Posts by sub1ime_uk

Assange bailed again

@IMG

I don't know if they have the same concept in the US, or Australia, but under UK Law we have the concept of a "spent conviction":

From wikipedia: "The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 of the UK Parliament enables some criminal convictions to be ignored after a rehabilitation period. Its purpose is that people do not have a lifelong blot on their records because of a relatively minor offence in their past. The rehabilitation period is automatically determined by the sentence, and starts from the date of the conviction. After this period, if there has been no further conviction the conviction is "spent" and, with certain exceptions, need not be disclosed by the ex-offender in any context such as when applying for a job, obtaining insurance, or in civil proceedings.

For adults, the rehabilitation period is 5 years for most non-custodial sentences, 7 years for prison sentences of up to 6 months, and 10 years for prison sentences of between 6 months and 2½ years. For a young offender (under 18) the rehabilitation period is generally half that for adults. Prison sentences of more than 2½ years can never be spent."

Was it 20 years ago that Assange was convicted of hacking? Non-custodial sentence was it?

My personal feeling is that you should get over it and stop hounding him.

The Boston Trio and the MBTA

So how long is reasonable?

"What the MBTA probably wanted was just more time to evaluate the vulnerability and fix it"

This story has been kicking around for a while now. does anyone have any knowledge of whether the MBTA has yet:

* acknowledged the vulnerability exists

* investigated ways of fixing it

* actually done anything about it?

I suspect they haven't done much other than talk to their lawyers. So if the students had felt a need to be responsible in their disclosure how long would the MBTA have wanted them to wait? A week? A month? A year? Longer?

Then there's the actual vulnerability. It's so trivial that nobody really thinks these three guys were the first, or the last, to find it independantly. How often have large organisations exhibited this kind of ostrich-like behaviour when it comes to security vulnerablilities? They are just doing the corporate version of sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "la la la la I can't hear you!" and hoping their lawyers will then frighten everyone away.

Finally, who pays? Does the MBTA get some sort of government subsidy for running the system? Do they make a profit? Are the customers going to have to pay increased fares to make up any shortfall? Of course increasing the fares would also make the hack more enticing for people with little or no money but some computer expertise (lots of teenagers).

Will any future losses, as with the music business, now be blamed upon hacking freetards?

Knickerless: the secure data centre connection

Re: What size knickers

Hmmm... well if that there's a 19" rack then the floor tiles are probably the 60cm square ones. The knickers look to be a 'bout a quarter or so across one of them and so are roughly 30cm in circumference which is about 12" but then you have to allow for elastic expansion so add on about the same again and you'd get a size 6 I'd say. Pretty small I think.