Posts by streaky

NCC Group admits its training data was leaked online after folders full of CREST pentest certification exam notes posted to GitHub

Wat

What's that certification supposed to be with such remarkably easy questions in a test?

Virgin Galactic pals up with Rolls-Royce to work on Mach 3 Concorde-style private jet that can carry up to 19 people

RR..

.. went in deep on REL's series B, just throwing that out there.

UK space firms forced to adjust their models of how the universe works as they lose out on Copernicus contracts

Rofl

What a load of bollocks.

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

Uhm..

This story is complete bull, UK would have been fully aware. The Dutch probably didn't know the UK would have been fully aware - but even if neither of those things were true the Dutch wouldn't have considered for a second blowing the CIA's op. See the issue?

Utter nonsense story. Complete unadulterated nonsense.

Eclipse boss claims Visual Studio Code is an open-source poseur – though he would say that, wouldn't he?

Re: Eclipse has other lives....

What exactly is stopping you running vscode on Linux?

Re: VSCodium, VSCode without the telemetry

I'm not. Everybody is either so anti-Microsoft and therefore won't touch it despite it being the best solution available or will be total buy-in to VSCode. Middle-ground solutions like that are completely alien to most people in these parts..

Rust core devs mull adoption of alternative compiler front-end for improved IDE support

Re: Nuthin' up my sleeve ...

TabNine does that sort of thing very effectively in a plethora of languages so..

Assange should be furloughed from Belmarsh prison, says human rights org. Here's a thought: He could stay with friends!

Re: Incompetent Also...

whilst prison-states like Iran and Turkey have released one third of their inmates

Yeah when you're locking people up for literally no reason you can do this - Assange isn't locked up for no reason. If he hadn't fought the extradition which always was and always will go through because he has no viable legal argument then he'd be in the US and you never know he might have been bailed - I doubt it but it's possible. Sure as hell aint happening here.

Re: As long as UK.gov keeps the money this time

Wasn't even their money - they weren't required to forfeit the bail money which is *nuts*.

LUL

Yeah here's a man who will ever get bail in any country ever again. Not.

We got plenty enough capacity to hold this man.

Python 2 bows out after epic transition. And there was much applause because you've all moved to version 3, right? Uh, right?

The only surprise here..

.. is that there are no major Py2 forks yet.. Py3 aint happening any time soon, sorry lads.

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

Stronk Disinformation

Crucially, the use of the Zoom software is likely to have infuriated the security services

Because? There was like 40 people that we could see ignoring staffers, families and the like. You think they discussed privileged information? Really? Oh dear.. That's not what cabinet meetings are for.

while also raising questions about whether the UK government has its own secure video-conferencing facilities

Nah man they just use Zoom for everything despite the contracts for video conferencing being fairly well publicised.

We asked GCHQ, and it told us that it was a Number 10 issue. Downing Street declined to comment.

As they should.

You people can't possibly be this simple? It's clearly a massive diversionary tactic. Pointless one sure, but lets get a grip? They wouldn't talk about anything of note over the public internet, full stop.

HMRC claims victory in another IR35 dispute to sting Nationwide contractor for nearly £75k in back taxes

Re: Rigged definition of an employee

what's to stop them then saying that they want years of holiday pay and benefits etc

Depends how you look at it and it could go either way - one way is sure, employees were getting screwed in an inequitable contract arrangement and should be entitled. The other way, and this one will be common is to say that these people knew full-well or should have known full well because they're not morons what the implications of the arrangements they were entering into were. Suspect we're going to find out in court though, but not against HMRC: these cases/tribunals would need to be directed at the employer where they belong.

Employment benefits isn't a matter for the HMRC, by the way.

Re: Rigged definition of an employee

and also guilty of not providing benefits, etc

That's literally half the reason IR35 exists - if you remember back to the time before this was a thing they were expecting the taxpayer to pick up the tab for things like sickness saving themselves a pile of money, and not paying the requisite taxes for those things in the first place - or put another way taxpayers were getting double screwed.

Re: Rigged definition of an employee

Its helpful when HMRC have basically rigged the definition of an employee to be be "anyone we think should have paid tax at an employees rate".

No.

What HMRC have done is rigged the rules to say anybody who is pretending to be a contractor yet is for all intents and purposes is an employee for all intents and purposes for tax evasion purposes is an employee and should pay tax like an employee.

It's not hard to guess why people are triggered though, given it doesn't apply to legitimate contractors..

If you're writing code in Python, JavaScript, Java and PHP, relax. The hot trendy languages are still miles behind, this survey says

Re: Irony

Ouch. Also completely true.

Quantum compute boffins called up to get national UK centre organised for some NISQy business

Re: Ugh.

Oil money doesn't need laundering given it's legal literally everywhere. The term you're looking for is "invest profits of in".

Ugh.

Bit ragey this thread. Let the yanks piss away cash on the hardware, they're not playing long game: applications of. We learned this with so many technologies over the years and that's what we're world leaders at. The sheer volume of effort we put into the jet engine and didn't play the long game and we got nothing for it other than a few industrial gas turbine makers and a car maker building jet engines - they're very nice jet engines but BA aint no Emirates.

We should be aiming for the Emirates of QC - whatever that looks like - not the Pratt and Whitney.

Re: Not falsifiable?!! Don't bother me with details.

This is such a pile of nonsense I don't even know where to start with it.

Re: "The UK has long been a world leader in quantum computing science"

10/10 for effort but your jokes are still binary..

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Re: Anonymous Contractor

a person is either an employee or a contractor

Except that plainly isn't true. Companies started making people who were *explicitly* even previously employees doing the same job become contractors for the sole purpose of not paying tax they aught pay, people were taking sick pay from the state (i.e. taxpayers) rather than the company who should have been paying it and all sorts of nonsense. That's how bad it got.

The whole thing is *supposed* to be coercive. Everybody involved is supposed to look at the situation and say "oh shit, that doesn't work for us, lets not do the contracting thing and pretend and employee isn't an employee because the tax implications of not keeping it legit are catastrophic" and those employees are supposed to look at it and say to their employer "I'm not playing that game with you, it's not worth my time". Again, to make absolutely clear, it's *supposed* to be coercive to all parties that's why when you come under it then it becomes a horrible nightmare.

Now, if what we're really talking is people who shouldn't be considered employees but are under the system that's a whole different argument/discussion, but it's one that it's utterly impossible to have because of all the noise around people moaning about it doing the job it's supposed to be doing.

It's not that I don't have sympathy, because I do - I got my current permanent job via a freelancing job, I've been there and I get why people freelance. My thing is we need to start by separating the two issues out, telling the people who IR35 actually targets to stop ruining freelancing and contracting and do one; only then can we seriously get into the detail of what the actual problem is.

Re: Anonymous Contractor

Avoidance is another way of saying evasion. Avoidance is used as a polite term by press because they think it sounds less accusative than evasion. What they mean is they're not paying a tax they should be because they found some loophole in the law. All synthetic "avoidance" measures are now illegal (via catch-all) in UK law are are, in fact, evasion.

Re: Anonymous Contractor

> Well, when contractors get holiday pay, sick pay, bank holiday pay etc...

I see we're still confusing legitimate contractors with the people IR35 explicitly targets as what you'd politely call tax avoiders and more accurately call tax evaders.

People targetted by IR35 are explicitly entitled to all those things because they're employees *pretending* to be contractors. That's why IR35 exists.

Because we can't have an adult conversation about the execution problems we can't have a conversation and the government is going to ignore the noise as a result - much like, by the way, Universal Credit - the parallels make my head explode.

Can't believe we're still arguing about this shit. The law is clear. It doesn't affect all contractors. It affects employees posing as contractors. If you're an employee posing as a contractor you're entitled to employee protections.

I know these forums are packed with contractors - and I'm going to get downvoted as a result for speaking truth - I used to be one and I get the pain, but please can we stop confusing who the IR35 is targetting, execution problems (to the extent they exist) and ACTUAL contractors doing contract work - IR35 for the latter being relatively trivial. Our tax system aint that complex and we should stop pretending it is.

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

Termination fees work both ways and in many cases this stuff is the companies cross-charging themselves. German telcos won't charge for roaming in the UK because they'll be able to swap with UK telcos for the same in reverse. Telcos aren't eating costs for nowt just because the EU ordered them to.

Again, this is how it works with other non-EU countries.

Also again, to be clear, this was already a thing - the EU didn't make telcos do something they a) weren't already doing or b) do something they didn't want to do - if they'd not wanted to do it, it simply wouldn't have happened; the EU is the wild west for lobbying and is extraordinarily corrupt as a result. They know how to make this cheap, they already did and leaving the EU doesn't make them forget how to do it cheap. Telcos aren't eating costs in roaming countries just because the EU ordered them to - it's because they can trade it and because it's extremely inexpensive. Don't forget, we're dealing with digital phone networks - it costs the infrastructure as much to call somebody as it does for me to write a comment here.

but trying to explain this to a Brexiteer is a total waste of time

Yes, because we're not as stupid as remainers think we are and have knowledge of how this stuff works and can see through it a mile away.

If the operators don't charge (as permitted), it's as if the old rules still apply.

There it is.

Ignoring the fact the rules still apply, it was something many operators were already starting to do when they first started to apply. There's no rule requiring free roaming in the US, but all networks give it, there's no rule requiring free roaming in Israel but most networks give it, there's no rule requiring free roaming in Australia but all networks give it.

Turns out in a fair competitive market you don't need masses of bureaucracy to give people the things they want - and that's what we should be watching out for, not the other thing.

Just ask all the UK banks who have all set their overdraft interest rates to be 40%.

This is the exception that proves the rule, it doesn't undermine it.

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

Re: Not Menwith

It says we must extradite if the Americans provide a warrant but that we have to present a case to get Americans extradited here.

Yeah but that's not how it works which is how Assange is still rotting in a UK prison cell. The only way they can do it with just a warrant is if it's uncontested, but that's the same the other way.

On the Sacoolas thing IMHO it's fairly clear that hubby is NSA or CIA and that's why the US is being protective. Without being declared persona non grata the only people who are fair game is who the US elects to decide are fair game. The real issue that the US aught bare in mind is what they're doing is precedential - when some young lad in the US gets mown down by a drunk British (or any other country) diplomat driving on the wrong side of the road (they'd have to be drunk because most people can tell the difference between left and right) and they claim immunity and leave the country what are they going to say to the family of the victim? Oh, well, we could have prosecuted him, but we tried to be clever in another case and it's fucked us right proper.

As for it originally being valid if her husband has immunity, which he probably does, then the convention is clear that it cross-applies to family, for fairly obvious reasons. It's an abuse of the treaties though - they exist to stop the likes of Iran and China locking people up just for the fun of it, not as a catch all we can do whatever we like which is a real risk of ending the entire diplomacy system, especially when it's a key military ally.

I'm not entirely sure I 100% disagree on the point about stopping extraditions, but it does work both ways, despite what you think and they're a massive help with things like tracking down people who skip out on paying child support and making them pay it and other such things.

There is precident..

For US federal courts noting and sticking to rulings in higher British courts and staying well out of ongoing cases and cases where a party has been ruled against - not least because forum shopping is abusive to the rule of law cannot be allowed. This should be fought in the US court system before it ends up anywhere near an extradition request.

Re: Not Menwith

There's no imbalance in the treaty, same rules apply both sides - the imbalance in what we consider to be a satisfactory case to answer. The US uses their system of district/state/US attorneys which are political positions which encourage news-making - and grand juries where the prosecutor gets to state any case they feel like which the potential defendant cannot argue their case. In the UK we have professional prosecutors who weigh the case on its merits, public interest and likelihood of succeeding - and it's explicitly apolitical (or it's supposed to be anyway). That's where the perceived imbalance comes from.

The Harry Dunn case is particularly shitshowy and there's the whole issue of diplomatic immunity (which it's not obvious is valid) that will go through the US court system. There is a strong and easy case to make to stop all UK-US extraditions until it is resolved though, absent exceptional circumstances.

Who says HMRC hasn't got a sense of humour? Er, 65 million Brits

Just to be clear..

In case there's people reading his who are from third world countries* with absurdly inefficient tax systems designed to kick up maximum fuss every year given the headline could be slightly confusing: the vast majority of people in the UK don't file tax returns.. It's about 12 million before you ask - which surprised me it's that high, suspect a good chunk of that is why IR35 exists..

* Like the US..

EU've been naughty: GDPR has netted bloc €114m in fines since 2018

Re: Wouldn't it be nice if the UK had an effective regulator?

If you can travel somewhere for 90 days by a simple application and paying a what was it again, 6 euros? fee every 3 years then maybe it effectively is visa-free travel and it might be time to stop moaning because nobody could put forward a positive compelling case to stay in the EU? (helps that there isn't one)

No, oh well, in which case - to bastardise a line from Sorkin - they'll like us when we win.

Re: Wouldn't it be nice if the UK had an effective regulator?

The UK does have an effective and well-funded regulator. Is now a good time to talk about the RoI?

MI5 gros fromage: Nah, US won't go Huawei from dear old Blighty over 5G, no matter what we do

Re: Bog Off USA

It's a legitimate decision for government to make. There's a reason GCHQ are neck-deep in this. They are a risk, it's true - but it's a manageable risk with Huawei's compliance, and that's what matters.

$13m+ Swiss Army Knife of blenders biz collapses to fury of 20,000 unfulfilled punters

Man...

I remember laughing my tits off at this kickstarter and how much money it was pulling in.

Never once had an issue with a kickstarter, maybe because I pay attention to who is selling and what they're selling.

Non-unicorn $700 e-scooter shop Unicorn folds with no refunds – after blowing all its cash on online ads

Ahahaha

"A large portion of the revenue went toward paying for Facebook ads to bring traffic to the site"

Perfect.

Who wants to take a wild guess if they even did that..

People who work in marketing are morons - a good product sells itself, every single time.

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

"I’m not a technologist, but"

I'm not a neurosurgeon, BUT, it seems like brain transplants would be trivial.

We strained our eyes with Lenovo's monster monitor: 43.4 inches for price of five 24" screens

Meh.

I bought a C49RG90 the other day and it's absolutely badass. Never horizontally scroll excel ever again.

Radio nerd who sipped NHS pager messages then streamed them via webcam may have committed a crime

Humbug

It's trivial to gulp down pager messages, the encoding on them stands up to no scrutiny at all and in theory doing so isn't a problem. Asking people not to look at what's passing through the air is like doing semaphore and asking people to look the other way - AFAIK merely listening has never been tested in court and it wouldn't survive if it was. HOWEVER - then distributing the data you collect has always been a no-no, predating RIPA.

TBH I'd say prosecute the hospitals that are passing messages around effectively unencrypted. Seems like a job for the ICO.

A stranger's TV went on spending spree with my Amazon account – and web giant did nothing about it for months

Blergh.

Obviously this stuff should be revocable and Amazon's site suffers with a lot of inertia.

BUT

Remove all your payment cards so purchases fail until Amazon fix?

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

Well, yeah.

Been saying for years it would never ever happen including on these very forums. Still hilarious the way people a) thought it would ever happen and b) that most foreign press already thought it was already a thing.

Her Majesty opens UK Parliament with fantastic tales of gigabit-capable broadband for everyone

Re: It's no problem...

After a no deal BREXIT, they'll be cutting the cables to the UK anyway.

Vast majority of the bandwidth between the US and Europe passes through the UK so I wish them every luck with that. Bit late to start laying pipe now.. All that finance traffic down the toilet, oh dear..

Tesco parking app hauled offline after exposing 10s of millions of Automatic Number Plate Recognition images

Re: RFID tags instead of pictures.

"it beats an open server filled with pictures of license plates any day of the week"

If we're assuming incompetence now they don't have pics of numberplates (I can think of reasons why that can't possibly be true, but -) now they have name, if it's a corp account, where you live, payment info and again, times when you used a car park, road (in the case of tolls) etc and when. Can't imagine why Brazil has a systemic problem with armed car jackings of rich people.

Okay sure presumably you could anonymise such a system and have people only top-up so to speak via shops or whatever, but most people won't want the inconvenience. Not saying there should be a problem with such a system but we're assuming incompetence remember - there shouldn't be a problem with a db of licence plate images either..

Enjoy the holiday weekend, America? Well-rested? Good. Supermicro server boards can be remotely hijacked

Re: Port forwarding necessary

Really, it's actually not so simple to do

It's absolutely trivial if you give it a public IP.

Also by the way there's billions of reasons to use IPMI not just related to no onsite admin - if you run thousands of servers you want a way to manage them, to provision them - it's the public IP *plus* flaws that's at issue here. They're both fixable.

Call Windows 10 anything you like – Microsoft seems to

Hololens..

I bought a Vive on spec and was happy with my decision. Would not buy a hololens without getting my hands on one.

Also, by the way, when I found out Microsoft was killing HL1 updates I didn't even know it was officially for sale and I stay up to date with this so not terrifying in any way Microsoft. There's a company that should know how to do hardware, has demonstrated it knows how to do hardware and then is utterly tone-deaf when they've sold you it. May or may not be up to standards but that's no excuse. Who are you - Apple?

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moves to shut Parliament

Re: So, to sum up. . .

To *accurately* sum up: lawfully emplaced prime minister acts entirely within the law and constitutional norms and settles parliament down a bit and they all cry like babies about things they plainly don't understand. There's gonna be such a massive turfing out after the next GE..

Twice in one month: Microsoft updates new-style Terminal preview

Well..

I've switched to Linux on the desktop since I first got hyped about this, but still... Microsoft are finally getting around to fixing one the things I've been complaining about since the late-90's - even to the face of senior Microsoft execs in a pub in London one night circa-2010 - so it can't be all bad. Wonder if it'll make it into the next OS release they do...

Leaked EU doc plots €100bn fund to protect European firms against international tech giants

Re: Nothing to see here

If you don't think the backstop is necessary then you clearly don't get why its an absolute necessity. Next you'll be telling us that there is no way out of the backstop without the EU's permission, and its all a big trick to keep the UK in the EU, won't you? Spoiler Alert: There is, for both the UK and the EU, but you've read the WA and you knew that? You have read the WA, haven't you?

I was one of the first members of the public to read it, I distinctly recall live-tweeting reading it. To this day I'm fairly sure I'm one of the very few people who has. The "way out" assumes the backstop itself doesn't have nefarious purpose, which leads anybody with any sense to presume that the backstop has a nefarious purpose. You're forgetting that parliament on legal advice voted this down 3 times and rejected point-blank attempts to bring it back at least another two times. Lets pretend for a second that it's not just me and it's not just brexiteers given the vast majority of parliament are hardcore remainers, can we?

I understand the claimed purpose but the claimed purpose is a massive pile of illogical. The claimed purpose is that if there's no FTA as foreseen by the future relationship then somehow the UK blows the single market open. Why's that illogical? If there's no FTA everybody goes their own separate ways and we end up in the same place as under no deal otherwise... I'll give you a chance to think about why that doesn't do what is claimed minus backstop. ignoring the fact it's a nonsense, again, it's almost certainly going to cause the very thing it's supposed to prevent. It's illogicalception - illogical nonsense within illogical nonsense.

We've been debating for years if the common law legal system is in any way compatible with the civil law that is used around the rest of Europe, similar to how people debate if sharia law is compatible with same in various countries - the WA is the final proof that it isn't in any way. What boggles my mind is Theresa May couldn't see it and that she thought she could sneak it past parliament.

By the way on the presidents thing, yes there's 3 (I can pretend that's not absurd for a few seconds) to simply point out this - it's a colloquialism, when people say that they're referring to the president who shows up to represent the EU, the president of commission and literally nobody is impressed by the pedantic effort of correcting like that as if you know something other people don't. Everybody knows.

Oh and by the way Brexit (in any form) and the GFA are entirely compatible with each other. Three years now I've been asking people to cite the sections of the GFA that are affected in any way and nobody has managed it yet.

Re: Nothing to see here

If the guys running the EU had any sense at all they'd shower Trump with love and he wouldn't know what to do with it. Why is a president of a military dictatorship like North Korea politically and diplomatically smarter that the president of the EU? That's the real question here.

If they'd just given Trump what he wanted in the first place it costs the EU *nothing* and they gain an ally in the fight against China as they see it. They're all morons and it's embarrassing. Nobody in the EU wants to buy cars made in the US because they're crap - and consumers know it - and if the EU had sense it'd recognise that and realise it doesn't need massive tariffs to keep those vehicles out the market. Similar issue with GM food - demand they're labelled accurately and then let consumers decide what they want.

Same thing with the WA backstop. It costs the EU (and by that I include Ireland) absolutely *nothing* to not have it, and it's a massive cost to having it and they refuse to budge on it, it's utterly nutty.

It boggles my mind this is the system and people that citizens of the EU actually want to be governed by. Simple problems require simple solutions, not pretending they are or actually making them 5000x more complex than they need to be.

Re: Nothing to see here

At the risk of sounding like a toddler, the EU started it. Compare the tariff rates and barriers the EU applies to US goods versus the same tariffs to EU goods the US applies and tell me maybe Trump doesn't have a point. You can't - because he does.

Trump isn't a protectionist - he wants a fair system which shouldn't be too much to ask. The UK has been asking for a fair system from the EU too, we've been asking for one for 40 years with no improvement and that's why we're leaving the EU.

Re: Nothing to see here

What do BREXITters still care about the EU? You won't have to pay for this fund (or see a penny from it), so there you go, have fun.

We don't, great way to piss 100Bn down the toilet though.

For the record wait until the sanctions against EU companies start in Asia, Africa and North America all because you set up a fund that couldn't possibly do what it's intended to do because such businesses can't survive in the EU because of the EU which is why you need the fund in the first place - standard EU deeply flawed circular logic. You're all crazy. Just.. Crazy. Certifiable to use the Americanism.

End of an era for ULA as the last Delta IV Medium rocket leaves launch pad

Re: I could never

Weapons have always been built with the assumption that GPS doesn't exist, that's the whole point of what I said. It's the difference between 10 meter CEP and 10cm CEP and nothing more - it's not even that if it's something like a modern cruise missile that actually understands what it's supposed to be hitting looks like.