For your safety and security
We will indefinitely retain "Scans of identity documents such as passports and driving licenses". You can be assured our (your) data is as leaky as our pipes.
1648 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2022
My phone from three and a half years ago is still good, apart from the battery. So I recently bought another one, exactly the same, new in the box. It's a third of the original price, and less than a quarter of the price of a new phone. I'm getting the battery replaced on the old phone. Mad? I don't think so. I now have two chargers, two charging cables, two sets of earphones for identical devices.
No doubt the cameras now are better than three or four years ago. But the old one is more than good enough for me.
I like what the USA ostensibly stands for. But what it actually does, the FBI is no different to the Stasi.
The USA paints itself as a democracy while several states are trying tooth and nail to disenfranchise voters of the "wrong" colour. If it was anywhere other than the USA the usual hangers on would be proclaiming about the "disputed" and "sham" elections.
The prison industrial complex in the USA is just slavery by another name.
It wears very thin after a time. We read about the FBI spying on people protesting wrongful deaths caused by the police, but not about the FBI spying on police officers causing wrongful deaths. The FBI may say it has "changed" but it's like changing my socks. They are still my socks and the effects are the same.
And all because the whole Linux community cannot come up with one definitive way to package apps and libraries. So instead there are the worst options of the immense bloat of fully packages apps + libraries. It sounds good but it isn't. It is bloat and lazy. Backups come to mind? If you can't do a bare metal recovery you do not have a backup.
The Linux crowd, me included, used to laugh at the NT people whose backup/recovery process was reinstall the OS, reinstall all the apps, reinstall the data, because in those days handling open files on NT was a real PITA. If anyone tells me now that Linux recovery is reinstall the OS, download all the apps again like it's some kind of smartphone, put back the data then get lost. App bloat (due to containerisation) = backup bloat.
I have run into this on Macs too. NamelessImageApp stores its thumbnails as well as all the metadata in a SQLITE database. Very good when you have a few photos. But when your SQLITE database is 2GB in size, if you so much as tag a photo that means a 2GB backup. Now multiply that by the number of people who have the same NamelessImageApp. This idea of backups is lost on people who it seems to me do not do backups or have endless backup disk space.
Gnome is bloated. Why? Perhaps because the people who code Gnome don't understand about using resources wisely. I have seen Yum update crash due to using too much memory on a small system. The solution is not 'get a bigger boat'.
This is like suing window makers because windows can be broken with bricks.
New York streets are peppered with 'preventative scaffolding'. It is frankly an eyesore, all brought about with good intentions. Read more here (2nd link on DDG): https://streeteasy.com/blog/scaffolding-nyc-why-so-much-scaffolding-new-york-city/
-> Open Office - done
Until/unless Open/LibreOffice works 100% with MS Office documents, it is not done. That is the truth.
You have a short list of applications. There are simply bazillions more 'standard' apps which are available on Windows. In the AV world you can use DaVinci Resolve. But there are more people who use Adobe Premiere Pro. That is the standard app. As is Photoshop and Illustrator. So your 'done' list is not done. Your done list is for people who do not need to interoperate with other people.
-> perhaps ones looking to repurpose existing fleets of desktop machines and thin clients which used to run Windows. For example, subsequent to a ransomware attack — a window of sales opportunity exists which Google has used to its advantage to sell its ChromeOS Flex offering before now
I wonder how many companies have actually done this - moved to Linux desktops due to ransomware attacks which were effective due to Windows security issues. The usual problems of Linux on the desktop still apply - the lack of 'standard' applications.
-> a small number of our customers
Yeah. But how many actual people? BA has about 35,000. The BBC and Boots are well into the tens of thousands extra.
-> another major supply chain attack
Hmm. It almost seems like the supply chain is not very secure.
-> Policy Exchange, a Conservative group
I met somebody from this group a few years ago and had an evening of social chat with them. Apparently the group came up with the idea that parents want good schools. They actually sit around, chew the cud, and come up with this as a 'policy'.
-> Won't help. People are too deeply wedded to MS applications.
So true. Alas I meet and hear a lot of open source advocates who simply do not understand the issue. It's easy enough for a one man band who writes a few letters in Word or works on a few Excel spreadsheets to move to LibreOffice, for example. But in a company where there is a long history of processes using Office, Outlook, SQL Server, it is a completely different prospect. We see it here in The Reg about people saying "try this distro, try that distro" when it comes to Linux. Pretty much all companies are not in the business of "trying distros", they just want to get on with their work.
Not just that, they pass the problem onto the people whose data has been slurped.
-> Those with children whose data was taken in the haul were offered advice in the breach notice on how they could "check to see if someone has created a credit file using my child's information."
Your data has been taken, here is how YOU can check what has happened to it.
Is to force data sovereignty - European data must be kept in Europe and not transferred to the spyhole of the world. This would mean MS, AWS, Google would have the same basic infrastructure costs rather than leveraging already-built-at-scale data centres in the USA. Sure, there will always be differences at the scale they operate at. But being unable to (mis)use US data centres would change their business methods.
-> The man behind a popular website that allowed cyber criminals to fake their caller ID location has been sentenced to 13 years and four months in prison... making or supplying articles for use in fraud
If he had stabbed somebody he would likely have got 5 years at most. Or even nothing at all.
-> Liles, in his capacity as security analyst for Oxford Biomedica
In the comments to this article - https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/12/exubiquiti_developer_jailed/ - I mentioned the difficulty of preventing insider security problems. It is not an easy thing to do. To me it is the trust element which is so troubling. Burglars burgle (for the benefit of our American cousins, they don't burglarize any more than robbers robberize or murderers murderize their victims) , and that is to be expected. It is why we have locks on our doors. We have an expectation that people inside the door are more trustworthy.
-> Liles had attempted to wipe his devices days before his arrest, but the data was recovered.
This git doesn't appear to be the sharpest of 'security analysts', does he? Which is how he was caught, I guess. He deserve a few years in the slammer for this.
-> I look at the Amazon being destroyed
I agree but for one thing. We in Europe, for example, can't point a finger and say "don't cut down those forests" when we have cut down ours. If we collectively want the Amazon to remain as jungle, then we collectively should pay for it. Pay the people of Amazonia not to log. Near to where I am there is a park with some large trees, some of which were cut down last year for "safety reasons". They had apparently become diseased and may fall down. Fair enough, I accept that. But no replacements have been planted. numberOfTrees--
-> I served in the jungles of southeast Asia hoping that the peace we restored would benefit the peoples and the jungle
I'm not sure which campaign(s) you were in, but wars never have such lofty goals. They are about beating an enemy or stealing land and resources (often from an enemy who rightfully owns them). Next up spreading democracy at the point of a gun.
That some people somewhere complained about PPI. 'Tut tut. If only PPI would get off its arse and fix this.' The same sort of people who complained about Log4J while doing nothing at all ever to help.
I tip my hat to the dedicated people in the open source world who maintain this stuff. They are often nameless (until the sh** hits the fan).