Posts by John G Imrie

WikiLeaks drama alert: CIA forged digital certs imitating Kaspersky Lab

FTFY

Independent experts reckon the CIA used Kaspersky because it's a widely known vendor.

Independent experts reckon the CIA used Kaspersky because it's a Russian vendor.

BOFH: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

Oh dear

The BOFH, the PFY and the Boss working together. This can only end in tragedy. I wonder who for?

Openreach boss says he'd take a burning effigy on the chin

. . . Did you have the joyful experiance of dealing with the GPO/BT pre-privatisation?

No. I lived in Hull.

Astronomers find bizarre 'zombie supernova' that just won't die

Song?

So it's a Zombie Supernova in the sky.

with apologies to Oasis.

US domestic, er, foreign spying bill progresses through Congress

Re: "it does the complete opposite of what it claims to"

You always dispose of the difficult bit in the title. It does less harm there than on the statute books. :- Sir Humphrey Appleby.

UK Land Registry opens books on corporate owners

Private Eye

I wonder how closely this matches Private Eye's map of land ownership?

Official Secrets Act alert went off after embassy hired local tech support

They weren't relatives of the Foreign Secretary were they ?

Which one?

TalkTalk glitch causing mobiles and landlines to go off at the same time

The Register has asked TalkTalk for a comment.

But every time TalkTalk pick up the phone their mobiles go off.

SCO vs. IBM case over who owns Linux comes back to life. Again

vexatious litigan

If they where firing off sue balls indiscriminately then you'd have a point, but the multiple cases that SCO started have now boiled down to, basically, SCO v's IBM

Re: I thaught Novell owned the property

So it's not that SCO can win, it's just that they can't lose in the current way proposed by the court.

It's about the lawyers making money.

Surprisingly it's not.

IBM are either using their in house lawyers aka The Nazgul , who'd be getting paid any way or a law firm on a retainer and SCO's law firm agreed to do the job, for a percentage of the payout, until, as far as I can tell, the heat death of the next Universe.

I thaught Novell owned the property

at least any of it that can be said to be owned now, and had told SCO to stop.

My #95Theses of #Digital

#1 The only password you can remenber ...

is either too short or too lon

French senator demands public inquiry into Microsoft military deal

Apparently

Toutes vos bases appartiennent à Microsoft

(All your bases are belong to Microsoft)

Boss put chocolate cake on aircon controller, to stop people using it

Re: Heating / Aircon

No! Set it to warm. If people are hot, they can undress.

That sounded fine, until I looked at my co-workers. ARGH!!!!!!

UK.gov: Use police body cams to grill suspects at scene of crime

Re: Should we call them...

I am the Law

Lets do the interviews on the streets

Then we don't have to worry about all those pesky lawyers.

The UK's super duper 1,000mph car is being tested in Cornwall

Re: Saw this on the news this morning

What, fake news?

I think the first person to come up with a way of doing that could make a fortune

Not sure about that, sounds complicated, I think it will take four or five attempts before it works properly.

Re: Just don't let Richard Hammond drive...

I'll give Hammond some kudos in that getting fans to donate to the Yorkshire Air Ambulance after his rocket propelled crash significantly reduced the time needed to buy their second helicopter.

Saw this on the news this morning

They are having to plan their runs to dodge the incoming and outgoing planes using the same runway.

EU law bods closer to baking new 'cookie law' after battle

The EU cookie law also called the "this is what happens when you have an elected parliament scrutinising the executive" law

HMRC boss defends shift to AWS, says they got 50% knocked off

Re: A darker shade of dark

Always two there are, a master and an apprentice

Watership downtime: BadRabbit encrypts Russian media, Ukraine transport hub PCs

I also bet that the entryway onto the corporate network was via some CxO who was to important for security.

HMRC's switch to AWS killed a small UK cloud business

Re: HMRC referring to taxpayers as 'Customers'

I thought that customers meant the other Government Departments.

Sex harassment scandal scoops up Silicon Valley's Slimy Scoble

Re: "no means no" - or DOES it?

For once I'm having to defend Bombastic Bob, go and read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rules The Rules

'We've nothing to hide': Kaspersky Lab offers to open up source code

can we assume the US based AV options are all compromised by the US intelligence agencies

You might think that, I couldn't possibly comment.

Jeff Bezos fires off a blue dart, singes Elon Musk and SpaceX

Re: The Test was Wednesday

So what happened to Thursday, can't they get the hang of Thursdays?

National Audit Office: We'll be in a world of pain with '90s border tech post-Brexit

Sure you have to do it faster but what's the problem with that?

I refer you to The Mythical Man Month.

Re: Brexit?

The problem is that because of Brexit we have to

a) Get this done now

b) Don't know what the rules are

Without Brexit we would have known what rules we should be working to and could take as long as necessary.

Brexit has had one positive outcome, because of the hard deadline we will know quite soon just how big a fuck up the new system is.

You can't find tech staff – wah, wah, wah. Start with your ridiculous job spec

Re: Not knowing how to look can make it hard to find

I once got a job, instead of the other candidate I was up against, because when asked a very technical question, my response was 'not a clue, I'd have to go and look that up', rather than waffling, which is apparently what the other candidate did.

No, the FCC can't shut down TV stations just because Donald Trump is mad at the news

Re: Whereas in the UK

Dear Laura,

I think you are the first person in the entire 50 years of my life to tell me I can spell and punctuate.

Oh, and thanks for the rewrite

John

Does that ...

make Anjit Pai the longest serving Trump appointee?

Re: Whereas in the UK

Of cause they where faked, its WELL KNOWN that Crimewatch gets over ten BILLION viewers daily that being half of the UK population. WAKE UP SHEEPLE your country is being overrun and the population figures are SYSTEMATICALLY under reported in order to feed the CORBIN LOVING BBC.

humm, I'm not sure about this, did I get the right amount of bile and vitriol.

Brit spooks 'kept oversight bodies in the dark' over data sharing

Re: What?

We don't parse the data into separate fields in the database called 'medical data', 'legally privileged', etc. We keep it in a big blob of text that we call 'data' so we can wheedle around the law.

Ex-TalkTalk chief grilled by MPs on suitability to chair NHS Improvement

Re: How

what pre requisites does she meet for the shortlisting process for a role overseeing the NHS?

Being married to a Tory MP probably helps. Allegedly.

Now German companies are beating the drum over poor patent quality

Congratualtions Battistelli

I would like to thank Battistelli for proving to me just how wrong my view of the world is. Thanks to him I now have a grudging respect for IP lawyers.

Dumb bug of the week: Outlook staples your encrypted emails to, er, plaintext copies when sending messages

ROT26.

Those are both outdated technologies, what with Unicode and all that,. These days you nee to use ROT-1114112

I love disruptive computer jargon. It's so very William Burroughs

Re: Real High Virtual Roller Stakes Poker Play ....... for Phantom Ghost Hosters.

I don't think aManFromMars' programmer will let you have the code. He has gone from total gibberish through marketing then management bollocks to almost coherent in a matter of a few years

MYaaRS

Doesn't Ricky Tomlinson have copyright on that.

Beware the GDPR 'no win, no fee ambulance chasers' – experts

Re: A good thing too

They want to leave because they don't want the hordes of Turkish immigrants entering the country just as soon as Turkey enters the EU. At least that was one of the reasons a friend gave me for voting leave.

Oh what's that. Turkey is unlikely to enter the EU any time soon, and because we are leaving we want to do trade deals with any one including Turkey which will likely involve letting hordes of Turkish immigrants enter the country.

UK Treasury Committee chairman calls on Equifax to answer for breach omnishambles

Re: Pretty Please - oh please

Won't happen in the UK. There are currently only two active policies being pursued by the UK government

1) Brexit

2) The survival of the Tory Party.

'There has never been a right to absolute privacy' – US Deputy AG slams 'warrant-proof' crypto

You Bet Your Life?

yes, because the odds are such that I'm far more likely to die of old age first. In fact I'm more likely to die from cancer brought on by the fact I smoked when I was 17 than this scenario.

Three words: Synthetic gene circuit. Self-assembling bacteria build pressure sensor

Re: Perhaps...

Ah, bring your daughter to work day, well we know how well that turned out don't we.

Leaky-by-design location services show outsourced security won't ever work

I use my phone to take snaps

I hope you don't have auto backup images turned on then.

Leicestershire teen admits attempting to hack director of the CIA

Cases that get tried in Magistrate courts can be transferred to Crown courts for sentencing. Crown courts have more leeway on the sentence they can pass so a Crown court my give a suspended sentence where as the Magistrate court would not have that option.

Bail

The 18-year-old has been released on unconditional bail, and still has access to computers.

I bet he's glad he was tried here rather than the US.

Blade Runner 2049: Back to the Future – the movies that showed us what's to come

Re: Robocop...

Go back further to the $6M man.

Steve Austin, a man barely alive ...

We went to Nadella's launch of Hit Refresh so you didn't have to

Re: comes from a scholarly background – his dad was a Marxist economist

Watch out Bob you are getting close to

“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.” :- Sir Terry Pratchett

Musk: Come ride my Big F**king Rocket to Mars

Re: Countdown to the next failure...

Progress come from failure. That's why the greatest sound in Science is not Eureka but, 'er ... that's odd'