Posts by Adrian 8 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2007
There was a case a few years ago where the Halifax argued the toss against a disputed withdrawal. This was before C&P but they refused to believe their equipment was infallible. Ross Anderson was a witness for the defence (of the account holder).
I closed my account : they're clearly stupid.
All the home secs since Blunkett have supported ID cards. I can't believe they're all that stupid (they're bright enough to fiddle the taxpayers, aren't they ? Though not so bright they weren't caught ..).
But minister material willing to put their names to this stupidity must be getting thin on the ground by now.
I'm sorry, I don't see the problem here. The report shows that if you have access to the router admin pages, you can use an injection attack.
But if you have access to the admin pages, who cares about owning the router ? You can disable the firewall and go straight for the user's machines.
The bug here is the default password, and the users that leave it like that.
This is excellent news. I've had a FON router for a year or so, and no-one's used it yet. It should give me free access to wifi elsewhere, but there aren't many in the areas where I need them : I'd have to go and sit in the car outside someone's house.
BT joining the scheme looked like a big improvement (they share FON access on home hubs but not the paid-for hubs) since it provides a much larger user base .. but hardly any homehubs have it enabled. Opting out rather than opting in is a much more sensible way to do it.
And what's the catch ? You lose a bit of bandwidth. For most residential users, you don't even lose that. In my experience it's the servers and caches that are slow, not the local link. You can always turn it off. In return, you get free access anywhere that someone else contributes.
Security ? Privacy ? I thought we didn't have those any more. If you care, it's easy enough to put the router in the DMZ.
Paytards, all of you. Share and benefit.
So in the blue corner we have the doctors, who would like to see a population that's sustainable, and in the red corner we have the economists, who believe continuous growth is the only way to pay a pension. Let battle commence.
I don't have much faith in either - both their 'science' is based on statistics measured without proper experimental controls, because no-one will give either group the freedom to try (OK, the Nazis did try some medical experiments .. and the economists have been experimenting with the US and UK economies .. I hope the latter will be considered as distasteful as the former was).
On this occasion my sympathies are with the doctors (who appear a bit less short-sighted than the economists) but I'm afraid I wouldn't put any money on them..
Don,
You may be fed up hearing of Linux user's wants. I don't care much about the features you mention - they weren't invented by either microsoft or linux engineers, but appeared in other computing systems long before PCs.
The point about alternate operating systems is not that they're better, more modern, more complete, etc. than proprietary ones (though they may be any or all of those). The point is that they ARE an alternative, and their presence keep Microsoft (and, indeed, Apple), honest. Or more honest :-). Without viable competion, there's nothing to stop us getting screwed.
Look at the price hikes in the supermarkets recently for an example of what happens when a monopoly kills the competition. Look at the lack of development in IE until Firefox started to steal back market share for an example closer to home.
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