Speechless
Japanese cyber security minister 'doesn't know what a USB stick is'
In Blighty, we have former home secretary Amber "Necessary Hashtags" Rudd, but shockingly politicians' failure to grasp basic aspects of their brief is not limited to the UK. Which takes us to Japan, where the country's newly appointed deputy minister responsible for cyber security admitted in parliament yesterday that he hasn …
COMMENTS
-
-
-
-
Thursday 15th November 2018 23:52 GMT diodesign
"the mod queue seems a trifle arbitrary"
Some articles have been marked for hand-moderated comments, most not, eg this one, which is why your comment went through immediately.
Articles and users on manual-moderation mode have to wait for someone to be free to clear the queue; certainly I've seen the queue averaging 10-40 posts.
If you find yourself in the queue, it may be because you posted a correction as a comment, or had a comment recently rejected/removed. That'll put you in the queue for a while.
C.
-
-
-
Friday 16th November 2018 23:07 GMT Dave559
Re: "the mod queue seems a trifle arbitrary"
Re: spinach in your teeth
What, and spoil all our fun? Laughing at particularly egregious errors is a noble British national sport!
(Of course, honest and completely unamusing typos should always be reported via the Proper Channels, he added, trying to avoid being cast into the wilderness...)
-
-
Friday 16th November 2018 14:59 GMT Dan 55
Re: "the mod queue seems a trifle arbitrary"
Well, it's not really private. I don't have my own private email set up on my work computer and given the rather stringent social media contract at my place of work I'm not going to use my work e-mail to link myself to a media outlet. Which leaves my phone, but I ain't going to be writing an e-mail at my desk with that either. And I don't think I'm alone in this, so a 'contact us' web form Would Be A Good Thing.
But I don't think it was the case that I posted a correction so I guess I need to tone down the sarcasm towards our Register overlords.
-
-
-
-
Thursday 15th November 2018 12:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
is this any different for any other politicians? Do people honestly believe they're appointed to their respective positions because they have knowledge in that field?
In the UK they appointed a scouser to the department of work and pensions for god sake.
Disclaimer: Some of us mancs are just as bad before the offence brigade arrive.
-
-
This post has been deleted by its author
-
Thursday 15th November 2018 21:45 GMT Terry 6
I think the tradition of the Civil Service was to wait until someone got good and proficient at their job and then move them to another department, so that they didn't "go native". Which could be good with regulators (where of course they don't have such a mechanism) but useless with a civil service.
And these days they bring in external "special advisors" who know nothing but believe strongly in something that has impressed the minister.
-
-
-
Thursday 15th November 2018 16:31 GMT Jay Lenovo
Sorry, I just manipulate people
Leaders of large numbers don't need to know all the details, that's for middle management. High ranking folk focus on the big picture.
A picture so BIG apparently usb sticks, computers, IoT devices are quantum particles, which can't be observed without meddling with the desired result.
-
Saturday 17th November 2018 02:44 GMT Black Betty
< subject > for Dummies.
It's not entirely reasonable to expect any politician to be knowledgeable in the subject for their portfolio prior to appointment, but it should be an absolute requirement that they read up on the basics of the subject once appointed. Enough that they can both understand and instruct their subordinates.
-
Friday 23rd November 2018 15:29 GMT Prst. V.Jeltz
Do people honestly believe they're appointed to their respective positions because they have knowledge in that field?
I know for a fact they arnt, they have a special procedure to make sure a minister knows nothing of the job he is in, cant be blamed for anything and can be diverted out of the public glare if neccassary.
Its called "Cabinet Reshuffle"
-
-
-
Thursday 15th November 2018 13:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: That's nothing
"There's desktop engineers still walking about that couldn't tell you what USB stands for."
A rose by any other name....
As long as they understand what "USB" does and appreciate its electrical and physical variations - then not knowing how the TLA is derived is irrelevant. There are many such acronyms that stand by themselves without knowing how someone contrived it from a vaguely relevant set of words.
-
Thursday 15th November 2018 21:46 GMT Overcharged Aussie
Re: That's nothing
I've had to explain what a memory leak is to more than one government CIO.
I'm sure one of them did not fully understand, especially when he asked if I had OH&S concerns about the storage of the requisite cleaning equipment around all that electricity in the data centre.
Sadly this was a true story.
-
Thursday 15th November 2018 23:48 GMT jake
Re: That's nothing
"OS&H concerns about the storage of the requisite cleaning equipment around all that electricity in the data centre."
Well, now, hang on a sec. Maybe not OS&H related, but ... In the mid-80s, I was working for a company that built gear to dynamically allocate bandwidth between voice and data.
Incredibly Big Monster of a company started getting weird bit errors on their global T1 (E1, T3 etc ... ) network. I was assigned to track down the problem after lower level techs couldn't figure it out.
Going thru' the data, I discovered that once the problem started occurring at any one site, it gradually became worse ... It was never bad enough to actually take down a connection, but network errors ramped up over time.
Further review showed that the same team of installers had installed the gear at all the sites with the problem.
I flew out to Boca and discovered that they had installed punch-down blocks in a janitor's closet ... directly over a mop bucket full of ammonia water. Seems it was the only wall space that was unused almost universally in such spaces.
Blocks relocated and corroded wire replaced, no more bit-errors ...
-
Sunday 18th November 2018 18:17 GMT Random Q Hacker
Re: That's nothing
While working for a certain large appliance manufacturer, I noticed huge rolls of plastic in the data center. Apparently the datacenter was built at great expense immediately below the dishwasher testing facility. Should a spill occur, the entire unix admin staff were to rush across campus to cover the systems, starting with those most important to the business.
Someone was paid a lot of money to put that datacenter there, and a lot more for that fancy remediation plan...
-
-
-
Thursday 15th November 2018 13:18 GMT Dave 126
Some exploration of the cultural differences? I've heard that the fax machine was popularised over email in the eighties by Japan, because of the difficulties of creating a Japanese keyboard. I've also heard of the Japanese learning English in order to use a computer. There are also stories of large companies being dependant on one experienced secretary for filing, because files couldn't be ordered alphabetically.
How much of this is myth?
-
Thursday 15th November 2018 22:06 GMT Z80
Unicode not showing up until the 90's can't have helped.
There are established sorting orders in Japanese though - how could they have dictionaries otherwise?. There's gojūon which orders words based on the pronunciation of the word. It literally means 50 sounds but modern Japanese only uses 46 of them. It starts with the 5 vowel sounds a, i, u, e, o then has rows of corresponding sounds (where they exist) in a set order with ka, ki, ku, ke, ko coming next so for example you'd find ao (meaning blue, but also green, but let's not get into that...) shortly before aka (red) in a dictionary sorted this way.
Kanji can have different readings so they can be sorted into I think as many as 214 groups based on their radical - a common element a group contains, and then they're sorted by increasing number of strokes within their groups.
-
Friday 16th November 2018 00:06 GMT Frumious Bandersnatch
1 dunno
2 dunno
3 unlikely as there is a standard dictionary ordering based on phonetic spelling (A Kat Sat Thinking oN How Many Yakult (are) Rancid for one possible mnemonic)
I'm still a bit concerned about how many textbooks are still out there telling you that you have to learn the word 電報("telegram")
-
-
Thursday 15th November 2018 13:19 GMT steviebuk
He actually sounds...
...like he's ill memory wise. Not because of the computer stuff but having to be prompted by an aide that "You do know this stuff, we told you earlier". But as the Japanese have always appeared a strike culture and proud, their government probably doesn't want to admit his not fit for the role.
On the "Today any company president uses a PC", isn't exactly true. Apparently, so he said on a documentary, Warren Buffet doesn't have a PC in his office. He's made his billions just reading the financials of companies in papers and other media before deciding to invest or not.