Posts by Doctor Syntax 42030 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I was envisaging taking this to the limit. Apart from exhibitors, or at least the construction crews for their stands, everyone attends as a telepresence. It would mean the venue could be in the cheapest possible shed with no worries about Elf 'n' Safety, fire regs, etc. The lower cost would offset the promoters' ability to screw the attendees for extras.
'Well, when you install a qualifying PV array, the "feed in tariff" is paid for twenty five years, with an inflationary uplift every year.'
Unless it becomes politically expedient to cut it. Don't base your own budget on what governments offer. They're not to be trusted, especially beyond a general election.
The company said that existing Pebble watches ... will continue to work for now but there will be no support or warranties, and "functionality or service quality may be reduced in the future."
If I were in the market for such a thing I would find this soooo reassuring to buy a product from this company.
Do these people have any wits at all?
You forgot that many in Labour and the clueless Left/Greens/Anarchists at the last election waffled on about "mass surveillance" and "privacy rights", and lost the election.
We remember that Labour, when in govt, had similar ideas, including identity cards. We also remember that Labour have a long track record of appalling economic management. There are good reasons why they lost the election. Sadly, this seems to be a party-neutral issue. Home Secs. of any political persuasion seem to go native PDQ.
"if cops want to read my email" then they are welcome, it's boring.
And what if the email is something like a link to reset a password to a site which has access to your bank for instance? Maybe not the best way to reset a password but it happens. Would you want this to be available to 48 different official and semi-official bodies as in the UK? Even if you think you've nothing to hide or that it's boring you probably have a great deal to hide and you're probably contractually obliged to hide it - just check the T&Cs of any online accounts.
"Aww poor little flowers."
The poor little flowers are all of us.
What protection would you expect if you were wrongly accused? You'd expect the prosecution to have to prove its case against you. You'd expect that it wouldn't be allowed to take short cuts, to suppress evidence or to present false evidence. In short, you'd expect to be assumed to be innocent unless you were proved guilty in a fair trial.
But you might say "I know I'm innocent, I shouldn't be treated like those bad drug dealers who are guilty."
Well, you may know you're innocent but in advance of a case being heard I don't know whether you are or not nor do I know if those accused of being drug dealers are guilty or not. All I or anyone else including a court can do is make the same assumptions about all of you. It is arrant nonsense to think that there is some means by which you or I, if wrongly accused, are to get some rights and those rightly accused are not.
If from your point of view as an innocent wrongly accused, that assumption of innocence, then that assumption must be extended to all. And in the past that has been reckoned to be a fundamental right of all of us.
Another right, going all the way back to Magna Carta has been our right to due process of law. Due process has come to include the need for TPTB to present an independent judge or magistrate with a prima facie case sufficient to justify a warrant.
This Act sweeps all these rights away and not the least of the issues is that instead of being signed by an independent judge or magistrate warrants are now to be signed by a minister. That raises a whole new spectre of political persecution.
The poor little flowers are all of us.
"The position of intercept material is relatively unchanged from RIPA and indeed IoCA, Intercept material is inadmissible and can't be used by the prosecution as evidence; only for intelligence purposes."
If you look at the example quoted about the DEA it becomes clear that a rule on parallel construction could be used to hide all sorts of goings on. The agent in that case had no information as to how the SOP knew that a given vehicle should be searched. If he thought that an intercept was the basis for it legislation such as this would inhibit him from saying that there was any sort of prior information but the truth might be that he was being directed to planted evidence.
"At which point he is arrested under this act"
Actually the prosecution would object, the jury would be ushered out of court and there'd be a legal argument culminating in the question not being allowed. Then the jury would be brought back in. A persistent defence barrister might well be able to try to put the question a number of times until such time as the jury worked out that there was something fishy going on.
A repeated blocking of defence questions might well be the basis for appeal, maybe as far as the ECHR (no, this is not affected by Brexit).
Another tack might be to get a copy of the relevant bit of the Act introduced as evidence.
Killed off in what sense? Killed off as in taken it out of current production, killed off as in made an upgrade available to punters who actually know an upgrade's available and will install it or killed off as in pro-actively upgraded all vulnerable devices exposed to the net?
"The originating ISP won't be able to detect it, and the target will have to send as many reports as it receives attacks, which isn't much help."
Change the emphasis a little. Tools such as Shodan enable the net to be searched for vulnerable devices. So instead of treating harbouring of attacks as the reason to blackhole ISPs, transfer attention to exposing vulnerable devices.
There is a clear historical instance of a new species being created by natural processes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartina_anglica
Species with extended geographical ranges can have infertility between the populations at the ends of the distribution most clearly demonstrated by ring species where the population extends round some obstructive feature and where the two "ends" have met up and do not interbreed. Such populations could be split into two species by exterminating it in the middle part of the range. The obvious ethical considerations prevent this as a deliberate experiment but it could happen as a consequence of human interference with the environment for economic purposes.
"Be honest, do you know how to type?"
I bought my typewriter over half a century ago. I think I've got the hang of it by now although the onset of arthritis in my fingers isn't helping.
"People who know how to type don't need to see what they are typing, helps proof check, but it's not required."
The whole point if this is that when you're entering a password you can't see what you're typing
It matters not whether you can type or not. The only feedback you might get is that you entered a character by having an asterisk or a blob appear. If you're logging in at a standard Unix command line you don't get anything back at all (and if, as in a previous comment, a key isn't working, you're SOL).
Because you can't rely on visual feedback to tell if you're entering upper or lower case the only sure way to be sure is to hold down the shift key or not. The only way.
As someone has pointed out, if someone enters a different password than they thought they were entering when encrypting a disk in the first place there's no way back. It's not like getting an ordinary password wrong when setting it up; you can't go to the help desk for a password reset. Your options are limited to reformatting the disk.
"The number of times someone is looking over my shoulder is tiny. The number of times I make a typing mistake is comparably huge. Please write for the common scenario, rather than assuming the worst case."
So do you just open any enclosure in a spam email rather than assuming the worst case?
"If you actually know how to type, caps lock throws a flag in your mind when you see consecutive capitals. Seems like the aystem is designed for people who can't type"
Read this very carefully.
We're talking about entering passwords where the letters aren't echoed back.
You can't see consecutive capitals when you type them.
It makes no difference whether you can type or not.
"Google could well have added its servers to the NTP time pool
No, no, and thrice no! Because Googles NTP servers will be telling the wrong time for about a day after every leap second."
I think the assumption in this is that Google could have done that and then implemented the leap second along with everyone else instead of having the Google Second.
"She epitomises the Mummy-knows-best attitude of EU politicians that led to the leave vote winning."
ISTM that she is asserting the sovereignty of Parliament which has been established, sometimes with a great deal of bloodshed, over the course of the last 1/3rd of a millennium. Some of us think that's worth keeping.
"And caused by an MP who resigned on principle (far too uncommon these days) over the Heathrow expansion, so nothing to do with Brexit."
Credit to him on resigning on a matter of principle. However he found himself fighting against opposition who were also against the Heathrow expansion but differed from him on Brexit so it appears that the latter was the main issue.
Considering the previous election result the outcome was a massive swing.
Not necessarily. It will have lost them the electoral support of many who voted for them in the past but no longer. Brownomics and then Corbyn have seriously damaged Labour. UKIP will get their comeuppance when the economic costs of Brexit start to bite. This could be the start of a Lib-Dem revival.
"There is an argument that the Snoopers' Charter is 'simply' codification of an existing practice that the UK authorities ... have been carrying out covertly for some time"
Such practices ignored the presumption of innocence which was part of Common Law. The Act now says, in effect, that innocence need no longer be assumed. It's a major step. Unfortunately the petition didn't say this. It should have concentrated on that single point and left the govt. no room for the anodyne reply it came out with.
"However what expectation of privacy can you expect if you voluntarily hand over said phone for somebody else to try to find something held on it, and then let it go out of your sight?"
It was handed over for one purpose and one purpose only. There is every reason to expect privacy. Even from a car salesman. Would you also expect that the salesman might have made used it to call his aunt in Australia and cousin in Ireland?
