Posts by Doctor Syntax 32961 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"I ate my budgerigar five times a fortnight, ten in one-twelfth of a year"
Getting a good pass-phrase right isn't easy, particularly if your throw some punctuation into it. You have a one in four chance of getting the comma and hyphen in the right combination, always assuming you can remember where they go. I have a similar approach to my Wifi pass-phrase. If I have to use it a few times in a few days I'll eventually remember the twists and turns after I've looked it up a few times. A few days after that and it's gone again. Having your unguessable babble written down defeats the object.
"The ab-so-lu-te first thing you must decide on when you create secure services is how you are going to deal with criminals using the service"
In principle this is no different to any other communication system. How are you going to deal with criminals using the telephone? The post? A taxi? A courier?
There's a trade-off between investigating crime and keeping innocent communications confidential. Perhaps the first consideration on deciding that it to ask what proportion of communication is innocent and what isn't. If you decide that the bulk of communication is innocent and deserves to be confidential then you have to accept that you have to forego bulk interception and accept that law enforcement is going to be harder. It's a temptation that everyone, from politicians downwards, has to steel themselves to resist.
"they got a warrant, seized the server"
There's no mention of a warrant in the article. Even if they did get one then all the traffic through the service was compromised. There seems to be a presumption that all the traffic was illegal. If you were using the service to negotiate a confidential but legitimate negotiation - say a merger - you now know the Dutch police had access to it. They were snooping on everyone, at least everyone using the service. Who, apart from the Dutch police, knows what legitimate stuff has been compromised?
"Even then, though, you'd hope that 2 clients that had seen each other before would then warn their owners that the other ends key seemed to have changed."
This is a case of hanged if you do and hanged if you don't. If you use the same key all the time any messages which have been intercepted and stored in the past can be decrypted if the key is later compromised - which is more difficult if the server didn't store the key - but you can tell if the key's been changed. If you use a different key each time then past messages are safe but the key exchange is susceptible to MitM attack if the server is compromised.
"I believe it was 11 September 2001 if not before."
No, that was when the US learned that what goes around comes around and that terrorism wasn't just something that happened on an island across the Atlantic and was probably harmless anyway so there was nothing wrong with contributing a few dollars here and there.
"Depending on what you measure my track record with the Midland back goes back more than thirty years and the businesses's twenty something
Good riddance to them."
My business only went back a bout 10 years but my track record went back 40 years to Midland days. And by the time I retired and no longer needed the business account I felt exactly the same way as you and took exactly the same step.
"One of the reasons I've heard for the justification of the inflated Apple pricing"
The other reason was the reputation of Apple build quality which might have been a reason to buy. As a bystander I can't comment on the validity of the reputation but from comments here & elsewhere it may be that that reason is getting to be a thing of the past so it might be that nothing of value is being lost. OTOH while Apple depend on BSD runtime pissing off the open source community might not be the best move.
"At least if it's Windows where, as the article states, a physically present user must be able to disable it to get Windows certification."
It's Microsoft's certification and they could change it at will. Now they have their own Linux Subsystem for Windows (whimsically known by a reversed acronym, WSL) they might.
"In a basic case, blockchain is ideal for recording those immutable historical facts - you were born on day x1 with name y and gender g, you did graduate on day x2 with name y and degree z, and you got married on day x3 and changed your name to y2, you changed your gender and your name on day x4, etc."
Well,someone did all that. What the potential employer - or whoever depending on the use case - needs to know is is the person claiming to be so really that someone?
"I've never worked out, if you don't turn up and identify yourself, how do the police know who they want to arrest?"
And even if you do, what does it mean? Who am I? Who are you? The answers to those questions are relative.
I can turn up with a copy of my birth certificate. I can equally turn up with a copy of someone else's birth certificate providing it gives a DoB roughly the same as mine.
I can turn up with a piece of photo ID. What does it mean? Just that I persuaded someone to attach a name to a photo of me or someone who looks reasonably like me.
Utility bill (what's that in the days of online billing?)? I got what I claim to be my address printed on a letter heading that looks as if it might have come from a utility company. Utility company billing base stock is scarcely a secure base stock; the base stock for the birth certificate is - and it clearly states it's not a form of identification.
"If we're going to have mandatory ID, we should also have a proper, written constitution"
We do. It's not just written in a single place. It starts with Magna Carta (which, admittedly, successive govts, especially recent ones, try to ignore) and including "and a Bill of Rights."
You want a Bill of Rights? OK, here you are:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMarSess2/1/2/introduction
"find it more impressive if someone gets bullocked without a single swear word being used."
The example given is definitely entering the realm of talking down to the culprit as if they were a small child. Nice one. Demeaning but without anything the snowflakes can actually put a finger on as being wrong.
" when the child comes to a conclusion you can ask them to explain why they think that is so."
It depends on the age of the child. Before they acquire language infants are learning how to interpret the various sensory inputs. One of the things they can do is reach out to touch what they see so they can correlate the tactile qualities of what's in the visual field. They can't explain how they learn that. In fact, can you, as an adult, explain how you recognise an everyday object such as a cup?
I'm not sure about a central opt-out register. It's an all eggs in one basket affair. At present one of the options we have in our defence is to set up variations on details such as email addresses, physical addresses, dates of birth and all the rest of the stuff to make it more difficult to combine data. A central register means that the user would have to give details of their account on that register to each site with which they connect. It becomes a single point of failure tracking.
"Here in God's Country where we have our own banknotes (a cunning ruse designed to spike the blood pressure of London cabbies"
When I lived in NI the local banknotes were useful for spiking the blood pressure of any Scottish businesses I had to deal with when in transit along the dreaded A75. In NI local, NoE, Scottish and (while the Punt was at parity) Irish notes were all accepted without comment.
Where do those using the term "scrum" and wearing rugby boots appear? Hopefully not too far below those wearing football kit. And amongst the latter do those not on a football field appear above or below those who are? I appreciate that in the normal circumstances the car is unlikely to find itself running down those who are on a football field; the manufacturers should make more efforts in this respect.
"In my opinion, If the autonomous car is out of control, then by definition, even if it can make a decision on who to kill, it can't actually control the vehicle to take aim."
My guess would be that an autonomous car gets out of control of it's AI by the latter overloaded with conflicting information and rules so that in order to ditch the lot it needs an emergency routine to follow. I suspect they're all loaded up with a secret "kill the lone pedestrian" function and that eventually it will be triggered where the overload arises in an entirely innocuous situation.
After all the emissions cheating stuff would you really believe it would be beyond the car manufacturers' inclinations?
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