gone up in my estimation no end.

Now if we could just train them to attack RIAA lawyers...

Iran 'eight years' from operational nuke

8 years?

8 years if they make one from scratch, but if they can persuade a hard up russian scientist or the pakistanis to sell them some weapons grade Plutonium, then they could be tooled up far sooner..

Austrian OAPs in crazed hare terror ordeal

Cuddly Perps

Yesterday it was an Anteater and now a Hare. Where is it going to end? A very pythonesque episode indeed.

Businessman takes NatWest for £35k

Overdrafts

I'm glad he got his money back. Although I wonder why he didn't have an overdraft in for the first place?

To Stephen and Ian:

When you start your own business, it is almost impossible not to go overdrawn from time to time. Not because of poorly balanced finance or taking the piss, but rather debitors who are slow in paying. You can send out bills, but if they don't pay on time, then cash flow becomes a problem and you will go overdrawn. As I said above, I don't understand why the bank didn't give him an overdraft in the first place.

The charges themselves are also not the entire issue, rather that they charge too much for a bounced cheque. In fact it is illegal for the banks to charge more for the bounced cheque, than it cost them to process it. So the reason they settle out of court is that if they were forced into court and had to reveal the administrative costs, they would be liable big time. The banks have been asked by a parliamentary select committee about the charges, and have so far refused to give details.

Maybe they have something to hide....?

'Cops help kill 32 Students', claims furious blogger

Who's to Blame

After reading the WTF blog it saddened me to see the police being entirely blamed for this awful tragedy. Hindsight is always 20-20 vision and when you read the timeline of the events on virginia tech's website, I'm not sure what more the police could have done.

The campus is 2600 acres in size, has over 100 buildings and 25000 students. You'd need an army to quickly lock an area of this size down.

The killer was not identified after the first killing, and if he was carrying a concealed weapon how do you identify him from the other thousands of students going to classes in the morning?

It's terrible to see what one nutter with a gun can do, but I don't see a practical way to stop someone who is hell bent on doing this.

UK patent rules to be overhauled

Welsh language Scheme?

Are there so many welsh people filing patents in welsh rather than english, or is this a insidious way to patent the Welsh language?

EU consumer chief roasts Apple

Re: Who needs iTumes anyway?

"Winamp and www.allofmp3.com are your friends..."

Agreed.

<rant>

Except that VISA and Mastercard have withdrawn support for allofmp3.com so you cannot replenish your balance using credit card any more. But as you know, buying kiddie porn using a credit card is ok, mp3s are, however, a greater evil...

</rant>