Posts by alain williams 2646 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
This means that the scambags will just dream up some other heist to carry out on their customers, try to avoid being caught but if they are then the cost of any settlement will be factored in to the plan.
The only way of stopping things like this is to make them eat government supplied porridge.
I do not have any agreement with Google, I do not use its services. However: I suspect that it has a lot of data about me.
If they have no agreement then they do not have my permission to move what they have about me out of the UK/EU. How are they going to manage this ?
I expect that they will just move my data to the USA and that there is feck all that I can do about it.
Having something preinstalled in the hope that the user runs it as it is just easier is OK, but something that runs when the device is switched on is not so. Especially if it has privileges that enable it to see & report what the user is doing.
Also will they be removable by the end user ? My Samsung 'phone has a non-removable facebook app installed. I'm OK with it being initially installed, but not that I cannot remove it. I have never used it & would like to zap it.
We need some legislation that the likes of Netgear have some pages on their web site (prominently signposted) that list such bugs. They would not have the ability to use weasel words to describe them.
But: I expect that NSA & GCHQ would put a stop to anything like that.
They're happy to be paid twice as much as a permie while not taking any responsibility for what they deliver,
If life as a contractor was really that good (in years gone by) - why did you not become one ?
I ask people that and they stutter out a variety of reasons - which just show that being a contractor is not the bed of roses that some make it out to be.
is to actually hire UK based expertise to run its own networks and not outsource to companies in other countries. Eg IBM & EDS, IBM (more if I could be bothered to search more). However they are all at it.
If you give people in other countries the keys to your network then you can't really complain if they use them. This is as much a comment about Huawei as Cisco, Ericsson, IBM, ...
If the UK government was serious about security this is what they would push for. It would have the added bonus of creating skilled jobs here.
A nice overview.
Ah, crafted in a more innocent age when the general belief was that we all work together for a common good.
Today is a post truth era where corporations (CEOs & their lackeys) & politicians will say whatever bollocks they think will bamboozle us to overlook the current heist that they are trying to pull off. AIs will do whatever their masters direct them to do; ie they will work to the benefit of the corporation or government that owns them, they will have scant regard to the harm that they will cause to the rest of us.
This piece by a FT columnist is worth looking at.
By all accounts this code has quality problems, but is the equivalent code from Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia, Intel, Qualcomm, etc, any better ? I suspect not.
Why does Huawei not just open source its code (eg upload to Github) and make it easy for users to install their own version ? They can make their money selling hardware & support. This would mean that:
* it would be hard for others to claim hidden back doors
* many programmers could work on & improve the code
Yes: that would still leave the possibility of deliberate hardware bugs - but that is harder to do & so harder to be accused of.
I do appreciate that doing this is harder than just uploading the code, but it would be doable.
Does this mean that operating systems running with this ULTRARAM will need to wipe memory before it powers down ? If not then crooks/Gov't-spys could move the RAM chips into a reader and get passwords, keys, etc.
There was a story a couple of years back about being able to read RAM after a reboot, but this needed to be done in a few seconds. With this it could be done at leisure.
The large corporations will play whatever tricks that they can to maximise profits. Governments should act** to the benefit of its citizens and thus keep the corporations under control. The EU has tried to do this and in some case succeeded - but they do need to do much more. Stopping the relocation of profits to some low tax country must be the next as is charging substantially different prices for the same thing in different countries.
** They should, but governments are controlled by people who are susceptible to 'persuasion' such as a high paying job when having left office or 'campaign or research contributions'.
Maybe not, but that is just the name, a marketing thing. I fully expect that future versions of MS Windows 10 will change the profile of hardware needed to run it and also drop support for some items of hardware that are in use today.
The result will be that occasional hardware refreshes will be needed - but people will be unaware of the need until after an update has landed and either performance drops as the machine is not beefy enough or it just does not work resulting in a panic hardware upgrade.
Everyone does need to do it. However few will do so unless they see others doing it, so some high profile cheer leaders like Microsoft can only be a good thing - even if it is partly marketing led: eg promotion for Azure.
I am not a Microsoft fan boy but I do applaud them for this.
busy telling everyone that they need to buy a new Windows 10 compatible computer
Would it not be more friendly to the environment to keep the old computer and install something like Linux Mint - which will run quite happily on a smaller machine than is needed by Windows 10?
And a seat belt will probably make fuck all difference if a Boeing 737Max falls out of the sky on top of your car.
Crashes on roads happen a lot, a seat belt is likely to help save a life - so worth installing
A 373 Max hitting a car is unlikely - so not worth protecting against
Software authors chose the licenses that they did because they wanted the protections/liberties that those licenses provide. Different licenses are not like two pieces of software that you can make play together with a clever bit of interface code.
Trying to blame one or the other is a bit like blaming a motor-car or a bicycle because you cannot make a composite vehicle; the two have very different purposes.
Unless, of course, it's a API or some other entity that Oracle feels possessive about
Since we are talking about Licenses and Linux - you should probably have written SCO rather than Oracle.
Me: looks around warily and heads off to wash my mouth out and find some garlic.
It is not a GPL problem - it is that some licenses are not compatible with others.
Whoever wrote the code gets to choose the license and thus what is/is-not possible to do with their code. If you do not like the license then you are at liberty to write it all from scratch and release it under some other license.
is there real evidence ?
I ask as this is highly political and it would serve several politicians well to be able to point fingers at the NORKs and say "nasty, dangerous". The trouble is that, unfortunately, I trust our politicians & their lackeys less & less - just look at Boris & Trump.
Flinging out malware & blaming someone else would be a good wheeze for all sorts of spooks & governments.
I am not saying that Kim Jong-un is a saint, but I doubt that he is the source of all evil.
1) We are told that advertising is important as it pays for the web sites that we visit.
2) Analytics: building up a profile of who has visited which pages.
I can live with (1) as long as they: are discrete; don't make my browser slow or download large files; etc. If a web site were to serve these up along with what I came to look at I would probably be OK with it - as long as it did not tell the advertiser who I was.
One trouble with (1) is that 3rd party advertisers do not trust web site owners when they say that they have served an ad up X thousand times. This is one reason that they are served up as links back to the advertiser's web site - bang goes my privacy, the advertiser can track me as I browse the web. They also set cookies, etc, to help them track me.
What is worse is that most adverts are served up by first running some Javascript in my browser; very often this will also snarf information about me and send this to the advertiser - so they know even more about me. This is also how the Internet data vampires work (eg Google, Facebook), they build up bigger pictures of who/what I am - far more detailed than individual web sites can do.
Then there is also the Javascript in many web sites which is just (2). This is pure evil. Much can be easily stopped with NoScript or similar, but this can make some sites fail to load properly - thus most of my friends will disable NoScript quite quickly, that is if I persuaded them to install it in the first place.
I am always wary of judging someone's behaviour in years gone by with today's eyes.
If everyone around you is doing XXX, then is XXX wrong ? We may think that XXX is wrong today, but can you condemn someone doing it when many others around were doing it ? How would you behave in that environment ?
I like to think that I behave well, but who knows how standards could have changed in 40 years time - I could be remembered as a YYY-ist.
Things move is all directions. What is 'saucy' can later become 'a personal intrusion/...' - eg pinching a bottom. What is 'disgusting' can become 'acceptable' - eg homosexuality.
How much more would it have cost to have done a proper job and secured their systems in the first place?
I suspect that some bean counter decided that the cost of good security was not worth it -- after all "it will not result in any extra business - will it ?"
Blame will probably be given to some lowly techie who was given neither the time nor the money to do it properly. If someone higher up the management chain is fingered they will get a nice golden parachute and told to keep quiet.
and then promptly de-anonymised. This has happened in the past and will happen again.
The only way of, maybe, avoiding this is: deep audits to see what happens with the data. When de-anonymisation is found huge fines must be paid, not by the organisation but by: the individual who did it, their line manager and the CEO.
I'm not sure how changing CEO is going to brush this under the carpet.
It is some blood on the carpet: a sop to the media and the public to try to mollify them, expect also these meaningless phrases: a new broom; lessons have been learned; safety is paramount; listening to customers; will not be repeated; absolute confidence; new processes; ISO9000; Quality Assurance; ...
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