Posts by Otto is a bear.

Spanish village called 'Kill the Jews' mulls rebranding exercise

Re: @Rob Crawford Village?

As a drinker and a believer, I'd like to say, I get confused as well, but drinking is mandatory in my faith.

UK.gov chucks £28m at F1 tech for buses and diggers plan

GKN

GKN, is a British engineering company, Guest, dating back to the late 18th century, becoming GKN in 1902, it's been involved in the motor industry a long time, so actually an unsurprising choice. I knew who they were long before I'd ever heard of Cummins. There are probably GKN components in every vehicle in the world, and probably Cummins engines as well.

Cummins, a US company, are mere whippersnappers born in 1919.

UK.gov to train up 11-year-old cyberwarriors

Still

At least they will be able to communicate on the same intellectual level with Ministers, and maybe share their Starmix. Well perhaps not, they would never get the bag back.

Brawling neighbours challenge 'quiet' cul-de-sac myth

My last cat

Was kind and considerate, only ever using its litter tray. It was also IT literate and spent many a happy hour helping me type, voicing its opinions at my documentation prowess, and acting as a screen saver when I left my desk.

Does anybody know how to get cat hair out of a keyboard.

UK's CASH POINTS to MISS Windows XP withdrawal date

Back in the day..

Many appliances were driven by Windows XP, and an ATM is just another kind of appliance. I'd bet NCR would love the banks to buy shiny new ones, but then how would they manage the production spike. It really does make sense to only replace these devices when they break, as they are in the main on closed networks.

It's also not very environmentally friendly to dump vast numbers of perfectly serviceable machines, just because they can't run Windows XP.

Boffins demo FIVE MICRON internal combustion engine

Re: Efficiency?

I thought it was steam engines, whatever happened to the steam engine on a chip.

My work-from-home setup's better than the office. It's GLORIOUS

Just a minute

Let me say a good word for corporate IT. --Working -- No minute's up, can't think of one. The trouble is that corporate senior management do not understand IT, still after all these years. They all see it as a cost that has no benefit to them, and something to be delivered as cheaply as possible.

Working for a major IT company, it's even more pronounced, they seem to think everything can be delivered with MS Office Pro, on 6 year old laptops. Oh and BYOD, doesn't exist, against the rules. Lucky for them we all do it though.

What did you see, Elder Galaxies? What made you age so quickly?

Could be

That the background radiation, gravitational and solar proximity effects in the early universe just drove the whole thing faster, and that by the time things had calmed down there were a few lucky, stable galaxies left amongst all the young whippersnappers born out of the rise and fall of all the rest of the early galaxies.

There you are a potted and probably completely wrong theory from someone who believes God invented physics, and then let it get on with the rest, perhaps with a few nudges here and there to confound us.

We all owe our EXISTENCE to lovely VOLCANOES, say boffins

Confused

Who said it was, I thought this article was about the preservation of life under ice in volcanic hotspots. The major cause of which is plate tectonics and mantle hotspots driven by the Earths molten core and gravitational distortion of the crust by the moon.

Also the article's title warrants the word "may", there's conflicting evidence on the snowball earth scenario, mind you not such a catchy headline.

Foxconn preps for Peak Apple with FIFTEEN THOUSAND new hires

Oh How.....

Every British politician would love to make that kind of announcement. Mind you the same amount of money in the 5i or Europe would only pay for 1500.

Steve Ballmer: Thanks to me, Microsoft screwed up a decade in phones

The trisk microsoft pulled

Was to be better at marketing what was a mediocre product, and in effect out competing everyone else, Windows was behind the curve, and still is in many respects, when compared to other "Legacy" operating systems.

Now, it's very difficult to convince most customers to risk anything else. The Windows Suite is now good enough, and it's value position makes it a better choice financially than any other combination.

Oh and if Microsoft thinks it wouldn't market like Apple, why does it go for premium prices on a lot of its products. iPAD v Surface.

Remember you won't get fired if you buy Microsoft.

John Lewis to respray with coat of Oracle ERP: Don't worry, we won't be 'wall to wall' Larry

Typo

I suspect 2017 was a typo, they really meant 2107, :-). Well, you would hope that tey are not going to be daft enough to try a big bang switch over. Unfortunately we don't know JL's current architecture, if it's all that old. If they already have a Service Bus moving stuff around, it gets easier, and lowers the risk, in fact you can use your service bus to do the transformations from old to new, and even parallel run for a while.

4 years really is a bit optimistic, unless that's when the first bit comes online.

NHS England tells MPs: 'The state isn't doing dastardly things with GP medical records'

What do you want from the NHS

Do you want any healthcare professional to be able to access your complete medical record before treating you, or to guess what a GP might be treating you for, or another hospital out of your area.

Do you want the NHS to be able to analyse health data for trends to identify disease or side effect trends, so that research funds can be applied.

If you do, then how do you think the NHS can do this without a single data structure to interrogate, be it distributed or centralised.

I have little trust in politicians, or indeed health service managers, but a lot of trust in healthcare professionals, with good reason, having had to repeat my medical history verbally many times over the past few years, I would much prefer that this data is available to any doctor who needs to treat me, just in case I forget a detail. I also don't want to carry a usb stick or card around with me that has that data on it, or authorises access, being human I would forget them.

Oh, and you might also want to think about the full consequences of Insurance Companies seeing everybody's heath records, not that I want them too, but you are required to disclose known medical conditions when you take out a policy. In some cases also during a policy, for example car insurance, failure to do that would invalidate your insurance. The Insurance companies might well find that their client pool drops dramatically, along with profits and revenue.

Re: One big database

Nice idea, just how much IT do you think a surgery has to do this, and what constitutes the minimum amount of data. You would need some kind of AI to work it out, or someone in the surgery who would spend their time reviewing and releasing data requests.

Snowden leak: GCHQ DDoSed Anonymous & LulzSec's chatrooms

What do you expect the state to do then?

You'll find that security & police services are permitted to disrupt criminal and terrorist activity, based on intelligence, and that they also have a duty to prevent crime, not just detect it.

In any kind of state, this is what you want your security & police services to do, the world would be a very dangerous place if they didn't. One method of doing both is to letting groups know, we know where you are, who you are and what you are doing, which I'd say a denial of service attack on hackers would happily do.

You might remember that it's illegal to shoot a policeman under any circumstances, but not for a policeman to shoot back, or shoot you first if you threaten their lives.

It is not that easy to find some cyber criminals, as they may only be visible for very short periods, certainly less time than getting a warrant, on the basis of we don't know who they are or where they are but we will, so can we have a warrant please.

Another thing to bear in mind is, state SIGINT can do a lot, and has a lot of potential for misuse, but then just think what the likes Lulzsec , Anoynomous, criminals or terrorists would do, if they had the power, and were not challenged. In the west we are lucky that our governments are reasonably honest and are not repressive, and the security and police services like it that way.

London's King of Clamps shuts down numberplate camera site

ANPR

As London Congestion Charging found out, number plate recognition on its own is no good, there are cars around, and more than you would think, that have false plates, so vehicle images are captured for evidence. This is so that little old ladies living in Scotland don't get charged for Bob the Builder skipping the congestion charge. There is a difference between a disabled driver and a blue badge holder, the two are not the same. The disability exemption is linked to disability allowance entitlements, blue badges cover a wide range of disabilities.

ANPR systems will flag vehicles of interest, for example, no tax or insurance, and depending on the installation will either have a local list, or will report all vehicles back to a server. One suspects that the Police have more than just that. There is one ANPR system that measures traffic speed between two points, but uses a one way hash of the plate to record the data.

Brocade-funded study says Fibre Channel faster than FCoE

Stating the bleeding obvious

Well Da..... If you wrap one protocol in another it'll be slower than running it on its own. It's more a case of how much faster the native protocol is than the wrapped. The key being that Fibre channel fabrics, cost an arm and a leg, as you say. So is that 20% extra worth it.

Big tech firms holding wages down? Marx was right all along, I tell ya!

More likely accidental cartel behaviour.

During my 30 odd years of working in technical IT, I've seen the market move from the buy your skills at any price to we pay the market rate for skills for virtually every employer, and every job. Sure there are still a few skills or people that buck the trend but, companies in general like to pay a median market rate for new hires. This is probably driven more by HR policy than any collusion between companies. An HR guru says it's the way to go, and companies follow.

Currently the drive is to deskill and drive down the costs, so highly skilled, multi-skilled and experienced staff are being replaced by cheap single skilled hires, which is great news for Microsoft.

BTW Marxism is a fine political and economic theory, which works, right up until you add people. People are the downfall of every political and economic system you care to mention. Democracy at least allows us to change to a new system we can destroy every few years.

Survey: Yoof too COOL for Ferraris, want state-sponsored hybrids

Didn't Some one say....

It's all about the platform.

Seriously though, you would need to get the motor, smart phone and auto accessory industries to agree about standard interfaces, which isn't just putting USB into a car. You would also need to ensure that the user's device choices were safe in a driving environment. Checking out your music library whilst driving isn't safe. Watching a movie on your smart phone isn't safe, and so on.

My current Golf likes iPhones and has simple controls that allow you to use it with the inbuilt CD/Radio and Phone system without taking your hands of the steering wheel. The phone is locked away in a special compartment, so you can't fiddle with it whilst driving. This is sensible, but you can't use anything other than an Apple iPhone or iPod. The car also locks out a lot of it's own configuration functions when the vehicle is moving, so extending that to selecting songs would be a good move.

I doubt it would be too difficult to do this for all smart phones. Anything more sophisticated would be distracting and dangerous.

ATM hacker Barnaby Jack's death blamed on accidental drug overdose

Re: What a crock.

There's nothing said about his state of mind. I'd have thought a man of his intelligence would have known the consequences of consuming this kind of cocktail.

But then I know some brilliant people who just don't know when to stop, and have no sense of self preservation.

A brilliant hacker, but as we all are a flawed human being, and I suspect his family and friends will miss him.

Samsung whips out 12.2-inch 'Professional' iPad killers

Re: Sounds like a fringe use case?

It all depends on what you want your pad for. I have a Note 10.1 and it's great for meetings, jotting notes and then transferring them to a document for minutes. It isn't however better at heavyweight document processing than my Air or PC/Laptops.

Really the only thing missing for me is the ability to easily drive a projector through an inbuilt VGA or USB connection, so I can dump my laptop when to of the office. BTW most projectors in the wild are still VGA driven, and I don't want to carry a projector with me.

I would probably switch to an iPad if it did native handwriting as I refer the iPad interface.

12 inch iPad or Note really would have a place in business, but do we need a 10 inch as well, hmmmmm

Personal use however is different, as web surfing and film viewing aren't big business needs, and you don't need a bid tablet for those.

India's spooks prepare to peer through their own PRISM

Now didn't I read somewhere

A suggestion that people should move their stuff to India if they didn't want it monitored by the US, so obviously India is better.

BTW. The security services in any country always monitor the opposition parties, and the governing party as well. History shows us that security breaches are as likely to come from the party in power, as anyone else, more so in fact. I suppose the difference being weather they disclose it to the ruling party for political advantage or not. In the 5i community they just use it to stop the wrong people getting onto sensitive committees, or too high up, with a quiet word to their party leader, as demonstrated in "Yes, Prime Minister".

Oi, Obama. Rein your spooks in, demands web giants' alliance

Re: Here is a plan...

And this will give you exactly what additional protection against Government, India has one too, you know, and I suspect they are somewhat less liberal with data protection.

I notice that no one is making any suggestions about what limits should be imposed, or what level of protection they expect the state to provide. Politicians care about two things, getting re-elected, and who funds their campaign. Thus the law will always err on the side of FUD and special interests. Don't forget that in a democracy, you are the state and you get the state you deserve.

Crown Representative: SME biz is huge... but I don't have exact figures

1/2 Price IT

I wouldn't want to be an SME dealing with government or large business, nor would I want to invest in one, but then I know how capriciously they are treated by both government and business.

Just wait till the Department for Administrative Affairs decides to cut 10% from all it's suppliers, regardless of how good their deal is anyway. There is a big difference between talk and actions, no Minister is going to say take 10% off our costs, except for SMEs, they won't even consider them, even if it's policy, and neither will the purchasing functions when looking for cuts. In fact it's easier to take from an SME than it is from an SI or OEM.

Cabinet Office: Hey, forget those multi-BILLION pound deals...

Yeah, right

And who does he expect to design the systems, most government departments no longer have that capability. And it doesn't work for any service that has a reasonable GPMS either.

There are also multiple clouds from different vendors, so actually, all change, and no change.

CIOs, IT chiefs: ARRGH! What do you MEAN, HR just bought 400 iPads and didn't tell us

It comes to us all

Lets face it very few people understand technology, even in the IT world, people do not understand the full consequences of their actions. In away this is not news, be it HR, Finance and such, they all follow the IN commercial practice, often without thinking, because if company X does it, it must be the right thing to do.

The management of companies rarely understand their own businesses in any detail, let alone the legislation governing their business. Why should we be surprised that shadow IT projects appear when it's easy for an IT savvy employee to plug a wireless router into their network and enable all the wireless devices you like.

But fear not, outsourcing HR is now in vogue, so most of them will disappear, and services will be run from an emerging nation. That's right all your HR details shipped to the far east, bank accounts, the lot, and if you work for a secure government project, you can look forward to that being know outside your country as well.

London: Hey Amazon, wanna slip your speedy packages down our tubes?

Reliable IT.

Actually the whole tube could operate without any station of train staff at all, after all IT is now so reliable there is no chance of ticket machines going wrong. Oystercard updates are perfect so we never need to speak to anyone at a station. The Victoria line was designed for driverless trains, may still be so, for all I know and the man in the front is actually the guard, who isn't needed either, but is there for passenger confidence. On the DLR they don't pretend.

Just need the platform doors at all stations and TfL won't have to worry about Jumpers, ASLEF or the NUR at all. Just need a few security guards to give the impression of security within stations.

What's wrong with Britain's computer scientists?

Back in the day.

I left university with a degree in Environmental Sciences and Beer Drinking, so only one relevant qualification for being a computer programmer then.

In the late 70s companies would take on any science graduate and train them as programmers, analysts, operators and such. 35 years later I'm called a solutions architect, and I know too much and how much I still don't know. It beggars belief that computer science graduates can't get jobs because they don't know the right things. IT moves faster than education, so education should really teach you first principles in computing and higher education and industry focus that to their needs by training. My main problem with most of the graduates I see, are that they are one trick ponies, many of whom won't learn a new trick. I look for graduates that want to learn more, mainly because I know you can't ever stand still in IT.

Industry does not like to train people in new skills, because staff leave for better paid jobs, because Industry shoots itself in the foot by commoditising jobs, and continuously telling you that offshore is cheaper and that your job is going to the third world, so no long term career prospects either. I would also guess that many students think that you have to be very intelligent to work with computers, never met a BOFH, then.

New NSA leak reveals invasion of the management consultants

The trouble is

This kind of nonsense speak has been around in business for years, why use 1 word when 10 make you sound intelligent. Ok. I know that's not true, it just makes you sound like a Richard. But the fact that the NSA might have resisted it, unlikely, until recently shows credit to them.

One or two of the more savvy commercial managers in industry and government have been putting word limits on tender responses, now that really challenges an authors grasp of the English language. Sales speak goes straight out the window.

Anyway back to counterpointing the surrealism of the underlying metaphor. I'm a great fan of technology, you know.

PS. The police in the UK now refer to informers as HUMINT, rather than snouts or grasses. I'm also intrigued as to how you might deploy a national SIGINT network that operates at machine speed, perhaps there's a new network technology that not just bends the laws of physics, but seriously warps them as well.

China challenged to take down all of AWS and Google

oh come on!

Stop attributing superhuman powers to the NSA, I'd bet that the PLA are the only ones who do, they have the man power and budget.

Coroner suggests cars should block mobile phones

Re: Surely there is another side to this...

I don't know how it works in Aus., but in the UK, you it something in the back and it's your fault, no matter what. It's up to you to maintain a safe distance, regardless of brake lights. The only exceptions are vehicles joining the road. Even on Motorways, vehicles can stop in any lane as the M1 seems to prove every morning.

Good sence says don't do thinks that distract you when drivinging, but we all do stupid things like take a cd out of the glove compartment, read papers, text in the blackwall tunnel whilst driving with your knees. Sadly you can never stop this only punish the consequences.

Norks EXECUTE 80 for watching DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES

Re: bibles

I didn't know whether to up vote or down vote that, but it's true to say Christians are persecuted in large numbers, even by themselves. Coptic and Orthodox christians in the Middle East and East Asia probably suffer the most. The ancient Indian christian church, I hear, cops it from just about everybody including Western Christians.

Me, I've suffered intollerance a couple of times from other christians and athiests, lucky I live in a free country, even if I couldn't be prime minister of my country, because of my denomination. (Not sure if that's still true, and no Blair wasn't)

@DijitulSupport

I think that you can safely say the the Russians and Chinese only like the NORKS when it suites them, generally I think they see them at best as an embaressment, who they would love to step on. Unfortunately they can't, because that would upset the SOUKS. I'd guess they would only be too happy for the two to reunite, although it would be eyewateringly expensive for the SOUKS even with all that NORK cheap labour. Just ask the Germans.

It's probable that the NORKS do execute people caught with unauthorised TV, Mobile or Internet access, life is very cheap there and the less people to feed the better.

Death of the business Desktop

A funny thing, well not

Not so long ago 2010, I with the help of others, came up with a VDI solution for a client involving Sun, VMWare, Citrix (Legacy) and Microsoft, in some form or other. The main driver was security, no documents on desktop computers, no USB ports, and the ability for separate corporate networks to remain separate, but visible through a single terminal device, for users allowed to access more than one network. Only one solution supported that, Sun Ray, all was going fine until Oracle took over Sun and started insisting you used Oracle VMs. We actually wanted to mix the back ends, some Windows Server Based (External), some VMWare (internal). The biggest headache was external users, maybe 100 on a bad day at most, but out of a pool of maybe 10,000, on 100,000s of endpoints worldwide, basically the external bit could run on a single 2U 2 Socket server. VDI was the answer, the technology would work, but the licence costs were ridiculous for external users. Guess which vendor couldn't get their head round the issue. Outside of licensing the other problems we had were Server sizing, bandwidth and latency which were far more than any of the vendors predicted, and application compatibility. The basic office suite, and a few common well behaved apps worked fine, but once you try the specialist and older client/server applications, you have a problem.

So, why would you want to use VDI on a browser driven application, once you have everything browser driven, you don't need VDI. Heavy weight desktop apps maybe, but if it requires a big PC then a big server will be required to host it. Some terminal services client can operate within a browser very effectively.

Life would have been simpler if MS had let us use our own Office 365 implementation, and we'd have ended up with a server farm a fifth of the size of the VDI one required.

World's first 3D-printed metal gun 'more accurate' than factory-built cousin

Re: Danger Will Robinson

Mmmm, and we also seem to be forgetting the cost of the metal printers and the power needed being way beyond what a domestic supply could achieve.

This is a stunningly useful technology for manufacturing high quality low volume parts, the owners of many vintage vehicles, locomotives and aircraft will be able to source parts at far reasonable prices than they can at present, in small volumes.

Likewise any other hightech low volume product, like a Formula 1 car, a space shuttle, a large hadron collider or a warship can leverage this technology to produce complex parts. I'd be interested to know what the cut off point between casting and printing is in economic terms. In fact this technology is alreay used to do this.

The biggest risk is some politician, supported by Daily Mail readers will assume that it can be done by 10 year old in their bedroom, and insist the technology is licenced or banned.

Facebook fans fuel faggots firestorm

Re: 'Twas ever thus

Just a handy reminder to everyone who think cars have priority in the UK, they don't pedestrians always do, except on urban clearways and motorways. Run a pedestrian over and it's your fault unless you can prove otherwise.

BTW You can also have lots of fun with the word Rubber, in the US it's a condom, in the UK it's an eraser.

SR-71 Blackbird follow-up: A new TERRIFYING Mach 6 spy-drone bomber

Re: Remember battlecrusiers?

Well, I think the US might well dispute that, what with Vietnam ( 200+) and Korea (700+), and a few others since then. I would think the Gulf War was the last serious air to air fight, and that was 20+ aircraft for the coalition forces as a whole.

More importantly, most genuine experianced air to air combat pilots, even Israeli will have retired from front line service since they were last needed, which I think was the Gulf War.

Office wage slaves face extinction at hands of ROBOTS - if bosses listen to Gartner

You do have to wonder

There is the idea that technology frees up people from being wage slaves and allows them to expand their horizons in new directions, becoming self employed with vibrant craft businesses, being bloggers, starving....

The trouble is you need a market to buy and sell stuff, the financial markets seem to do very well buying and selling between computer systems, note I did say seem. Ultimately you have to sell something to someone, to make money, and if you automate the selling process you could land up with computers selling each other stuff, so could we have Ford selling Inchcape futures on a 2020 Focus that drives itself, but before it's even made Inchcape sell the future to RBS Fleet who trade it in for a 2021 model at a discount that they can sell back to Inchcape a profit, and so on, without a human ever buying a car.

Could be, daft though it may sounds.

Wanna run someone over in your next Ford? No dice, it won't let you

Re: Pedestrians walking out in front of you - A Gentle reminder

The missing word is children.

Re: Pedestrians walking out in front of you - A Gentle reminder

In the UK Pedestrians have right of way on all roads except clearways and motorways. It is up to you to avoid them, not the other way round. You have to slow down for them within the laws of physics. You should also prepare to stop when approaching pedestrians at the side of the road and, especially unaccompanied ones. Run a pedestrian over and you'll be debating it with the legal system. Don't forget most pedestrians pay road tax as well, and I'd expect you would like motorists to take care when you cross the road on foot.

BTW Isn't all this technology already on Some Volvos and Mercs? Parking is old hat.

NSA's Project Marina stores EVERYONE'S metadata for A YEAR

@JJF

Oh! how wrong you are on so many levels.

No security service can stop everything, but they do stop or disrupt a lot, they also let stuff happen to protect sources until really needed, witness how intelligence gathered from Lorenz and Enigma was ignored in WW2 when it would give away the fact the codes were cracked. They also won't tell you how they do things, because if their targets know that, then they can take counter measures. Ultimately most counter techniques are discovered and avoided, so new ones need to be devised.

And don't think that criminals and terrorists don't use sophisticated IT, they do, some fraud and drug groups are very good at it. After all they want to sell us more S*£t and can buy data just like anyone else. Although their pet hackers probably steal it.

But you are right Metadata is used to sell use more.

Re: This new?

I suspect that bullets are more likely to make things worse, have an internal revolution and the state will spy more on the people to root out dissenters, real or imagined. When the revolution succeeds the new government does the same to root out the old regime, and once complete, well we can't allow recidivism can we, we need to watch the people.

Get over it, just because they have the data doesn't mean they have the capability to use it to spy on everybody, they really don't. It takes far more manpower than any western democracy is prepared to afford.

Oh yes, and note that the NSA buy data from commercial providers, that's your loyalty cards and credit histories which can be bought by just about anyone the vendors want to sell it too.

NSA slides reveal: iPhone users are all ZOMBIES

Re: Watch the enemy within...

Just because you are security cleared does not mean you are involved in the security apparatus, it just means you are trusted to handle sensitive information to a certain level. In the UK all civil servants are security cleared, the level of that clearance will depend on the information they handle. The same is true for all employees of government contractors. Would you want your tax information handled by people who were not cleared. The vast bulk of cleared civil servants work for the DWP and HMRC.

Re: No surprise there.

The term Adversary is used by the security business as a whole to describe hackers, terrorists, spies and criminals, basically groups who actively oppose them, it is not used to describe everybody. No western security agency has the capability of doing anything more than monitoring chatter, and then acting on triggers for key individuals. You just have to think of the costs and logistics involved in doing anything more than this to realise how silly the idea that they are watch everybody. They may have data on the vast majority of people, but only a fraction of a percentage of people will ever be looked at.

So far as living in the light goes, if you think smoking pot, and a load of other stuff we do when we are young would stop you getting a job, it won't, because if you are open about it, it can't be used as leverage against you, unless you are still doing it.

I read the Guardians article in full, and several others, being a Guardian reader, their articles are coloured a particular way to back their position on Internet freedom, in fact this is more like Daily Mail journalism than anything else, make the people afraid of something they don't understand. It isn't balanced. It is true that anyone could be a target, but that does not mean everybody is. The people you want security services to monitor are Organised Criminals, Spies, Terrorists, Foreign Governments, People with access to very sensitive information, Economic Competition, and Infiltration Targets, they really don't have time to look at all of these, let alone anyone else.

Apple prepares to unleash iPhone 5S, 5C for the GREAT BRAWL OF CHINA

Re: Cheaper Option?!?!

Sorry third post on the same subject, but iPods have been that way for a number of years, in fact you could say the whole iThing range is a range from premium, big 4G iPad to iPod mini, and don't forget you can still get the iPhone 4 (Just) and iPhone 4S new from suppliers, which could be seen as entry level models. 99$ for a 4S.

Re: Fingerprint scanner?

Funny that, never had a problem with my Lenovo, or the IBM before that.

Re: I have it on great authority...

Then again, if you have a 4S you might well be considering a 5S. My 4S has a tiny scratch on the screen so I simply must get a new phone.

Google submits YET ANOTHER offer to fix 'search dominance' in EU

Sadly

No one has a monopoly on bullshit. More bullshit is spoken about the EU than it actually produces itself.

In this case the EU is trying to overcome the fact that most of us are lazy bastards and can't be bothered to use the non-google version of a service because we don't see any need to, and its there.

That earth-shattering NSA crypto-cracking: Have spooks smashed RC4?

The Guardian's version

I read the Grauniad's version of the article, railing against the fact that security agencies have broken standard internet encryption techniques, and how this was an affront to liberty, the end of the internet as we know it, a green light to criminals to do it, on the premiss that once you know something is possible, it's a lot easier to do.

But hang on, until the internet it was not possible for ordinary citizens to seriously encrypt their communications, and if law enforcement, or the security services wanted to intercept it, they needed a warrant. The security services still monitored random telephone and radio chatter, obtaining a warrant if they needed a close look. This is still what they do, but there is a hell of a lot more chatter to monitor, so methods to monitor it have had to be developed, and as a society we need our security services to do this.

The Grauniad thinks that the argument of criminal or terrorist use is a smoke screen, but both terrorist and criminal organisations spend money on breaking encryption, and it's recognised by security vendors that there is a war going on to keep encryption secure, thus as soon as one method is broken, a new one must be released. Breaking encryption is hard, it's much much easier to compromise the endpoints.

Here's the thing do you want criminals and terrorists to be able to communicate in total secrecy, safe from the prying eyes of governments. Do you want people to be able to organise a riot through blackberry. No, I thought not, you can't have it both ways. I live in a safe democracy, sadly, like all things these technologies can be used by totalitarian states as well. In democracies the state apparatus can't and won't afford the kind of surveillance manpower needed to watch every one, in a dictatorship, they can afford the manpower. Your communications in the UK, USA and in fact all the major democracies are as safe as they ever have been, unless you start taking about pulling off major coke deals, or blowing up bits of the government.

re: Why would we have known about it?

@Ted Treen

Having been a liberal activist from the mid-seventies, and being at university during the three day week, I cannot think of any of my many friends of all political colours, and indeed serving military officers, of one who would have welcomed a military coup to solve the countries problems. In fact, I suspect it would have destroyed the country, and divided our military and police forces, as it would today.