Is this related to the HP that bought Autonomy ?
If so, I'd look outside if they said it was raining ....
3225 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2010
Let them do their worst with the data. But ensure that courts only accept legally obtained and processed evidence. And if it turns out a prosecution fails because someone "forgot" the law, the so be it.
I hate to big up the US on this, but they take "the fruit of the poison tree" very seriously.
There's something fundamentally wrong in allowing courts to consider evidence gained illegally. It's the first step in "the end justifies the means".
Yes, I took part in it. And received massive downvotes when I pointed out that even if you wrote the compiler, unless you had designed the bare silicon yourself you still had no guarantee of security.
Then Meltdown and Spectre came along and I had a couple or directors call me in to ask "how did I know" so far in advance (because I'd also written it into a weekly summary I did around 2011). I didn't "know". I just pointed out that there could be all sorts of vulnerabilities in the CPU itself, so there was a limit to how "secure" you could get.
I stand by that.
one justices decision seemed to have fuck all to do with the law, and something to do with their own world view ?
"With the Lanham Act’s scandalous-marks provision, 15 U.S.C. §1052(a), struck down as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, the Government will have no statutory basis to refuse (and thus no choice but to begin) registering marks containing the most vulgar, profane, or obscene words and images imaginable."
Boo fucking hoo. Suck it up - it's what the founders intended. If they hadn't, you wouldn't have a first amendment.
Presumably if you can put enough Big Things in the right places, you can create a square orbit a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuleaux_triangle ?
In fact if we are looking for advanced, intelligent life out there, highly artificial orbits of Big Bodies might be a better thing to look for than trying to extract sense from static ?
I hope there are big bucks waiting for the fist manufacturer to twig that a lot of people are happy to buy a dumb screen and plug their smartness into it. Making the smartness independently upgradable from the display.
Funny, but "Smart monitors" never caught on.
My 5 year old LGs "smart" features are never used now. Chromecast does me fine.
Well if the answer to a cure for cancer is found in the minerals of the moon, you're going to sound pretty silly.
As Prof. Brian Cox noted, people said the exact same about researching the nuclear world. Right up until the MRI scanner was a product of that research.
Simplistic views tend to emerge from simple minds ....
I - for one - would be astounded if those packages were any more than a couple of boxes of blank A4 paper (or whatever would be needed to look juicy and interceptworthy).
Huawei knew they would be "inadvertently" rerouted - or had very good reasons for believing so.
Now the whole world can make up it's mind. I suspect FedEx will quietly be dropped by some customers as a result.
This is all based on what I would do if I thought there was some jiggery pokery going on, and by the fact we know for a fact that intelligence agencies of all countries have pulled stunts like this in the past.
For those of a certain bent, "Operation Mincemeat" relied on the Nazis intercepting a package.
With the caveat I'm not a USAian, nor a lawyer, there are circumstances where you can't plead the 5th. Certainly when the prosecution has offered you immunity from your testimony (because then you aren't being a witness against yourself, since you can't be prosecuted).
In that case, refusing to answer is actionable.
Bear in mind there are plenty of jailbirds who did plead the 5th and still got locked up.
Sorry, but my BS detector hasn't stopped jumping at the amazing coincidence that a top-level perv just happened to let to a top level security expert ...
All of which said, it's a good story to remind all folk to TAKE CARE OUT THERE.
How many people have learned to make minor tweaks to ****ing expensive equipment and reaped the benefit of years of service ?
My favourite "fix" is to immediately use a USB hub on all USB-ported equipment ... saving hundreds if not thousands of insert/eject cycles on the one soldered to the board.
This allows us to provide an online broadband health check, which gives you updates on the speed you're receiving and the devices connected to your Wi-Fi.
Why do they feel the need (or right ?) to know what devices you have on your network.
reason enough for them to fuck off to the far side of fuck and then fuck off some more.
Virgin may suck donkey balls, but even they've not (yet) gone that far. Not that it would do them much good anyway.
I bet the Five-Eyes love> Sky customers ......
Just don't use their supplied router. And if it combines router and modem functions (cf. Virgins "super" hub) then either put it into modem mode, or just bolt your own router onto it, and configure that.
For myself, I run my own SSL enabled Pihole DNS server on my network. Dont' really see why anyone needs to know my DNS history. Unless they want to pay for it.
Before fripperies like this, manufacturers really need to nail:
1) accessibility and useabilty issues, as their core demographic get older, slower, with poorer eyesight
and
2) battery life, since smartphones are so ingrained in modern life.
all else can wait.
Now, where's my consultancy for telling manufacturers the real deal, not what they want to hear.
from giving your email address to a 3rd party ?
(I know they do, I have done a LOT of reading on this).
So any user that happily types their password into Facebook loses all protection ? No, it may not be fair, or nice, but the bottom line is NEVER GIVE A THIRD PARTY YOUR LOGIN CREDENTIALS.
(Incidentally, for all the sniffiness about SMS 2FA, accounts so protected would have been safe from Facebooks prying eyes).
Note also this applies to companies that "require" you to give them your Facebook/Twitter/MySpace login details.
Maybe I'm an oddball here, but I don't believe a word in adverts or marketing. They can call their service Gerald for all I care.
What I do care about, is a requirement to be honest when answering a direct question upon which I will base my decision to buy (or not).
So the important question for me, is should I ask an ISP if their service is exclusively fibre from my house to the cabinet, and they reply "yes" and I then discover it isn't, that I have grounds to either sue. or leave the contract without penalty.
All else is frippery.
Wow, how gracious of them to pay out of their own pocket (we all know it's the shareholders really) to correct their fuck up.
Is this a new thing now ? Company fucks up - costs customers serious money, but gets to walk away saying "oh well, you win some, you lose some" ???????
How are the big media players not all over this like a rash ?
Ah, yes, They'll fuck up too one day.
Be curious to know what the biggest individual loss due to their fuck up ? At a guess a house sale falling through with a chain ?
Betamax lost because while Sony was beefing up the tech, the VHS consortium was busy making exclusive VHS-only deals with the big studios (probably for peanuts, as the studios couldn't see the future of home video).
If you wonder why Sony started buying record companies and studios in the 90s, it was to ensure they had the content for the Next Big Thing. Although given the NBT was DAT and Minidiscs, both of which died a death and I can't remember which one was Sony, the whole affair was a massive ->
does a central heating thermostat in my house need a round trip to anywhere outside my house to turn the ****ing heating on ?
Sorry, who thought this was ever a good idea ?
Given the decreasing quality of almost everything these days, the less I need from any third parties the better.
When Monty Python joked about "society" being a victim, they weren't.
English common law views "society" as a person - so it can be a victim.
Personally I think that's a load of cobblers as it's just a fig leaf for fascism and a gateway for arbitrary laws - which the UK has plenty of anyway.
In 1979s "The Mighty Micro" (a book I would still recommend to anyone for a single-book overview of computing and society) the much missed Dr. Christopher Evans (died far too young) not only mentions "interactive" textbooks from the 60s where you chose a page depending on your answer, but also predicts that computing developments would make future media truly interactive.
If Netflix Lawyers want to pay my mortgage, then I'm giving El Reg permission to forward my details :)
Why are there no RFCs or IETF specifications for password handling. Starting with they are never stored in plaintext because they're only ever hashed ????
Plus a defined secure recovery process.
Why does every single website feel the need to reinvent the relatively simple job of user authentication ??????