Posts by Fred Flintstone 2938 posts • joined 9 Jun 2009
It has ceased to be..
Ironically that reminds me more of the fantastic rib the Not The Nine O'Clock News crew pulled on the Pythons in the days of the "Life of Brian" controversy (which was IMHO indeed as idiotic as a clearly frustrated John Cleese was considering it).
Despite the DO NOT SWITCH OFF label on the socket and DO NOT DISCONNECT on the plug
That's just about the surest method I know to achieve the opposite. This could be a worthy attempt at an Ig Noble prize: checking what would happen if you used a label "KEEP THIS OFF, absolutely DO NOT LEAVE CONNECTED". I suspect it would peel off from old age before anyone touched that.
They are the only telecoms vendor who have had their code inspected in this way.
.. as opposed to, say, 100% of US sourced gear. I find the disparity more revealing than anything else and it suggests it has really zip to do with security, more of protection of another kind.
The kind we really can do without.
That Microsoft et al have convoluted and possibly conflicting privacy statements doesn't surprise me. I would like to refer you to this rather excellent Freefall cartoon which describes the situation beautifully IMHO.
That said, when it comes to confusion I still think that Adobe remains a strong number one regarding complicating the access to legal statements. What they cooked up is award winning as requires *serious* effort to find the bit of data that applies to you - I'm assuming the idea is to make people give up halfway through their search.
If you're interested in these matters I would suggest a visit to Google's archive of previous statements, because it allows you to see which words Marketing has changed to more benign appearing texts. The words "into perpetuity", for instance, have been replaced with text that means the same, but appearing more benign.
Yes, it's the same story.
In a nutshell: Swiss company Crypto AG wasn't as clean as Swiss manufactured gear normally is, it had been backdoored by the Americans.
This is why you cannot trust gear whose manufacturer does not expose themselves to public testing and validation - which is what Huawei has done, but Cisco not. Hence the amused snorts heard from security specialists worldwide when US people declared Huawei to be unsafe and that the world should use US gear.
Caveat: those evaluations have a limited lifespan, though, you're but one unevaluated update away from a backdoor and you only have to look at the entries for the obfuscated C contest to see what evaluators are up against. It's a job for people far more persistent than I will ever be :).
The problem really lies on the US side (no surprise there, sorry): although the Privacy Shield agreement is mainly a tool to stop an all out trade war (or, to be precise, a mechanism by which US companies can continue to make vast profits off the private details of EU citizens), there is no actual legal match between the two entities.
US law has at federal level so many backdoors (they seem to love them over there) that privacy protection for even US citizens is but a vague and as yet unsubstantiated rumour, which is wholly at odds with the EU situation. As that gap is unlikely to be addressed (because, you know, profit), any attempt to pretend it's all fixed is just marketing and, to be frank, the same BS we were served even befoe Safe Harbor died.
AFAIK, 2% is on the high side - I've seen figures somewhere that were more like 0.5%. That said, there's a still a rather massive gap between 2% and 98%, also because the resulting waste has a half life measured in hundreds of years, not the galactic times of standard fissile waste.
So, simpler mechanism with far less demanding safety measures and FAR better fail safe processes, supports non-proliferation as it doesn't cook up kaboom plutonium, easy to obtain fuel (because it's a "waste" product of rare earth mineral mining) which needs very little enrichment AND it gradulaly chews away at the mountains of existing nuclear waste because it needs some to start the reaction: I honestly cannot see why someone would want to run a uranium based reactor for power anymore. Maybe a small breeding one to create elements for Xray gear and (inevitable) the plutionium stuff for bombs, but for power, this seems to be so far beyond what we do at the moment that it would be insane to continue down that road.
Oh, wait. Unless you're the one making profit off the fuel and the waste management, of course..
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