Posts by Dave Aitken 11 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2007
or any other mecha-bits of these mechadroid would-be overlords. We need to zap their frikkin brains out with 10kiloTesla per second EMP pulses. Build coils, lots of BIG coils!! and magnets!! gather many many large magnetics. We must prepare to hit these monsters where we can hurt them
glass half-empty or half-full?
Full to overflowing with breaches both direct (civil SERVANTS) and indirect, but you can only really get accountability from STAFF, not from contracted-out services
A cautious welcome to this start of what may become a wind-change in HM Gumment practice
Well done, Jesper
Aside from the fanboi flame wars erupting in previous coments, let's get back to basics for a moment. This multi-layered techno-social engineering scam demonstrates 2 things:
1) the criminal business case to invest time & effort into coding such a Byzantine maze of tricks and traps for the ignorant (not in the perjoative sense of the word) masses is sound
2) the home computing paradigm is not sound, upon which the case in 1) above is based
I can think of no other purchase we make where we are seemingly willing to accept all the risk of vulnerabilities; nobody would buy a car if they knew that no matter what they did the clutch would burst into flames next Tuesday, &c
The balance of liability for malfunction between vendor and purchaser is so distorted in favour of the former in this computing malarkey compared to any other aspect of modern commerce it is almost beyond belief.
How have we, at a societal level, seemingly blundered blindfold into such a mess?
Now how best, at a societal level, are we to procede to redress this ridiculous imbalance?
The answer must lie in persuading legislatures to produce sotware liability laws. Lobby your MP, AM, deputy, representative, congressman - whatever title (s)he may have in your country - the computer software vendors must be legislated into taking financial liability for the flaws and faults in their products.
OBTW: "not part of user acceptance test plan" - precious ;-) - a coffee spluttering moment
Our wunnerful gum'ment has got a LONG LONG way to go to even understanding how to procure Information Systems & Services coherently.
So when will Gordo announce the sacking of the e-gov "Commissioner"?
Will Gordo understand that this is (I originally capitalised the 'is' - but it made this contribution look like it came from Mars) one area where centralisation of authority (real authority, not just words on paper) actually makes sense. I propose a Cabinet Office Minister, advised by a panel of Accreditors, shall be tasked with an URGENT and comprehensive information architecture review across all Departments; the Senior Information Risk Officer in every department to report to the oversight panel by - say - end of Feb.. Oh! there already is one - young Milliband!
The coherence of HMG IS must be security-driven, Milliband is nominally in charge of the Central Sponsor of Information Assurance. Time to give the CSIA teeth.
Outcome: lots more work for me ;-)
"The following URL:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/10/dwarf_stars/
has a length of 52 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 25 characters:
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Or, give your recipients confidence with a preview TinyURL:
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OK for tinyurl among friends; no guarantee, of course, for links from strangers.
Remember: don't take sweeties from strange men
The current US mil fanboi approach to 'network centric warfare' is ludicrously ambitious and I, for one, am glad to see that there is at last some semblance of detached and objective scrutiny being applied. The FCS is nothing less than 'Skynet' - the US mil actually think/believe that 'the network' will be better at warfighting than 'the soldier'. The intellectual & technical chasm between their aspirations and the ability of technology to deliver is so enormous their strategy appears to be to ignore it.
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