Posts by JohnG 1642 publicly visible posts • joined 27 May 2007
I was under the impression that open sources licenses don't have clauses that permit particular individuals, entities or groups to be excluded, whether for a moral compass or any other reason. If you say your code is not available to particular entities, the MIT License could no longer apply.
"Europe," she said, "is being very robust in demanding transparency, on where profits are earned and where money is made."
Of course, the UK is due to exit that club at some point in the future.
The crux of Amazon's low corporation tax bill in the UK (along with a few other multinationals) is that they can supply goods and services in the UK but say they are sold out of Ireland or Luxembourg and invoice from one of those jurisdictions, which offer them favourable tax rates - and single market rules allow them to do this. Once the UK is no longer part of the single market, that loophole would not be so attractive.
"Would it not be to assure that any detection of their activities could be handled by the client's staff during their normal daily business, avoiding expensive and distracting call outs?"
The pen test includes the testing of procedures i.e. it is no use having firewalls and and intrusion detection system if these are ignored at weekends. I have often seen attempts started on Friday evenings, by hackers who had clearly given some thought as to when systems were likely to have the least supervision.
"That's probably to protect them from a company that charges by the hour..."
My experience is only of fixed price contracts for pen testing i.e. they look at the scale of the testing, the number of servers, etc. and give a price for the whole thing, including the report at the end.
"... even though the target of the surveillance effort was almost certainly the president himself."
Why would anyone bother to target his phone? Any information on his phone will be stuff that he is posting to Twitter, for the world to read.
It seems more likely that the Israelis were providing information to the US administration that their own intelligence agencies could not legally collect. A bit like when Margaret Thatcher had the Canadians use Echelon to spy on some of her cabinet ministers whom she believed were disloyal. The Canadians provided intercepts that showed her suspicions were correct.
Amazon provide services in the UK but invoice from Ireland or Luxembourg (the goods and/or services have no connection with the country in which the invoice is generated), due to the favourable tax conditions there. My company provides services in France and the UK and invoices in the UK. If I tried setting up a scheme to invoice from Ireland, my company would be accused of tax evasion and treated accordingly.
"HMRC must pull their finger out on this.
And if we can't act unilaterally, maybe as part of Eur...damn."
It is single market rules that allow Amazon and others to provide services in one EU country but invoice from another e.g. Ireland or Luxembourg. That particular scam will disappear once we are out of the single market and it will be interesting to see how the likes of Amazon cope with this change.
The Americans are sitting on loads of minerals, including the lithium needed for batteries. It is just that they would prefer not to pollute their country in the way that others are doing, which means that it is not currently cost effective to extract using environmentally clean methods. That may change once supplies run out in countries that don't care about such details.
In the meantime, environmental laws and economics make battery recycling both required and worthwhile. Aside from professional recycling/re-manufacturing, there is a significant market in used EV battery cells for DIY home storage systems.
"The self driving ability of horses should not be underestimated."
I remember reading a news item about a court case in the southern USA, in which two drunk guys in a pickup nearly collided with another drunk guy on a horse. The pickup ended up in a ditch and the drunken horse rider fell off - the horse stayed with the fallen rider. The judge explained the lack of penalty for the horse rider with something along the lines of "between the four of them, the horse was the only one with their wits about them and some common sense".
The support and warranty issues for software are not different for those of other types of product. Manufacturers don't support products beyond a certain lifetime and will encourage customers to buy newer products when customers look for support for what are deemed obsolete products.
MS and others would like customers to give them a constant revenue stream to fix the problems which should not have been there in the first place. I have yet to meet an Office user who requested or wanted the changes made in Office 2010, over the preceding version.
Every time LO fixes an incompatibility with the latest version of MS Office files, Microsoft introduces something new in the next version. Despite having subverted the definition of ISO files, Microsoft doesn't stick to it. Any file that has been created or modified in LO will be declared as corrupted by MS Office. It isn't a real problem but is enough to scare non-technical users.
The only significant compatibility issue I have had between MSO and LO is that of exotic spreadsheet macros.
"I'm interested why they dont include a dead mans switch in the cars for this very topic"
They do - the car expects regular resistance applied to the steering wheel. If it thinks the driver is not responding, it tries a couple of warnings and ultimately, bring the car to a stop, with the hazard flashers on.
Ferranti made their parts for the Tornado nose cone radar but GEC were late with their parts of the same system. As a result, some early Tornados flew with a chunk of ballast, instead of a nose cone radar. Some radars of that period had names like Blue Parrot and Blue Fox, so some decided to name the Tornado radar ballast as Blue Circle (after the cement) and joked that this radar had a more consistent performance than others. However, the ballast was actually made of lead.
"If you have to keep your hands on the wheel, it isn't AutoPilot. Call me when it is safe to engage before jumping in the backseat."
Why? The term Autopilot is taken from aviation and enabling autopilot in an aircraft does not allow the pilots to go for a coffee and a piss - they still have to be at the controls and ready to take over at amny time. The public seem to have developed the idea that autopilot means an completely autonomous machine - but it is not the case.
I could imagine some folk might start trolling these camera trials by wearing dazzle camouflage make-up or similar. It probably wouldn't be the sort of thing that someone with a job would want to be doing but it might considered as field work for anyone on a political science course or studying human rights law.
Whilst the Spamhaus approach may be a rather blunt instrument, any security researcher who scans address ranges that belong to someone else without prior permission may well find their subnets on someone's shitlist, simply because the effect of their scanning may make them indistinguishable from those with malicious intent. It may or may not be legal to conduct such scans or even to have the necessary tools (depending on the jurisdiction) but it is also legal for those who have been scanned to block scanning IPs from their networks.
It was silly of Assange to wait through the tenure of a US government that was entirely disinterested in him until the current US president, who has a different attitude. If he had simply faced the issue in Sweden, it might well have never gone to court but in the unlikely event that he was convicted, it would have been for a technical breach of class of rape that carries a maximum sentence of six years. I guess he can hope that his UK bail issue, the remaining Swedish charge and arguments about human rights and the penalties he might face in the USA can delay any US extradition decision until another disinterested Democrat president is in office.
"Normandy was invaded and settled by Vikings"
Technically, the Normans were gifted Normandy. In 911, in the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte between King Charles III of West Francia and Rollo (the Viking leader). It was basically, stop doing all these raids, become Christian and offer military assistance to me and you can have this chunk of land and my daughter.
How about: breaking into her home, taking a shower and then sleeping in her bed?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6473155/Taylor-Swift-stalker-gets-six-months-prison.html
However, I guess Swift, her family, friends and management company are more concerned about Eric Swarbrick. Over the course of two years, he has threatened to rape and kill Swift.
https://meaww.com/taylor-swift-death-note-stalker-eric-swarbrick-restraining-order
I thought it was common knowledge that Windows 10 and other Microsoft applications spy on users, regardless of any privacy settings. There are several services, numerous schedule tasks - and these can be changed/renewed during software updates. The most effective way to prevent all of this is to block access to the various servers that receive such telemetry. Spybot Anti-Beacon is one utility that provides an automated approach to this.
Additionally....
"Viasat first aimed a legal kick at Inmarsat after the latter won an EU contract in early 2017, the European Aviation Network (EAN)..."
Procurements funded by the European Commission are typically open only to entities from EU member states, which would exclude Viasat.
"For an under-funded trust, when the choice is between spending cash on security training and staff to avoid a (future) data breach, an on spending cash on staff who can stop people dying tomorrow, it's and easy choice."
The first question they should address is why a bed in an NHS hospital is apparently 4 - 5 times more expensive than for a private patient in a similar German hospital. Similarly, the costs quoted by NHS trusts for various procedures are dramatically more than in Germany. German staff are no less qualified than their British counterparts and earn similar salaries. Equipment costs are the same. Why is there such a large discrepancy?
The second question should be: why the hell don't they send more NHS patients for treatment in Germany, both to save money and to reduce waiting times/strain on resources?
"trouble is with the current economy 7 is that it works overnight when demand is low which is ok but come the evening the thing has already dumped all its heat"
One answer to that is Economy 10: the timings vary between suppliers but typical cheap periods are 5 hours overnight, 3 hours in the afternoon and 2 hours in the evening.
I understand where OpenWRT are coming from but realistically, most broadband users have not even heard of OpenWRT and fewer still would contemplate flashing their router with open source firmware. Most people have whatever router their broadband provided supplied and many of them won't have even changed the WiFi key.
Is the ban on banned words in filenames going to be applied retrospectively? Are they going to allow people to reference existing files with banned words in the filenames or are some interns going to have to do a rather large search and rename operation? Can we expect Google to expunge all references to Scunthorpe (again)?
"Because the data gathering is too broad, automatic, without user knowledge, and without any way to turn it off."
It is worse than that because there are some options to turn data collection off in various places in Windows 10 - but these only turn a few things off and leave all the other data collection running. It is designed to give the user the false impression that data collection has been comprehensively disabled, when it has not - it is incredibly dishonest.
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