Posts by alain williams

Day 4 of outage: UK's Manchester police deploy exciting new carbon-based method to record crime

They have been hacked by OfficeWorld

who are now doing great business selling note books & pencils!

There's got to be Huawei we can defeat Chinese tech giant, thinks US attorney-general. Aha, let's buy stake in Ericsson and Nokia

They will buy it ...

then a year later decide that it was over valued and take the previous owner to court.

Fed-up air safety bods ban A350 pilots from enjoying cockpit coffees

Put coffee in non-spill containers

Is that really that hard ? There are many such cups - should be able to get them cheap from what is left of Mothercare.

Vodafone CEO: We will elbow Chinese firm Huawei from our European core networks

What Vodafone should really do

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.

Orange has an elegant solution to Huawei question in France: We'll stick with Nokia and Ericsson for 5G networks

So: neither Huawei nor Cisco

Has anyone done analysis on how spook-clean are Nokia & Ericsson ?

Artful prankster creates Google Maps traffic jams by walking a cartful of old phones around Berlin

How easy it is to fool

these services that we increasingly rely on. This guy did it as a prank and probably caused little harm. What if he had been malicious ?

WannaCry ransomware attack on NHS could have triggered NATO reaction, says German cybergeneral

Far better to spend the nuke money ...

helping people & organisations to make their systems robust -- and with good, tested backups.

Brits may still be struck by Lightning, but EU lawmakers vote for bloc-wide common charging rules

Hopefully the UK will follow this

as it is very much to the benefit of the consumer. Hopefully Boris is sane enough to not decide that the UK should not adopt this just to show that we are independent; but I'm not convinced.

Sorry: the word 'not' appears too many times in the above sentence.

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

3 laws for AI

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.

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

Re: Thanks for the clarification, Smooth Newt

mutt

EU outlines 5G rules: You don't have to keep 'risky' vendors completely Huawei

HCSEC is auditing Huawei code

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.

UK: From 5G in Tiree to the Isles of Ebony, carry me on the waves… Sail Huawei, sail Huawei, sail Huawei

So will we also limit other "high-risk" suppliers

like Cisco ?

Cisco Webex bug allowed anyone to join a password-protected meeting

Re: TLA

No you only talk about banning Chinese companies that might be controlled by their government. Cisco is controlled by a friendly government - or so we are told.

Brit brainiacs say they've cracked non-volatile RAM that uses 100 times less power

RAM clear on power off ?

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.

Apple: EU can't make us use your stinking common charging standard

Another corporation vs government war

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'.

We need to make it even easier for UK terror cops to rummage about in folks' phones, says govt lawyer

Re: Wipe Password

Even easier: read messages and immediately wipe them.

If they are not on the 'phone then giving someone the password will not tell them anything.

A nice low tech solution. I like low tech.

One-time Brexit Secretary David Davis demands Mike Lynch's extradition to US be halted

Would you trust a USA court ...

to give Lynch a fair trial ?

Hapless AWS engineer spilled passwords, keys, confidential internal training info, customer messages on public GitHub

Should not passwords be one way encrypted ?

I get the impression that passwords, etc, were published in plain text. I always thought that best practice was to store passwords encrypted/hashed and compare this when doing authentication.

Have I got this wrong ?

South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal and unjust' sale of .amazon to zillionaire Jeff Bezos

All of this would have never happened ...

if ICANN had not decided that it would print itself lots of money by having all of these stupid new top level domains in the first place.

Looks like the party's over, folks: Global PC sales set to shrink as Windows 10 upgrade cycle tails off, says Gartner

"there will not be a Windows 11"

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.

Over a thousand electronic gizmos went missing from London councils last year

How does this compare ...

with the loss of non-electronic items ?

what is the total number of these gizmos - ie what percentage were lost in any year ?

Microsoft picks a side, aims to make the business 'carbon-negative' by 2030

Re: Mildly depressing!

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.

Re: Truly hope this is not just a marketing ploy

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?

Spanking the pirates of corporate security? Try a Plimsoll

How to make changes happen

With lifestyle changing fines to the IT director if s/he knew about it and did nothing in reasonable time.

People don't care if their company pays a fine, change will happen when penalties hurt individuals and their daughters can no longer afford to go to pony club.

Re: A decent backup strategy is very expensive.

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

It's a no to ZFS in the Linux kernel from me, says Torvalds, points finger of blame at Oracle licensing

Re: The problem is not Oracle (for once)

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.

Re: The problem is not Oracle (for once)

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.

Re: The problem is not Oracle (for once)

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.

UK Home Office opens AWS cash firehose even wider with £100m public cloud services deal

Should be hosted in the UK by a UK organisation

More secure - less easy for the USA get see what we have (qv Patriot Act)

Generate jobs in the UK

Develop UK skills

Pay UK taxes

National Lottery Sentry MBA hacker given nine months in jail after swiping just £5

This seems out of proportion to the offense

The cost of keeping him in chokey for that long will be much, much more than £5. Many weekends doing community service, or similar, will be cheaper, not cost him his job and enable him to care for his child.

Ministry of Justice bod jailed for stealing £1.7m with fake IT consulting contract

Re: Good on the whistleblower

Just don't let him near the till.

I think that Pascal Monett was referring to the whistle blower - the good guy. He could easily find himself pushed out as being too dangerous to have around, he might blow his whistle again about someone else.

In a desperate bid to stay relevant in 2020's geopolitical upheaval, N. Korea upgrades its Apple Jeus macOS malware

"Believed to be operating out of North Korea"

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.

What if everyone just said 'Nah' to tracking?

Two conflated things

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.

UK government review of IR35 tax reforms? Like a broken pencil, say contractors groups – it'll be utterly pointless

It was an election promise ...

did you expect any real action ?

From Soviet to science fiction icon, the weird life of Isaac Asimov 100 years on

Re: Asimov was a letcher

Not a good analogy/parallel, far better is:

having been touched by women

This does happen. It is not always welcome - then and now.

Asimov was a letcher

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.

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

How much is this costing them ?

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.

Senior health tech pros warn NHS England: Be transparent with mass database trawl or face public backlash

"records that are said to be anonymised as necessary"

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.

Boeing, Boeing, gone! CEO Muilenburg quits 'effective immediately'

Re: Cascade failure

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; ...

This isn't Boeing very well... Faulty timer knackers Starliner cargo capsule on its way to International Space Station

Re: TITSUP

It was a Clock up.

Capita unfurls new consulting arm. Hmm, what shall we call it?

ConCrap ?

That would seem about accurate.

GlaxoSmithKline ditches IR35 contractors: Go PAYE or go home

Gov't promises ...

with a whopping majority they don't need to worry about promises

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

How rapidly were the cans opened ?

This seems to me to be the most important factor, one that they did not investigate.

Pull the ring quickly, rapid loss of internal pressure and the beer will fizz out.

Pull slowly opening it a crack, wait for the internal pressure to reduce and then complete the opening and little beer will be wasted.

I thought that most kids learned this with bottles of pop.

Revealed: NHS England bosses meet with tech and pharmaceutical giants to discuss price list of millions of Brits' medical data

My GP wants my email address

This confirms my decision to not give it to them.

Americans should have strong privacy-protecting encryption ...that the Feds and cops can break, say senators

Re: The solution is simple

Such a solution would be used by law abiding people; it would not be used by: criminals, terrorists, pedophiles, ... The very people who this is supposed to deal with are the ones who will not use it & so not be caught.

In spite of what they say the politicians are not that stupid. So who's private conversations do the really want to pry into ?

Kiwi tax probe squeezed $25m out of Microsoft – now it's Oracle's turn

Re: Alternative Minimum Tax

The better way to do things is to institute a type of General Sales Tax, which is something corporations hate - for good reason, since they cannot evade it.

The trouble with that is that it hurts those who legitimately have a low-markup business. This is something that the likes of starbucks pretend to have - through the use of fake costs to be paid to another part of their business that lives in a low tax country. Distinguishing between fake & real costs is the real issue. It probably needs to be decided by fiat by the tax authorities -- any sort of formulation in law will just be worked around by accountants/solicitors; but general principles and a fiat court will have them squealing 'unfair, unfair' but to everyone else's benefit.

But the tax authorities are not 100% fair either, look at IR35 :-(

France has done it, now NZ ...

hopefully many more will do so. The Orange twat will moan - but let him, he cannot win if he wages economic war with all other nations; but there might be a period of painful adjustment.

Take Sajid Javid's comments on IR35 UK contractor rules with a bucket of salt, warns tax guru

Re: There's an elephant you're ignoring

If you look at a large group of people you will find a diversity of opinions many of which you disagree with. Some will be anti-: semitic, muslim, gypsy/roma, black/brown/yellow/white/... gay, men/women, ...

Just because the large group are all members of XXX does not mean that XXX is institutionally anti-YYY. But what does seem to happen is that if group YYY is well organised they can make sufficient waves in the media for some to believe that XXX is anti-YYYist.

So: be slow to believe what you read, try to learn what is really happening.

Register Lecture: Can portable atomic clocks end UK dependence on GNSS?

Re: Interesting

Yes: but they are not talking about a replacement positioning system, just the accurate time part of GPS.

Re: Interesting

So if you really need the precision of atomic clocks

This is the key -- how much precision does your application really need ? I doubt that many need more precise than 1 ms.