Posts by JohnG 1639 publicly visible posts • joined 27 May 2007
"For Labour, Shadow Home Office Minister Meg Hillier MP said: "Labour had already reviewed and altered the scheme. It was never about vetting private family arrangements or infrequent contact with children."
Much like RIPA was all about terrorism and was never to be used to spy on citizens for anything trivial. More poorly written legislation suitable for use by officials against innocent people they don't like.
Yes, it is interception. It is not like Speaker's Corner. A couple of my neighbours have unencrypted networks but funnily enough, I don't see their Internet or PC to PC traffic popping up on my screen - I am not going to see their traffic by accident. If I wanted to see their traffic, I would need to run programs with the specific intention of capturing it and then I would need to filter what has been captured to make it readable. Here in Germany, the mere possession of such programs is now illegal unless you are a certified security professional.
The rot started when the commercial bits of many UK companies (Marconi, Ferranti, etc.) were stripped away to form ICL back in the 1960s. The remaining parts of those companies were forbidden from competing with ICL in the commercial sector. All thanks to Messrs Wilson & Benn.
"Google was capturing network IDs (names, MAC addresses) to map on GPS coordinates..."
...along with 600GB of payload data, as Google themselves have admitted, after the German regulator caught them.
If they just wanted the SSIDs, they would have used a capture filter for the related packet types. The MAC addresses could be obtained from any packets. There is no reason to capture everything, particularly given the questionable legality of sniffing on WLANs where the SSID has been set to "hidden".
The intercept data is evidence for the various countries' authorities against Google. In each country, they will use it when determining if/when/who goes to court to face criminal proceedings.
No doubt, Google would like to just say the data has been deleted and forget the whole thing - but it might not be that simple. They have been told by some countries that deleting the data may constitute more criminal offences on the part of Google.
The £30 fee was for expenses incurred in the processing of the application (and that's what the Identity Cards Act 2006 states). This would put it in line with similar government issued documents such as passports, driving licenses and visas. Such documents are issued to the holder but remain the property of the government and may be withdrawn under certain conditions (as the Identity Cards Act 2006 makes clear). The application for Epstein's ID card was duly processed and she paid for that processing. More accurately, she paid for some of the processing, with the bulk of the costs dumped onto the taxpayer.
IANAL but if the Identity Cards Act 2006 is repealed, perhaps this woman would be able to get her money back by selling her card as a curiosity.
A move to ChromeOS makes sense - why pay licenses to use a competitor's product? It is also a bit much to expect others people to adopt any given OS if it isn't widely adopted in-house. Car manufacturers follow this thinking - BMW don't buy Mercedes company cars, for instance.
Given recent disputes with Apple, the choice of Mac seems a bit strange but maybe they are thinking that as Mac can run MS Office but is "unix in disguise", it represents an intermediate step in migrating users from Windows and towards Chrome OS.
Well yes - but wouldn't that be self-defeating in this case? In the article, the entire point of correlating the ENF on the tape with the database was to prove the authenticity of the tape and to demonstrate that it had NOT been edited. If you strip out all the ENF, then you have, by definition, altered the original, which may invite questions as to its authenticity.
Schengen works (sort of) for countries with internal controls - i.e. the requirement for everyone to carry ID in public and a law that allows police to check anyone's identity. Britain has not had such measures since WWII and the ID card scheme is at the centre of this issue.
Schengen hasn't prevented large numbers of illegal immigrants entering the Schengen area, something you can see if you take a short drive around Calais/Coquelles or look at the registrations of cars parked near building sites across Western Europe.
The Home Secretary has the power to stop the proceedings (overruling any judge or court) if he/she deems that the extradition or subsequent proceedings would be any breach of the individual's human rights. A trial in a foreign country for an individual with a mental condition may represent such a breach.
Although the individual was in the UK when the alleged crime was committed, the US authorities have refused the offer of a trial in the UK, which may call into question their commitment to a free and fair trial - also grounds for a Home Secretary to halt extradition.
As the alleged crime was committed in the UK, why not take a leaf from the Germans and try the case in the UK, under UK law? The matter would then be settled.
"Mating for life is a relatively new notion for us as a species and some people just aren't cut out for it."
Then such people shouldn't get married, should they? Living together and even having children together outside of marriage is no big deal today (expect in some Islamic countries). If you voluntarily enter a contract of marriage and then break it, you have to live with the consequences. This woman needs to grow up and take responsibility for her own actions instead of trying to shift the blame on others. Rogers may well have made an administrative error but the fact this woman's marriage ended is because she cheated in the first place.
"You lot are awfully keen to make horrible pronouncements about a situation you know sod-all about."
We know what has been recorded in this woman's complaint filed against Rogers and people who have been through a divorce or have cheated /been cheated in their marriage may have some relevant experience - all of which is rather more than "sod all".
Just to clarify though, this site publishes stories (some of which are IT related) and then a whole bunch of people leave comments in which they give their opinions on the issues involved, regardless of their expertise in the areas of interest. You may find one or two other sites on the Internet where people do something similar.
"The woman told the paper the affair only lasted a few weeks. She said she was embarrassed and ashamed over what had happened, but did not deserve to lose her life over it"
That's not how it works. Just one act of adultery can be enough to end a marriage - it depends on the people involved and their history. Her husband must have been more than a little suspicious of his wife to call a number he did not recognise, without first asking her what it represented.
According to the Toronto Star "After she terminated her relationship with the “third party” in August 2007, the jilted lover, himself a married father of three, called Rogers and obtained her secret password to her voicemail and used it to access it to harass her and taunt the husband, the statement of claim alleges."
As her affair only lasted a few weeks, her husband would have found out in the same timeframe without ever seeing a detailed phone bill when the jilted lover started leaving messages.
Maybe they didn't have sufficient resources (i.e. people) in-house to perform a useful trial. Smaller companies often don't have many IT people (sometimes none) and consequently, rely quite heavily on their suppliers. This is fine when the suppliers are honest but tends to go astray when suppliers become unduly focussed on monthly sales.
No. It is illegal. If I did it, I could expect to be arrested - why not the people who did this at Google? Incompetence or negligence is hardly a defence, especially for an organisation as large as Google who can afford to employ the necessary technical and legal experts.
They did not "suffer a technical screw up" - the relevant code did not just happen - someone wrote it and it undoubtedly went through some layers of checking and change control before it was included in a software build used in the cars concerned. It is laughable to suggest that some code to acquire and store other people's WLAN payload data could have just "happened", as if by some freak accident.
Additionally, the possession of hacking tools in Germany is illegal, other than by certified security professionals. Any of the car drivers/operators who were not CISSPs or similar at the time of their German outings are probably in trouble.
"It's a neat feature, there's nothing overtly sinister about it....."
I you happened to be a dissident blogger in one the world's less enlightened regimes, it might be very sinister if wireless geo-location brings men with guns to to cart you away for a spell of torture, followed by a long stay in jail.
"Run OpenOffice.org on the big server..... Total cost of software £0....."
However, in a corporate environment, you then get called before the VP Finance and receive a message like this: "WTF have you done? My entire department cannot process xzy important business processes because this shit (OO calc) won't run their macros. All this worked fine last week (using MS Excel). This is costing us ££££ per day. Put it all back by tomorrow night or find another job."
Don't get me wrong - I like OpenOffice and use it at home. However, until OO is a direct replacement for ALL functions in MS Office or MS Office is no longer in top slot, it isn't likely to make any inroads in the corporate environment.
For those with long memories, this was originally the reason that Excel could not replace Lotus123 or Word could replace WordPerfect - but apps were simpler then.
"Why is it the supplier's responsibility to know what the buyer wants and needs?"
Probably because the supplier makes the following claim on their website:
"Entirety Property Management System (PMS) has been designed to fulfil the requirements of any size of hotel organisation....."
Do you think the sales patter was any less optimistic when they were looking for a sale?
Sales and marketing weasels the world over are renowned for promising the earth and then disappearing once the purchase order has been received.
Another possibility is that a coalition of losers will not be able to agree where cuts should be made and the ship of state will drift along, without any cuts being made at all. This would no doubt keep Unite and some government suppliers happy but might see significant sums of money heading out of the country and away from a ever weaker pound.
This guy was/is plainly an idiot for posting such a message but if the CPS and other elements of law enforcement and judiciary in that part of the world have budget enough to waste on such utterly useless prosecution then they have just marked themselves as a primary target in the forthcoming round of drastic cuts in public expenditure. Some of them may soon be joining this chap down at the Jobcentre.
Most systems are designed to meet an SLA. If their downtimes total less than that allowed per unit time in the SLA, nobody is going to spend more money. Even if the SLA is exceeded, it might mean some penalties for the month concerned - this will earn the Service Manager a good kicking but nobody will put any money into improving anything.
So, this guy is implicitly admitting that he failed to adequately supervise his son and is not competent to understand his mobile phone tariff but he is in a job in which he is responsible for participating in decisions that affect millions of people. He is also a JP.
"Britain is seeking assurances that its identity documents will not be abused in future, but Israel has refused...."
Why? They made the same promise before but have not kept it, as indicated at the end of the article:
"Margaret Thatcher shut down the agency's UK operation in 1988, partly because plans to use British passports in operations against Palestinian exiles had emerged. Mossad officers were allowed to return to London after apparently giving assurances the transgression would not be repeated."
This shows that such assurances are a waste of breath or paper. How about getting them to promise that they''ll use US passports next time?
German men are pussy whipped - they are not allowed to have the toilet seat up and stand whilst peeing - they are supposed to sit. Hence signs like this:
http://shop.stickyjam.de/product_thumb.php?img=images/FK11009-Stehpinkler-web.jpg&w=235&h=235
I kid you not. I found a sign like this over the toilet in the house I bought in Germany.
I thought China was on the list of places to whom the export of certain products and/or technologies is forbidden - and "strong encryption" is included in the list of forbidden stuff. In which case, the Chinese rules would be irrelevant for most people, unless they want to get a personal listing on a US shitlist of undesirables.
There is a Cisco add-on for the Nokia E and N series phones which facilitates some proprietary features available under Cisco Unified Communications - I guess RIM have now got something similar.
Of course, the RIM offering is only of use if the local telco has not disabled the WLAN interface of the Blackberry to increase traffic through their network and therefore, their own revenue. In this situation, it might be better to get a Nokia phone and use the available Blackberry client instead.
If a user runs a suitable script from your website, you can get the MAC of their router returned to you. Use the geolocation database and you have just found out where that pesky corporate whistleblower or political dissident blogger is located and you can send the secret police round to get them.
Try http://test-geolocation.appspot.com/
If you are unfortunate enough to live amongst some of the less honest members of society, you might be only too pleased to see policemen on the street but that will never happen. It is considerably easier and safer for a the police to sit on their arses back at the station, spying on the online activities of the public at large or sit in a patrol car on a busy road with a speed trap.
Somewhere over the last decade or so, the police have morphed into a significant part of an apparatus of state surveillance and control, apparently with ambitions to become much like the much-hated East German Stasi.
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