Posts by Phones Sheridan 573 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2020
It does run out. Wind stops blowing, clouds stop sun shining, in fact it stops shining once a day regular as clockwork. Renewable energy runs out more frequently than fossil fuels do. Fossil fuels have been predicted to have ran out by now since when I was at school in the 70s. Bar the occasional power cut the gas is still flowing and the lights are still coming on.
"Microsoft had hoped to have its UK arm struck off from the claim and suggested that Ireland would be a better place for the claim to be heard,"
This is actually quite an achievement. If you look at the TOS for MS, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Paypal etc for supply into the UK, they all say that the agreement is between the UK customer, and the <insert foreign country here> office of the supplier, not it's UK subsiduary. Every case I've read about prior to this has usually fallen over at this hurdle.
Windows 11 doesn't seem to be being pushed out though. I have Windows 11 ready machines, that are still on windows 10, but are not telling me to upgrade yet. It's been this way since the beginning, MS have only been allowing it out in drips. Sure some people can force the upgrade through, and I am one of those (on a couple of machines), but all I've been met with are bugs which have made me glad it isn't being pushed out wholesale yet. Once MS pushes the button that activates the full roll-out, these figures will change.
"Something must be compelling for so many businesses to use Microsoft Windows"
First reason is off the shelf business packages. Until Linux gets off the shelf business packages, that allow you to do business, it isn't going to happen. And by business I mean the buying and selling of physical products, not developing software. In the UK Sage Accounts is probably the most widely used business software, I've only come across 3 companies in 30 years that were using something else. We are talking hundreds of thousands if not millions of companies using it. This software and it's abilities just do not exist on Linux. There are a few packages out there, that someone has wrote specifically for their own business, but it has no real measurable uptake on the market because it requires too much work to get it to work elsewhere, and Sage probably already does it.
Second reason is business presentation. Would you put Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman in front of your customer while trying to sell them a quantity of your product? Not a chance, your customer would take one look at them and walk away, yet in the Linux community, they are gods. Bill Gates in the 80s was a sharp business man, he got attention for the right reason, he was friendly, presentable. You could stick him in front of your customer, and your customers would lap it up and pull out their wallets. He spoke business. Linux people, don't.
Genuine question here. Some decades ago, a very technical friend I met at the Uni I went to, and had no reason to doubt, told me they used Z80B processors on the shuttle, because it only had <insert a number here I can't remember> official documented errors and therefore it was approved for "USE-IN-SPAAAAACE". They apparently could not use the then current 486, or previous x86 processors, because too many errors were still being discovered, and NASA liked to work with hardware that had not had newly discovered errors in a defined period of time. To this day I've genuinely believed this, because it made sense, but old me is starting to have doubts. It may not have been the Z80B after all, but is there anyone here that can confirm the essence of what I've believed all this time, or is this one of those urban legends, or something that may have started off as true and got carried away etc.
And no mention of the clusterfuck that Microsoft made the last time they got a court order to swipe domains and cut off 4 million people.
We were using No-IP as our fail-over load balancing supplier at the time, and Microshaft cut us off for 3 days, all while lying through their teeth that genuine customers were unaffected.
The one thing we took away from it, using Cloud suppliers for any critical service, is an all-eggs-in-one-basket approach.
That's exactly what happened with us. Devices that had not had the latest update installed continued to work, updated devices didn't. It took 8 weeks for apple support to confirm this was a post-update problem (which involved lots of screenshots, videos and logs being sent back and forth), and say they were not supporting it. I held off for another 8 weeks, then I decided to bite the bullet and switch to Outlook or the Gmail client depending on the users requirements. We then finished off updating everyone's devices, which broke each one in turn with the Apple client.
As the former Apple employee stated above, this was caused by strong authentication, or the lack of. Apple dropped strong authentication between IOS releases, for reasons only known to Apple but probably in an attempt to push people to their Apple services. If your IMAPs continue to function, great, but they just are not using strong authentication.
Simple question then, have they resolved the issue regarding strong authentication and IMAP? If not then no amount of calling BS is going to change the fact that the update broke what was working previously.
The solution was to install Outlook or the Gmail client. Both continued to work after the upgrade and still do.
My last IOS upgrade broke IMAP functionality for me on the apple email client. The solution was to download another email client, but only after approximately 8 weeks when apple care support came back to me and told me that IMAP was business only functionality, and apple do not provide business support. Their products are consumer only.
Straight from the horses mouth.
Data Mining is the method of finding out what questions you haven’t been asking about your data all along. You’ve got the apocryphal story about how Walmart one day started selling beer on the same isle as diapers initially to everyone’s confusion. What the public didn’t know was data-mining had found a correlation between the 2 products. Purchases of baby’s nappies were accompanied with purchases of beer, so Walmart put the 2 together to nudge more people into buying the same.
The authorities in a country either apply to a court, or pass legislation allowing them to legally sanction Apple. Once they have this, assets can be seized, bank accounts frozen etc.
In the UK historically Trading Standards used to do this, but they just don’t seem to have the resources nowadays. If their demands were ignored, they’d go get a court order, then turn up unannounced with bailiffs and a police escort, if necessary to enforce a forced entry and confiscation of assets.
My first thought was "how brave, well done", but the more I thought about it, the more I'm thinking "How utterly stupid". For someone working in Infosec I have to call into question their judgement. She was completely unprepared and her actions literally put her into physical danger, possibly leading to death, not only for her but for anyone else that may have had to come to her aid had she been unlucky. Any chance this was done for social media exposure, i.e. being seen to be doing the right thing.
Does she approach her Infosec work with the same amount of level headedness, planning and execution?
Reminds me of the japanese manufacturing joke.
"We've completed your order for parts with a manufacturing failure rate of 10%. We've never had a customer specify how many parts they want to fail before so we're not sure how you want them delivered, for the time being we've put them all in this separate crate".
I did notice a seriously large uptick in the amount of hits my networks were getting from Russia. At first I Geo-Blocked at the firewalls all russian IPs for all services but web servers, Within a few hours came a huge increase from Ukrainian IPs, so I added that country to the blocking rules. I then ended up playing whack-a-mole over the next few days as the surge switched to China, North Korea then Malaysia, Belize and finally Spain. My final solution was setting up a honeypot on an unused IP with nothing on it, that logged the probes and attempted log-ins to things like FTP, MySQL, POP3, RDP etc. A single probe or login attempt and the IP address is added to my firewall blocks network-wide. It seems to be working, the deluge is now a manageable trickle and I'm not constantly looking at the logs all day long.
The most interesting thing I found in the logs, I did lookups on blocked IPs, and found some were registered as belonging to the FSB. So it looks like they are openly and brazenly probing the internet looking for services.
That would have been sensible considering the sanctions going on. The new-Cost of Aeroflot's fleet I've just worked out at (all in billion $, the average age of Aeroflot's planes are 6 years old).
B777 9.3
B737 3
A350 0.5
A330 2.8
A321 4.1
A320 6.4
That would have been a serious chunk out of some oligarch's pockets.
It can't happen, it's been discussed to death.
In order to get the first imprisonment, the prosecutor (in the UK) has to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the person withholding the password, is indeed in possession of it. They have to prove that the person accessed a device within a recent period, so recently in fact that it's highly unlikely that the person could have forgotten the password. In cases where people have been imprisoned, the prosecution demonstrated using forensic data that the devices were accessed several times over several days all within the time frame leading up to the arrest and they have actual physical evidence proving that. "It's his device, he must know the password" is not and never has been sufficient evidence that has lead to a successful prosecution.
The idea that someone can be prosecuted a second time for the same offence say 2 years after the original prosecution is laughable. Courts have an understanding of the reliability of testimony from memory, and how it becomes more unreliable over days, weeks, months and years. Courtrooms (in the UK) are not like they appear in American TV dramas, where each interaction is tense and full of suspense with sharp back and forth dialogue, each word being met with surprise and an intake of breath from the jury. The prosecution never dramatically pulls out the final piece of damning evidence at the end of the trial that results in an instant "Guilty" from the Judge. No instead courtrooms are dull, methodical tedious places where previous policies, judgements and precedents are all brought up sequentially and legally argued over. Everyone and their dog in the courtroom understands the concept of degraded memory, and none of them would bother to try to argue that someone claiming that they have forgotten a password they last used over 2 years ago is lying. In fact for a prosecution to even begin under section 49 of RIPA 2000 specifically for withholding a password, a judge needs to first give permission to prosecutors to issue the notice of disclosure. Unreliability of memory is already an established and understood precedent so a second prosecution would probably fail at the first hurdle of trying to convince the judge to allow it to happen after such a long time.
So yes, it's a myth, In the 15 years since the law came into force it has never happened or been attempted. Where prosecutions have occurred, it has only been after physical evidence has been presented that has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the person must reliably know the password being withheld.
We have one in our office of 10 people. It does get triggered by non Alexa related conversations, or when several people are on the phone at once (on headsets so they only hear their own conversation). So I think it is both listening at all times, and is set to have a stab at responding with somethng rather than holding back in the event of doubt.
"The problem is, you can't tell what is worthless so you have to keep it all"
Back in the noughties I worked as IT support to a pharmaceutical company, They too complained that they never had enough space for raw data and that they NEEDED everything. I used to tell them to create a Zipfile from the raw data, and compare the sizes afterwards. The resulting zip file could be 0.1% of the size of the original files. I'd then point out that if maths can determine which data is pretty much redundant, then I'm sure they have the skills to do the same much more accurately. You could see the light-bulb go on inside their heads when it twigged most raw data is incredibly repetitive and can be discarded if you look for and identify it.
A quick example, a single sided DVD can hold just over 6 copies of the human genome. If you zip that, it will span 3 floppies.
The problem you can't solve so easily is the user that sticks a 1gb video into his Powerpoint presentation, and distributes a copy to everyone.
The best manual I have ever seems was for the Coherent 3 unix clone operating system I used during my time at Uni. The university had Solaris machines, all I could afford was a 486 SX 25 and the $99 OS to go with it. The manual got me through Uni, it covered everything Unix right down to C programming. It was about a thousand pages thick. I’ve never seen anything like it since.
After I left Uni they did release a Coherent 4 which had X11 Windows support in 1992 which I did purchase, but having left Uni I never found a use for it. Windows for Workgroups was taking over the world, and it was another decade before I even came across another Unix implementation of any kind, and that was A Red Hat Linux web server circa 2005ish.
Nowadays any manuals don’t match the product I have in front of me. They don’t seem to keep up. Screen shots and instructions are just plain wrong and you’re pretty much left to fend for yourself.
"Will google have to remove the information that we now learn it obtained illegally ?"
Until a plaintiff obtains a legally enforceable judgement or court order against Google, the answer is no, it just wont.
And even then, Google is probably big enough to stall the process indefinitely, and even then once that's exhausted, they probably still wouldn't.
Self certification is certainly permitted, visit https://www.gov.uk/guidance/using-the-ukca-marking and scroll down to the bottom section titled "Legislative areas where self-declaration of conformity for UKCA marking is permitted".
In practice if you have CE certification, you can self certify by listing the relevant UKCA conformity that matches the CE conformity you have on a like for like basis.
Just a point on your number 2.
HMRC love court challenges if they consider it an easy win, because it allows them to set a legal precedent without much work. Once a precedent is set via case law, it becomes much harder for everyone else then to fight it.
IIRC HMRC don't take other government departments to court per se, but "someone" does ask for a judicial review which gives the same outcome. The judiciary would typically in this case, rule in favour of HMRC, because, well they are the government department that deals with tax, so they must know what they are talking about. This is very common where judges favour the government department that is responsible for a matter, over someone else who isn't.
Not working as advertised. I am still having issues with imports from the EU going back as far as February 2021 last year. I'm still waiting on paperwork from HMRC, and it is purely bureaucracy on this side of the channel that is the cause of the issues.
They simply have not caught up with the backlog. It got to the point where the hauliers over in the EU were rejecting jobs transporting goods to the UK, because it is HMRCs public opinion that their system is infallible, and any delays must be caused by either those pesky Europeans, or incompetent hauliers, and not that HMRC is simply a black hole that is sucking up all communications going in, with nothing coming back out leaving the hauliers just sitting there twiddling their thumbs and people like me waiting for the output from the CHIEF system so I can fulfil my VAT obligations going back almost a year.
"over the course of 57 years is that science changes its mind a lot"
Suggest you google and obtain a book called "The half life of facts". It's quite an interesting read, that has been updated via an errata website over the years and basically deals with how predictably science is wrong, and how long it will take for half of all facts within a specific science, to be proven wrong. Upshot of it is, science doesn't get it wrong sometimes, its' wrong most times, and if it isn't, then it will be* soon!
I've tweeted a link for it to Ricky Gervais each time he's been on TV stating his opinion that science is immutable, because scientific facts never change, and they are still facts even if you don't believe them.
*Maths has been the only science that pretty much has remained static. Every not-so-often something new comes along, but unlike other sciences, hundreds of years pass between accepted facts being challenged.
Indeed, I've often wondered if this site could be being used as a resource by either hackers or states. Remember Lavabit, Truecrypt, Tor and Proton Mail were considered safe by their fans, quite fanatically, until it turned out they actually were not. Lavabit was in the process of being forced to install traffic sniffers into their network, Truecrypt were being co-erced, Tor had so many government controlled nodes there was no anonymity and Proton Mail removed one of it's privacy promises off it's website following a court order. If Haveibeenpwned was being compelled by it's government, it probably couldn't tell us overtly.
A database of known passwords and usernames, is highly valuable because it probably indicates just how un-unique most peoples passwords are. Geeks will probably point out that mathematically there are trillions of user / password combinations possible for a particular application and it would take millions of years to crack them. This trove probably narrows that down to hundreds of millions making the timescales more reasonable, if it doesn't already have your exact login names and password to start with. Combine this with a google like ability to match data to actual people and the ability to predict your actions and the way you think better than you can yourself there is no actual privacy out there.
The 50 or so active commentards on this site will proclaim that their passwords are indeed truly random or for some technical reason the event of them being cracked or discovered is highly improbable. My response is you are not and never will be the target, and if you were, I would point to exhibit a... The pipe wrench, and exhibit b.. you're probably not that interesting.
It’s produced physical results than can be compared against models, predictions and estimates of the astrophysics required to fly in the thin Martian atmosphere. Now they have hard data from a concept vehicle, they can plan a much more useful and capable vehicle that will hopefully become as useful as the rovers Spirit and Opportunity became over their long lives.
Was reading an article last week about how the Voyagers 1 and 2 had discovered after leaving the solar system, that the density of space was increasing the further out they got. This was unexpected, and reasons were given why this might be the case, but it's unknown if this is simply the bow wave of the solar system as it were, as it travels round the galaxy or if the atmosphere will keep getting thicker all the way into another discovery.
If it keeps up, we may end up swimming to Alpha Centauri! :p
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