Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26106 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
>also if you're dumb enough to trust a school supplied laptop you get what you deserve.
If you are at the stage where you have to assume that something your school issues to your kid is dangerous then this is the least of your problems!
What's next ? My kid brought home a note form school but I had the bomb squad destroy it unopened - after all you can't be too careful with school stuff!
Prove your laptop is off, assuming you didn't install it and don't have admin rights.
Do you take the battery out everynight, put it in a lead-lined box?
I used to work in an environment where, for security, you were allowed nothing electronic - even car alarm fobs were suspect.
But this was for a lab where "prompt criticality" wasn't a management buzzword - I wouldn't expect the same thing to apply to my kid's bedroom.
They acted appropriately ?
They threatened to fire the minion that had been told to email the data.
Not the bosses who picked the system without thinking of the problems, or who allowed data like this to be emailed around in clear, or didn't look at backup plans like detecting outside email addresses, or having a separate secure system for this type of mail.
It was PC idiot wot did it, so fire him.
MSFT would be happy for Flash to disapear, they will just make the new codec's plugin depend on Silverlight and so tie people to Windows
Apple want flash to go away so people can't have any iApp that hasn't been iProved by the iSteve.
But what Google want is people to view their site in a browser that can't do ad-blocking. Best way to do this is to switch youtube to a format that only their browser supports.
The only reason to opensource the codecs is to avoid monopoly investigations, in which case they will opensource it in the same way that MSFT published OOXML or Autocad publishes DXF
What people don't understand is that newspapers provide a vital editorial service by deciding which news to report and which to ignore.
What is needed is a way to duplicate this process in Google/Bing /etc:
I propose a system where you select which shares you own and it doesn't show you any news which is harmful to the value of those shares. By simply selecting newscorp (MWS) you will automatically receive the same reporting as you would from reading the Times.
>Quite why this should be available free to anybody is beyond me
Because it's public data, collected by a public monopoly at public expense - that they then charge the public for?
A better reason to make it free is to encourage people to use it.
The tiny amount (a few million) that they make from selling PAF to junk mail firms is much less than the savings from sorting improperly addressed letters.
The main reason is that the RM would prefer to deliver nothing but junk mail - the last thing they want to do is to encourage the public to send letters.
But not thinking clearly agency.
Option 1:
Small scale power plant to charge batteries, to run slow electric propeller driven drones, to spy on and drop bombs on guys on donkeys.
Option 2:
Huge nuclear plant to produce synthetic Jet fuel at 0.001% efficency to power mach2 fighter jets, to spy on and drop bombs on guys on donkeys.
The 9.2M figure has been disputed aswell, it's the direct extra tax that was paid under IR35.
It doesn't take into account all the people that were running this as a scam and switched to being regular employees - paying regular tax.
Yes it unfairly hit IT, just as VAT rules unfairly hits builders not lawyers and accountants.
But there were also a lot of scams going on - worked for one place where the CEO wasn't an employee, he 'just consulted'.
I've had MS 'partners' at trade shows warn me that we could be sued because we sell a version of our app on Linux.
I don't know where they got the idea that end users of an OS could be sued if the maker violates a copyright, but if that's true then there are a lot more MS users and they have been convicted more times.
From an agency that ships people to syria to torture them I don't think age-concern is going to worry them too much.
As to the other concerns, remember the inteligence service now is really just another ad agency - the government of the day wants a campaign to persuade people it's right to invade X, it's MI5's job to produce something to convince the voters. Probably cheaper to just replace them with Satchi^2
You can do the internet exactly like cable TV, all you need to do is remove net neutrality.
Rupe owns your local cable company so he is a monopoly on you getting to the internet (with no ADSL).
So your internet package is $20/month for basic - which gets you bing and fox instead of google and the bbc - and amazon if they pay him.
Then another $10 for access to flickr,facebook and youtube
Then another $10 etc etc.....
Bletchley is crap.
There's an enigma machine ,a recreated colossus and a few bits that could and should go in the science museum alongside the recreated Babbage computer.
The rest of the site is typical British, small town, local council, amateurish crap.
A model U-boot from some film set in the carpark, a few rotting portacabins with school project level displays of carrier pigeons on the walls, an exhibition of toy cars in one of the stables.
The national computer museum, is a collection of about the same home computers I have in the loft and a couple of old mainframes - with a volunteer to tell you about when they got them.
And the money is being spent on restoring the roof of some ordinary grade II 19C country house that is now used as the tea room.
The only bit that doesn't look like it was done by the local WI is a recruiting pitch by GCHQ explaining how we are only safe from Nazis because they read our email.
Move the artifacts to the science museum where they can be properly displayed and people will see them, there is no significance to them being at the same address as the offices they were used in. It's like having the air museum at Duxford distributed around the country in sheds at the site of each of the designer's offices.
Smoking is great for the NHS.
Smokers pay Brown-loads of tax (funny the swear filter seems to have replaced the word I was thinking of ? Although the substance is brown)
They don't need expensive treatment. Standard protocol for lung cancer = chemo doesn't work, you're stuffed, goodbye.
Smokers die in the 60s before they get to collect on pensions.
Us cyclists however, cost the NHS a fortune in surgery and physio when we fall off and we all live to be 90 cos we are so healthy ;-)
So you have super secure quadruple AES 4096bit encrypted unforgeable biometric ID cards .
And the gateway into this system is the 'local' person behind the counter at the postoffice confirming my identity doing an iris scan.
So a bunch of locals going into their local sub-postoffice on say, the Falls road, and all getting ID cards in the name of J smith isn't going to be a problem?
@The digital key for this signature is controlled by the issuing government.
Good job that the issuing government has never lost anything secret then!
Leaving aside the question of whether the key has already been cracked.
How do you keep a single 1024 bit number secret when you need to use it to generate millions of passports not to mention literally dozens of id cards?
As soon as one disgruntled/bribed/blackmailed worker, keylogger, accidental laptop left in bar or copy of database lost in mail then you would have to recall all existing passports and re-sign them, then issue new public keys to every pasport desk at every airport in the world, every bank reader and every employment check.
> I still can't see why they would use the UK passports of those resident in their country.
The reason for using 'real' passports is that they have a back story.
If you suddenly have a passport for a made up person that has never had a passport before, never traveled before, has no credit history etc it raises alarm bells.
Not necessarily in real time at the airport - although you do get a lot more questions at immigration if you have a brand new passport - but in the investigation later.
If you have an newly created person showing up in the trawl of visitors that is suspicous and a good starting point for finding the others.
In the past they used 'cooperative' people to borrow the passport details from - since it would be embarrassing if an unknowing person coincidently traveled to the same country on their real passport at the same time.
For those of us of a certain age who did our exams years ago.
Could this be because a modern exam paper consists of questions like:
'Einstein's general theory of relativity describes gravity as a curvature of 4 dimensional space - underline the word gravity"
grumps off to make another cup of tea and complain that Wogan isn't on the radio anymore....
For lifeboats you already have reverse osmosis pumps. Maybe not as efficent in watts/litre but you can drive them mechanically - it's just like a big bike pump, but a lot less to go wrong.
Most microfluidics stuff has a real issue scaling upto the industrial scale. It's pretty easy to build prototypes from silicon and PMA but when you want the silicon wafers to mate up with stainless pipes and o-ring seals the engineering and tolerances get expensive.
Then you have the issue of cleaning, servicing, flushing the filters etc - all tricky on large scale reverse osmosis plants but much worse on a tiny portable device. It will probably turn out to have to have disposable cartridges where you simply throw away the microfludics part making it too expensive for anything other than western hikers or military.
No they weren't forcing the maker to support it - they just wanted to use software they had paid for without buying a new support contract.
It's more like MS revokes your licence for WindowsXP when Vista comes out forcing you to buy the new OS.
It's common on big iron where support is part of the OS licence. When HP bought DEC they upped the support price on our VMS licences to persuade us to switch to HP-UX (so we switched to Sun)
The normal wording in most development contracts is that I give you a perpetual licence to the code I write for you - but I still own it. Otherwise i have to rewrite every little utility library from scratch for each client.
If this ruling means I can decide to cut off your licence for software the moment you pay me - then you aren't going to accept this deal anymore and are going to insist on owning the software in full.
Which means I am going to have to prove that the xml config file parser I wrote for your app is different from the xml config file parser I wrote for the next client.
@Seems a bit strange to me... Paying 200k to be not actually in orbit....
Nasa probably paid more for Shepard to do the same, after Gagarin did real orbits.
As long as you could fool the people then, that in space and in orbit were the same - you can do it now.
So there will now be a huge government department to police this.
In order to fund this and make a profit there will have to be huge fines for recycling a stolen phone, so the recycling companies will reduce what they pay for phones and increase what they sell them for to cover the costs of this.
If a stolen phone does turn up they will have to dispose of it, either give it to the police who will have to store millions of phones as 'evidence' or return it to the owner - who is probably now the insurance company that paid out for the first phone.
Now how do you get rid of the phone? You can't recycle it because it's reported stolen, you can't throw it away (legally) because it's full of enough nasty stuff that it's toxic waste. So insurance companies are going to be adding a small fee (+500% markup) to the insurance to cover e-waste disposal. Everybody else will just throw them in the canal.
The trouble is the address and zip code (and possibly phone) have to match up for the test.
So if you are testing a mailing system you can't just use 1 Main st. Nosuch Town.
In the UK the PO list gives you the limit of numbers for each street and each postcode, but the postie will still just put the dummy letters through a random door, and you don't know if they will build a few more houses in the future
Yes if you are streaming GBs of data to an empty drive.
Now do a compile - where you are seeking to 1000s of possibly fragmented, small files, spread all over the disk - in your build tree, in the compiler directories and temp.
Install visual studio + your src on even the slowest of these and you see an amazing improvement.
There was a story here a few weeks ago about that.
Some local council was playing classical music in bus shelters to dissuade kids from hanging around.
The radio3 crowd were furious, basically like in Clockwork Orange, you were training a generation of kids that classical music was a punishment.
If you renew your passport abroad at a consulate they can't do all the biometric stuff - you get a chipped 'biometric' passport but the only biometric part is a digital thumbnail of your photo.
So if you live in Manchester you get a supersecure digital inside-leg measurement bio-chipped ID card, if you live in Syria/Afghanistan/etc you go to the UK consulate with a photo and get a passport anyway - and this is in order to protect you against terrorists,
Isn't their plan to 50% of people going to university by then aswell?
Simply require them to have id cards - so uni can check their attendance or for security, or so that they will be 'safe', or require it for their student loan
You could hand them out for free and make money from the change of address fine - if you move house every year there are bound to be lots of missed changes of address.
Then since the loan payments are tied to the card you have a reason to link it to the inland revenue, and their employers databases - to reduce paperwork
Because it's the same business model as anti-virus software and updates.
Create crappy insecure OS, then blame it all on hidden invisible viruses launched by invisible internet terrorists and sell anti-virus software.
If you don't pay up for the virus software, and OS security updates - it's all your fault you sinner.
"Britain has no equivalent to the Stasi. "
Special Reconnaissance Regiment - excellent shots, it's not easy to shoot somebody in the back of the head without making a hole in the balaclava they were wearing.
"We do not grab people out of their homes in the middle of the night and lock them away indefinitely. "
Internment - Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (Northern Ireland)
"No one in Britain gets locked away for thought crimes, only for things they actually do"
Like displaying the wrong kind of flag? - Flags and Emblems (Display) Act (Northern Ireland)
And of course the idea of the army patrolling the streets of a British city to keep people of one religion under control is ridiculous.
GPS receivers normally do have real time clocks, it helps the time to first fix if you know what time it is and have a valid empheris (list of where the satelites are) from the last fix.
Plus a real time clock is built into the SOC and you have a battery anyway so it's not exactly a challenge to implement - of course the maker might not bother to write software to let you set it.
Another wrinkle, GPS time doesn't include leap seconds so is currently about 15secs out. The new satelites broadcast this correction but older/cheaper receivers might not use it.
Either there has been a plague of killer devil dogs I have somehow missed.
Or, a check-box appeared on an hospital A&E admission form in 2004 for dog bite?
Personal winge - there has never been a motorbike accident due to skidding on spilled diesel, because the Police only have a box on the form for skidding on ice/snow. And since there is no evidence that a bike has ever skidded on diesel there is no need to change the form.
Phase 1: Develop system for triangulating position based on lightning strikes. So soldiers wandering around in tunnels can find bad guys.
Phase 2: Develop super-villain system to generate lightning strikes at will anywhere on Earth. Ability to do this rather negating the need to send mere mortals down into tunnels.
Alternatively you could limit your wars to places with lots of lightning strikes, like the southern US, while avoiding desert countries which are not known for their rainy weather.
The google effort doesn't work very well yet - select 'by foot' here and it won't let you use any bridges - it insists you go miles out of your way to take the foot ferry across the harbour.
www.cyclevancouver.ubc.ca uses google data but also knows about roads with cycle lanes, cycle friendly 'major road avoiding' routes and best of all - it can calculate routes based on a maximum hill gradient.
