Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
There's also the little matter of getting fibre the last few yards let alone the last mile. In my own case the house is unusual in that it's the only one where the phone cable is underground, the neighbours all have overhead distribution. However, in my daughter's street and the surrounding streets all the houses were built with underground feeds and I suspect it would require planning permission to put in an overhead distribution system. Failing that all the roads and drives would have to be dug up and relaid. Would the householders be willing to pay for that? I doubt it, given that FTTC gives sufficient bandwidth to support her working from home.
The bigger problem would be in getting better bandwidth to the more remote houses. The FTTC network has been extended past our house so that the next hamlet now has a cabinet. However there are a few fairly remote farms. FTTP might be as economical as FTTC for these.
"putting a cookie on a browser doesn't constitute a monetary damage to the owner or user of the iphone."
They're trespassing on the phone. If someone were to trespass on your land by parking their car on your drive you'd probably feel you had cause to sue them for trespass. At the very least you're suffering damage in that if they'd asked for your agreement you could have charged rent and that amount has been lost to you. In this case they're occupying storage, processing on the phone and traffic on airtime. That's even before we get to the value of the data gathered. And that's only monetary damage which seems to be the only form you recognise. Maybe you don't consider the loss of privacy as a damage; why not?
There's a difference between a fine, a punishment arising out of criminal law, and compensation, which these settlements are supposed to be.
If somebody crashes into your car they may be fined for careless driving - a criminal offence. That's quite separate from your claiming on their insurance - a civil claim.
"however I'd still like to be allowed to choose a username instead of being forced to use the email address as my username"
The extreme worst case is a site-issued username generated from other data such as a concatenation of real name and DoB (yes, I have a site that uses that).
Keepass will generate passwords that look like line noise. Perhaps a useful addon would be an option to generate usernames, preferably pronounceable ones.
"And before some of you attack me about having to access your passwords from multiple locations, not all of Internet users are such power users."
Restricting where and by how many devices you access stuff that you think deserves good security should be a part of your security strategy. Otherwise you're trading security for convenience and we know where that's likely to lead.
"I wonder, if we shouldn't be using unique usernames and passwords for each site."
He's an expert and he's only wondering? What will it take to make him sure?
Of course we should. We all used to until sites decided to use email addresses as user IDs. And it's even worse when some sites - looking at you PayPal - hand out the email address to other parties and can't even see what's wrong with that when it's draw to their attention. Given that most folk only have one email address anyway the password is the only meaningful credential. No wonder people wiitter on about 2FA. With any reasonable policy about user IDs it would be 3FA.
"organisations where IT is an enabler for their core functions, and is often being pushed to reduce costs"
Where IT is so deeply embedded in those core functions they are IT businesses whether they like it or not and whether they care or not and attempting to reduce costs is not a good idea. They are businesses whose entire business model depends on having customers trust them to hold their data. That's not a trust they can weasel out of by pushing it onto a third party, nor can either of them get out of it by finger pointing.
"They're patents"
In the US they're called patents. In the UK they'd be called registered designs. I'm not sure how other countries would treat them. They're not the same as ordinary patents.
Nevertheless this is a case where you'd like all three sides to lose - Apple, the trolls and the lawyers.
In the past the crown has been responsible for providing at least some its own armaments. As in the Royal Arsenal* and the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham.
That's only provisioning arms before a conflict that's now been handed over. When operational matters are outsourced there are additional risks. The refuelling fleet is only one aspect. F35 servicing is another. When day-to-day operational capacity is in the hands of private companies, not necessarily companies controlled by boards within the country, the ability of the militaries to get on with their job, as you put it, of killing people can be brought to a halt without their command structure or governments being able to do a thing about it.
* A late friend of mine was responsible for typesetting a book on that. He said they had a lot of trouble with the hyphenation.
You should listen to those who are older and wiser than yourself.
You say that you want banking, for example, to be secure. Presumably you never use online banking, otherwise you'd realise why there shouldn't be back doors in that. It may not be a question for you (and neither for me) of keeping your banking transactions secure from national governments. But what about keeping them secure from criminal access? A back door for one is a back door for anyone else who discovers it and the most effective way of preventing anyone else from discovering it s for it not to be there.
Yes, email has all the privacy of a post card. Does this mean that it's satisfactory? Of course not. Encryption, the equivalent of using an envelope, should have been rolled into it as standard, not as an add-on, years ago. The fact that is hasn't is why we now have things like WhatsApp. What's worse it might well prove too late to get it rolled in; it would certainly meet strong opposition.
"You can formulate a response"
And much good may that do you. However it persuades the little people that ID cards are Good Things I can see why the Estonian PTP had it built that way. There is, of course, the underlying assumption that it actually does work the way the little people have been told it does.
"I suspect that this is simply a very extensive dossier"
Something like that. The last Home Sec, shortly after being appointed was interviewed in the Times describing being shown an alleged chat room and a child being groomed. This, he said, persuaded him. In other words he described the brainwashing without even realising that that's what was being done to him. He didn't even stop to wonder whether the entire thing was staged. Nor did he stop to ask whether, if this wasn't encrypted why breaking decryption should be necessary. This is the standard of thought that makes a good Home Sec from the HO's PoV.
"At least with a decent Linux kernel you can check your keystrokes aren't watched and build up from there."
You need a decent userland around it. You can start with that kernel but then wrap it in layers of opaque binaries and it doesn't matter what the kernel is.
