Posts by Dimitris Andrakakis

Pastafarians: Get your noodly appendages off that Facebook suspect

Re: Religious Affairs Minister?

There are many many Greeks, myself included, who would welcome this but, as always, things are not as simple as they seem at first glance.

The main problem is, as always, money : the church has given the goverment substantial sums over the years -and this goes as far back as 1900 and has happened quite some times- in return for its tax free status and the obligation from the goverment to pay priests' salaries.

The church's main arguments are basically :

a) we gave the gov all these money and we have the contracts and

b) there's no church tax in Greece (as happens e.g. in Germany or Switzerland)

While I must, however reluctantly, agree with the first, the second is disingenious : in these countries everybody is free to declare their religious status to the tax authorities and pay or not the church tax.

Libya fighting shows just how idiotic the Defence Review was

What about the French ?

Thank you for the very informative article, even if a lot of your readers seem to disagree :-)

Meanwhile, we the readers of your column who are not English (and maybe some who are) would like to see a similar analysis on the French, if you have the time and the data.

If the media are to be believed (I know; that's a VERY big if, especially here in Greece) the Armée de l'Air has delivered some serious pounding on Gaddafi's forces.

Dutch transit card crippled by multihacks

@Aitor :

Using a standard (and proven) algorithm in closed-source and not telling anybody is NOT illegal. There is nothing that obliges you to report which algorithm you are using.

Ofcourse, if you use a certain open source IMPLEMENTATION of the algorithm, then you do have to disclose your code too --but this actually depends on the open source license used. AFAIK, the requirements of the BSD license are less than these of GPL.

That said, many people (including me) do regard open source code as more secure not just because it is open-source, but because peer review will eventually give out any insecurities, and they will be fixed.

This does not happen in closed source cathedrals, even in very security conscious companies.

Preatoni breaks silence over Telecom Italia spying probe

Does this...

...story remind you of anything ?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/06/greece_mobile_snooping_scandal

"[...] will re-examine the supposed suicide of Kostas Tsalikidis, 39, Vodafone Greece’s head of network design."

Seems like the NSA's been busy in the Med.

BT's 'illegal' 2007 Phorm trial profiled tens of thousands

@Paul

I'm not flame-baiting here, but how do you know that they won't ?

Ok, so it may not be their official policy, but they cannot assure me that one of their employees will not "backup" some data --and sell them to the credit card black market ?

Even perfectly legitimate businesses have similar problems. I would assume the worst for Phorm and the like.