Posts by rag2

Ransomware-hit British Library: Too open for business, or not open enough?

Re: One cheap, simple solution for reducing the impact of this sort of thing.

But worse, those documents would appear largely not to have been retained. In the realm of secure information management there are no easy, cheap solutions.

GitHub's Copilot flies into its first open source copyright lawsuit

Re: Is it "fair use" or is it intellectual property theft?

In the UK there is a concept of Fair Dealing, which isn't quite the same. (Introductory from British Library at https://www.bl.uk/business-and-ip-centre/articles/fair-dealing-copyright-explained) Of course, it's never quite that simple. For our American cousins (and possibly others) IANAL.

Tech spec experts seek allies to tear down ISO standards paywall

Europe does it better

For many of the reasons outlined above, ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute), quite some time ago decided no longer to charge for ETSI standards. Since the participants had already, in effect, paid their people to generate the standards, why should anyone have to pay again? Much the same applies to 3GPP, which goes way beyond 3G, and to whom ETSI in effect donated the GSM standards as a get-you-started. The cost of standards themselves simply becomes an overhead on development, whose cost is ultimately paid for by customers, whether network operators or retail (and business) end users.

Not only that, but ultimately high cost items—standards, patent fees—fail in the market place.

Annoyed US regulator warns it might knock SpaceX's shiny new Texas tower down

Not forgetting Tereshkova, of course.

Blessed are the cryptographers, labelling them criminal enablers is just foolish

Re: Peer review

If one isn't prepared to be disappointed by the answer, and learn from it, then one should not ask the question.

In cryptography "AFAIK" is simply not good enough. Unless one is prepared to think as a true hostile would, then one is not in the game. The opponent is ruthless, and has far more resources than most folk are prepared to give credit for.

If one is serious about crypto, then reviewing existing papers—your favourite search engine is your friend—would be a very good place to start. Are existing proposals better or worse than yours? And then making friends, one way or another, with a university (or industry) crypto group would be a good second or first step.

Cryptography is not simply about the maths, it's really about making sure that any proposed scheme is secure in the manner in which it is to be used. Thus the frequent development process, team-based, is make a cockshy system, let a hostile team loose against it, find and evaluate the weaknesses, rinse & repeat. It's very hard to do on one's own.

Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4

Learning to code

Or twenty years older than that to understand that a Raspberry Pi Zero(W) plus power bank is just soooo much smaller, lighter, cheaper, and more powerful than the machine that you learnt to program on. Also, there's no danger of spilt card decks!

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...

Boris: You sacked Bob Quick for less!

Does anyone remember Bob Quick being sacked—described as resigning—in 2009 for keeping Secret papers in a transparent folder, duly photographed by the paparazzi? And who was Mayor of London at the time who sacked him/took the resignation? The very same Boris J., now the UK's prime Minister!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/apr/09/bob-quick-terror-raids-leak

Unionised BT workers reject plans to revamp pay, grading structures

Re: BT is changing - the redundancies and reorganisation are necessary

The issue with your intriguing thesis is that there is a presumption that a new management & pay structure will somehow, magically, make the company more efficient. In my direct experience of BT, such new structures do little more than to fritter away the esprit de corps of the staff in favour of short-term cash-flow reductions on the pay front.

Long term, the company, in this case BT, suffers. And consequently, those who do business with the company suffer. And as for awarding staff "Golden" status, just how is such status to be compatible with team-work? And removing indirect discrimination? Strong companies are those where such pernicious behaviours are systematically discouraged, rather than structurally enabled. As for "We value diversity…"!

Ex-VMware veep loses attempt to throw out his own $1.5m legal win

Bleak House…

Just as in Dickens' Bleak House, it would seem that the only real victors in the case are members of the legal profession. Unlike Richard in Bleak House who ended up with nothing, Dane Smith is better off at the end of the proceedings. But not as better off as the legal profession.

Odd sort of Justice!

ITU readies gigabit G.fast standard for copper's last wild ride

It's not all twisted pair…

@Steven Jones: existing Telco line plant has low quality pairs between exchange and PCCP (cabinet) and then PCCP and DP (distribution point). From the DP (telephone pole or distribution box) then the pairs to the customer are, generally, non-twisted pairs designed a very long time ago for audio performance only. The modern CAT5/6/7 cables used for data networking have much tighter specifications than the old CAT3 cable used for telephone applications (all of thses use twisted pair technology). If one has a pole feed, or a feed from a distribution box, then the cable involved will not be balanced. Whilst not as leaky as mains wiring, flat pair is still a leaky medium.