Posts by tre4bax

Chinese state media accuses Cisco and other US giants of spying

Clearly a lot of posturing and focused on protectionism and developing yet more FUD.

The reason for you to be paranoid is if you believe your technical resources are not as skilled and would therefore not pick up something in the system designed to export your secrets. If they are skilled enough an approval process should be all that is necessary to ensure that the devices are safe from the risks.

Many years ago confronted with someone concerned at what the Chinese chips in their laptop could be exporting to China I pointed out that it was running an American operating system and that could well be doing the same. I mean what else is it doing in all the time it spends with an egg timer and disk activity for no apparent reason ;-)

The 'experts' who never see BBM will never understand RIM

When I first encountered this I asked my kids worried that they may be missing out but they knew of nobody in their school that used a BlackBerry or BBM! This seemed strange as the Register and everybody else seemed to think this was such a given.

Leads me to wonder if this is actually just in London or maybe other urban concentrations. Out here in the sticks where connectivity is less assured maybe people don't get so wedded to messenger clients and instead use the slightly less real time threaded text messages.....

A platform such as this restricted to a single device is not going to survive ultimately when there are similar applications that will work on all clients including blackberry. If they truly want to exploit this then RIM would need to expand the user base but honestly I'm not sure even that would be enough now, blackberry users on the trains in and out of the capital seem to be becoming a rarer and rarer sight.

Microsoft: Don't overclock Windows 8 unless you like our new BSOD

Don't I remember reading somewhere that DELLs success was on the back of overclocking 286 chips and thus delivering the fastest device of this type available at that point. Of course nobody had invented the BSOD at this point.

Wraps come off UK super-snooper draft plans

Fingerprinting

This line is interesting

Checking communication records, not content, is a crucial part of day-to-day policing and the fingerprinting of the modern age – we are determined to ensure its continued availability in cracking down on crime.

How many of us have been fingerprinted without actually doing anything to provoke suspicion of needing to be fingerprinted?

I have no problem with tracking people that there are suspicions against, much as we would fingerprint them. See how people would feel if the government announced they were going to finger print everyone by force..... Oh didn't they do that a few years ago with a DNA database...that went well for them too....

They will get away with this simply because most people do not understand. And most organisations have not realised that this requirement will need to be forced on to them next so perpetrators using their networks can be traced. This will involve a lot more spending...