Posts by monty75

British intelligence recycles old argument for thwarting strong encryption: Think of the children!

They don't even have to decipher anything. Just ask for your password and when you refuse, lock you up under Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA). S.49

Re: Surveillance

And we're installing them ourselves at our own expense

Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America

Re: Yes, I am ashamed of my country

It’s not any legislature’s business what an adult does to their own body.

UK police to spend tens of millions on legacy comms network kit

They could put them in special blue boxes that also double as space and time travelling vehicles.

Apple to replace future iPhone Lightning port with USB-C next year, this guy claims

Re: Still doesn't change anything ....

Oh, look. Now you’ve made Tim Cook cry.

> Kuo's predictions should be taken with a pinch of salt

He seems to be sticking enough fingers in the air that he’ll be able to say one of them was right, thus proving he’s a trend-forecasting super seer

60 countries sign declaration to keep future internet open

Mad Nad

Mad Nad Dorries, minister for lack of culture, was also part of this shindig. You know, the same Mad Nad who wants to downstream a tennis pitch and segregate off “our” nice internet from the rest of the world’s nasty internet.

$10b National Security Agency contract re-awarded to AWS

Re: codenamed "Wild and Stormy"

It’s named after the previous President’s two favourite hookers

UK Prime Minister, Catalan groups 'targeted by NSO Pegasus spyware'

Re: Who said it was illegal?

Nobody expects the Spanish authorities!

What do you do when all your source walks out the door?

"Ever been tempted to dash out a quick FORMAT C: or a sudo shred just for giggles? "

Actually done it, no. Tempted to do it, several times a day.

Vital UK customs system outage contributes to travel chaos at its borders

Re: @Spaceman9

"This really did seem to be a thing that occupied the minds of staunch remainers. They seemed to have some obsession with WW1/2 and also kept referring to going backwards to the 1970's too. I never understood their desire over all that."

Your memory is dodgy. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2020/01/31/ww2-has-become-a-rallying-point-for-leavers-it-need-not-have-been-so/

Re: @Spaceman9

UK economy took a bigger hit and has been slower to recover than any other comparable country (despite what Bozo The Clown likes to repeat)

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/23/uk-living-standards-fall-sunak

The UK vaccination strategy had nothing to do with Brexit and in fact we're now behind the rest of the EU

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/covid-vaccine-decisions-brexit

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1196071/covid-19-vaccination-rate-in-europe-by-country/

Cooler heads needed in heated E2EE debate, says think tank

Never mind cooler heads, what we need are some heads filled with actual facts and science rather than political soundbites and "world-leading" stupidity.

Re: Suppression of citizens

Which corners of the internet were you frequenting where debate about Covid was closed off? I seem to have read nothing but debate about Covid for the last two years.

Court erred in Neo4j source license ruling, says Software Freedom Conservancy

Re: Mangle a license, get confusion

The first clause under Definitions of the AGPL v3 says:

"This License" refers to version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License.

Assuming that clause was still present in Neo4J’s version, the term is consequently unambiguous.

Only 29% of techies truly want to stay in current job

With you on the first three but project management here is more like that scene in Friends where Joey wears all of Chandler's clothes. You can't even think about doing requirements gathering until you've filled in half a dozen forms, been to a bunch of meetings and kissed the ring of at least one PHB.

Plans for UK rival to Silicon Valley ditched

Re: They've been talking about the varsity line since before I was born...

Due to the free-for-all nature of 19th Century railway architecture it's almost impossible to make any East-West journey without having to go to London first

Has he ever got anything right?

His impression of children's TV character Pob is pretty bang on the money

GCHQ was rebuked for ignoring spy law safeguards as pandemic hit Britain

Foreign Secretary unaware

Given that Raab was unaware that Dover-Calais was a significant trade route it's no surprise he didn't know what was happening at GCHQ

UK health secretary confirms end for NHS Digital, architect of the GP data grab debacle

Here we go again

From past experience this will result in the same people doing the same jobs at the same desks only with different headed notepaper. Half the staff will quit and come back as contractors on five times the salary. Expensive branding will be undertaken. Capita and co will make a fortune. NHS digital efforts will be same or worse.

Not only MSPs: All cloudy firms are in line for UK security law crackdown

If you tolerate this, your children will be next

If it's going to rain within the next 90 mins, this very British AI system can warn you

Re: Other Options

Apple bought Dark Sky. Presumably for this use case.

Re: the standard trick of hanging up an old pine cone

Like a scrotum in a cold swimming pool

Indian broadband connections top 800 million … sort of

Last time I was out there in those sepia-toned pre-pandemic days, the mobile broadband was pretty incredible. Couple of gigabytes allowance per day for pennies, decent download and upload speeds and reliable connections. But only if you have a friendly local who'll front up a sim for you as they insist on photo ID and generally are wary of anything other than an Indian-issued ID.

Wired broadband, on the other hand, is shockingly bad. Frequently cuts out for anything between a few seconds and a few hours.

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

Re: Wobbley rampacks

Same here. Sometimes I'm not sure if I thank him for that but here we are.

Where on Gartner's Hype Cycle is Gartner's Hype Cycle?

Re: It's the quantum computing

Yes and no

Seems to be something young people are into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAP_(song)

It's the quantum computing

All the predictions are held in a superposition of simultaneous plausible and implausible states. Every time they predict quantum computing will go mainstream it collapses the Gartner Probability Wave (TM) and randomly allocates their predictions to either a true or false state.

Brit firm fined £200k for banging on about missold PPI in 11.4 million nuisance calls

Maybe people are just aware of the pitifully tiny fine likely to be imposed and the minimal likelihood of it being paid versus the company shutting up shop and starting again under a new name.

PrivacyMic looks to keep your home smart without Google, Alexa, Siri and pals listening in

Re: Roll Yur Own

Pretty straightforward with either Rhasspy or Mycroft (the latter wasn’t totally offline last time I checked but they were working on it)

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Re: implications and questions

Second appearance in this comment thread https://xkcd.com/908/

Train operator phlunks phishing test by teasing employees with non-existent COVID bonus

Re: Lessons learned

If you're a phisher, offer anything that's related to money.

FTFY

UK Home Office tenders £5m for a supplier to help it greenlight IT projects. Yes, you read that correctly

Re: Best choice of adviser?

> What's really needed is a non-supplier

Call Chris Grayling. His experience of finding ferry non-suppliers is tailor made for this role.

Ex-asylum seeker with infosec degree loses discrimination claim against UK cyber range provider after storming out

Re: Allegations without consequences

Yeah let’s make it more difficult and risky for people to raise legitimate problems. We could make people pay a deposit any time they report a crime to the police too.

The 40-Year-Old Version: ZX81's sleek plastic case shows no sign of middle-aged spread

Re: Computers vs girls

The girls might have been more interesting but the computers were far easier to get your hands on (and to understand, for that matter)

UK's National Cyber Security Centre sidles in to help firm behind hacked NurseryCam product secure itself

Re: "The company needs NCSC's help"

I’d prosecute them for the grievous brain damage they caused me banging my head on the table when I read their BS excuse.

Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

Prancing about in a tutu. She still doesn't know where her future lies.

Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm

> Since the laptops are going to the kind of people not privileged enough to know what tcpdump is

Poor kids aren't allowed to know about computers?

Negative Trustpilot review of law firm Summerfield Browne cost aggrieved Briton £28k

Re: The man who seeks Summerfield Browne for advice has a bunch of fools...

“Allegedly”

Extreme Networks misses death-of-Flash deadline, suggests winding back PC clocks to keep its GUI alive

Re: I'm not at all surprised

Have you ever tried to explain IT to a marketing droid?

Decades-old UK government papers show that they tried to roll out a 'Cab-E-Net' system in the '90s. It was crap

Re: Joined up thinking

I'm sure there should be something more important lodged in that corner of my brain than 1980s kids TV shows set on the premise of mixing up measuring systems but we are where we are.

Re: Joined up thinking

“Jimbo!”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimbo_and_the_Jet-Set

I’d expected Cab-e-net to be a prototype Uber and was momentarily impressed with the government’s foresight.

Italian competition watchdog slaps Apple with €10m fine over allegedly misleading iPhone waterproofing claims

Re: Well

At a molecular level, water is a mixture of two things.

UK coronavirus tier postcode-searching tool yanked offline as desperate Britons hunt for latest lockdown details

Re: This is easy to scale... or should be

Probably only needs the first half of the postcode so an even smaller list

NCSC's London HQ was chosen because GCHQ spies panicked at the prospect of grubby Shoreditch offices

If they made Osborne pay for all the things he ballsed up in office he’d really need all those jobs he got when he left politics.

After Cummings' Barnard Castle trip, cheeky Britons started using the word 'vision' in their passwords

Another good reason not to reuse passwords for different services. Unless you enjoy having your office BOFH ordering dildos from your Amazon account and having them sent gift-wrapped to your boss.

Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence

Re: Chat logs

And the reply "Not much. On a completely unrelated topic, did you pass any nice inhabitable worlds?"

Software engineer leaked UK missile system secrets and refused to hand cops his passwords, Old Bailey told

Sounds like this guy needs to be receiving psychiatric care rather than being dragged through the courts

UK test-and-trace coronavirus data may be handed to police to nab those who aren't self-isolating as required

Re: And who is surprised?

"to covid regs killing freedom of movement"

I think it was Brexit that did that.