Posts by nicboyde

Hong Kong's central bank sees seven big issues to solve before a central bank digital currency can fly

An Eighth Requirement

Freedom from trace, permission, supervision or oversight.

Sometimes you want to pay someone and no one else to know. Once upon a time one could rely on the discretion of one’s bankers to pay the rent on the little flat in Paddington that the wife doesn’t know about. But no more. All sorts of types can get court orders and the jobsworths at the banks are supine.

So cash.

If a digital currency cannot offer this kind of freedom, it won’t be used. It deserves its own status as a problem to be addressed, or cash or barter will remain.

A Code War has replaced The Cold War. And right now we’re losing it

Violence IS an answer.

While writing software and using it is as cheap as it is, you cannot hope to regulate it. Or to defend yourself against it.

You can however make the consequences of writing bad or malicious code so expensive that people will regulate themselves. This is what we do for crimes like theft, or murder. We make the consequences very hard to escape, expensive and public.

This would mean changing the civil laws that permit authors to avoid responsibility for the consequences of poor code. Make them pay. They'll fix the bugs if it means not getting fined.

It would also mean pursuing, with full vigour, the bad actors who deliberately publish malicious code. Don't just shut down their botnets: arrest them and jail them. Noisily and publicly. Confiscate their houses and property. Make them pay. There is nothing like enough effort being put into suppressing cybercrime, so it is flourishing. Instead, prosecutors aim at the folk who crack poorly-secured government websites. This is the limit of their interest and concern, and this has to change.

Lawyers are expensive, and so are policemen, but their cost is but nothing compared to the economic damage caused by shitty code and shitty people.

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

There are no humans at Paypal

Thesis: There are no humans at Paypal

Discuss.

Please provide proofs if posing a contradiction to the thesis. (These would include evidence of change happening after speaking to a "person".)

Brit prosecutors fling almost a million quid at anti-drone'n'phone ideas

I've never seen the point of not using a shotgun. We have in Britain plenty of trained clay-pigeon shooters who'd love a nice easy shot at a loaded drone. Probably wouldn't have to pay them if you let them keep the contraband. Or a tenner per 'bird' downed, whichever.

For me, though, the right thing to do would be to permit all the drugs and phones to enter freely. Someone sitting in a THC haze texting his mum isn't the bloke sharpening a shiv and/or denouncing all and sundry as kaffir unbelievers (replace with religious maniac epithet of your choice).

When customers try to be programmers: 'I want this CHANGED TO A ZERO ASAP'

Re: Any chance of a solution?

Nothing succeeds - like a budgie with no teeth.

That's what we were taught, anyway. Possibly I didn't go to very good schools.

Cops turn Download Festival into an ORWELLIAN SPY PARADISE

Perhaps someone in the current world of finance could enlighten me: has the law on legal tender changed? Surely cash, within the legal limits, (http://www.royalmint.com/aboutus/policies-and-guidelines/legal-tender-guidelines) must be accepted if offered in settlement of a debt? Is not every vendor taking part in this scheme conspiring with the organisers to break the law? Shouldn't Leicestershire's Finest be on to this, dragging the offenders off to the Beak?

DRUPAL-OPCALYPSE! Devs say best assume your CMS is owned

Looked at Drupal long ago to compare with other free CMS options, and went with MODx - which has also had its problems (always quickly resolved) - but if you've already been compromised, it's too late..

Fixing a compromised site takes a very long time because while some back-doors are easy to find, others are dead sneaky - you are supposed to find the easy ones and think the job is all over.

So back-ups are essential, yet on at least one occasion one of my sites had been compromised by at least two different baddies at different times and it took ages to find a clean (pre-hack [pre-hack]) backup. One had actually got in before the flaw had been published.

What I really, really wanted was a site-signature for the code of the site, and file-signatures for each code file and some kind of signature-scanner that could detect a change in those signatures across the entire site and all the backups to identify the last clean version. MODx doesn't have this, and the least said about Drupal the better, but they don't have it either.

I'm no techie - I'm not much more advanced than the "developer who treats Drupal like magic". This is why I use someone else's CMS rather than design and build my own. I can't build OSs either, or write drivers for flash arrays. All magic to me.

As it should be. The magicians need to up their game, and in these days of thousands of baddies, working in shifts, hiding behind irresponsible and incompetent governments (if not worse), the magicians are failing to impress. We need the tools to make recovery from compromise as straightforward as, say, an original install.

While I'm at it, the chap above who has "thousands" of invoice-like transactions that now have to be re-keyed, needed a transaction dump file - a journal we call them in accounting terms - which can be used to regenerate the online processes in a recovery - suitably error- and hack-checked to remove the SQLi transactions.This has to be maintained somewhere else, not in the same database as the one it protects. and, no, I don't know how to do this either.

Come on Gandalf.

So, just how do you say 'the mutt's nuts' in French?

Gaelic

According to Bruichladdich, darling of Islay, "Clachan a Choin" is the Gaelic. By which I believe they mean the Scottish form, not the Irish, Manx etc.

http://www.bruichladdich.com/news/press-releases/murray-mcdavid-is-sold-to-aceo-ltd

Furious Stephen Fry blasts 'evil' Reg and 'TW*T' Orlowski

OK, I give up

What's a thespedian?