* Posts by Lotaresco

1501 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2007

CBI: Brexit Britain needs a 'sensible and flexible' immigration programme

Lotaresco
Headmaster

Re: It will be horrific

"but I do dislike the use of the colloquialism butthurt ever so much"

Do you? How terrible! WTAF does it have to do with "gay"?

I'm probably older than you and got butthurt on regular basis because the school had an ethos of "flog em" for every minor infringement of school rules or expectations.

I suspect the association you are making is in your own head, not mine.

"Do I sound old?"

No, you sound like someone in their 30s who thinks that constantly complaining that other people aren't living up to your high ethical standards is a way of making yourself look "nice".

Lotaresco

Re: It will be horrific

"it's not quite as bad as Chard...."

I was in Shepton Mallet when Kim Howells, Minister for Culture, made his ill-judged comment about the worst thing he could think of was being trapped in a pub in Shepton Mallet with a folk act consisting of four blokes in hairy jumpers. That evening in a pub four blokes in hairy jumpers got on stage and said "This next one's for Kim Howells."

Lotaresco

Re: @Doctor Syntax: It will be horrific

"evidence from local acquaintances (in middle of Devon) who have farms 'n stuff doesn't bode well, apparently the locals are basically to f'ing lazy and work shy to actually get up each morning and pull veggies out of the ground."

I was up in Wakefield not so long ago working on an IT contract and had meals in a local pub. One evening there was a local bloke going on and one about how "The Polish" had stolen his job at a nearby farm. He hadn't realised the farmer was at the bar.

The farmer turned round and gave him an identical speech to the one above mentioned that the wages were paid fairly and equally and said the guy could have his job back next day if he wanted. All he had to do was to turn up on time, arrive sober and do a day's work. Much swearing and the bloke ran from the bar. I bet he wasn't at work the next day.

Lotaresco

Re: It will be horrific

"I'm not convinced they do speak English in Shepton Mallet..."

Have an upvote.

Meanwhile... WTAF downvotes a joke? Butthurt Brexiter?

Lotaresco

Re: It will be horrific

"unless we expect everyone to speak English when they buy our innovative jams!"

And all those other wonderful products that we can sell to the world. Why the Shepton Mallet International Antiques fair is positively full of items to be sold to the gullible septics American connoisseurs of fine English craftsmanship.

Lotaresco

Re: dual nationality

I've worked with Irish nationals on contracts requiring a security clearance. However you won't be able to work on some types of projects. I can't see that it limits your work potential much. Work that cannot be done by dual nationals is comparatively rare.

Lotaresco

"I'm married to a German and I am looking at getting German citizenship, if the worst comes to worst."

You are Prince Phillip and I claim my five pounds.

Smart guns are a neat idea on paper. They'll never survive reality

Lotaresco

Re: "I still don't understand why any sane adult would ever want or need to own a gun."

"Living in the UK for 62 years, I never even saw a gun in real life until about 10 years ago"

I have lived, so far, in the UK for 62 years. Guns were and still are a part of daily life for me. I learned to shoot when I was seven and consider that the lessons that I learned at that time are lessons that are useful in life. I live in a farming area rather than some urban hell-hole so I'm used to using guns for perfectly legitimate purposes.

If you only saw a gun at an airport ten years ago you're either very unobservant or rarely use airports. I also suspect that you had not been outside the UK before the age of 52, since even nice liberal countries like Sweden have armed police who carry guns openly on the street.

Shooting is also a pleasant hobby that can be very relaxing. It has elements of self-improvement and also of competition. Until the UK went stark raving bonkers on the subject of guns many people enjoyed the hobby. The portrayal of those who like shooting as psychopaths looking for a place to go postal is unfair to the point of parody. It's as accurate as portraying those who don't like guns as feeble minded knee-jerkers would be.

I'm guessing that you don't feel the same way about archery since I've not seen loud cries to ban bows in England (although some newspapers have worked up a fit about crossbows) yet a bow is a weapon as well as a sporting article. So by the way are the discus, the javelin and the shot, do you feel like banning those as our Olympians were banned from practicing their sport in the UK by the over-reacters?

Meanwhile in France and Germany trucks have been used as weapons. Perhaps we should ban trucks?

"we have no native animals likely to attack us"

That's not true, there are native animals that are likely to attack you in the UK, even within London. They will kill without warning.

They look like this.

There are other native animals that will attack humans. It's just that city folk wander around with their eyes shut and can't see the hazards. Here's a list of some of the native animals that will attack humans.

Lotaresco

All the way back to 1951

"The Isher/Weapon Shops novels are very rare examples of Golden Age science fiction that explicitly discuss the right to keep and bear arms, specifically guns. Indeed, the motto of the Weapon Shops, repeated several times, is "The right to buy weapons is the right to be free". Van Vogt's guns have virtually magical properties, and can only be used in self-defense (or for suicide)."

So to be useful a smart gun needs to recognise not only who is using it (Tssk, tssk, no, you can't use if you are in the service of the Empress, Innelda Isher) but also who or what it is being used against. It also needs to be threat sensitive to prevent illegal use.

We'll have to wait until June 4784 to see such weapons available to purchase for reasonable prices.

Software For Video Creation.

Lotaresco

Re: Software For Video Creation.

"I have to create video presentations for my working projects. Could you advise me some programs that will really help?"

You don't mention which OS you are using. Is this a case of "there is only Windows!"?

If not, you can make impressive videos with a soundtrack using the Photos (was iPhoto) app on OSX or an iOS device.

If you are using Linux (or MacOS or Windows) and can cope with a command line you can make videos using ffmpeg which can be used to trim, join, resize, convert formats and convert an image to a video clip. It will add sound to avideo track and it's fast[1] and efficient. Steep learning curve.

[1] On a 3.4GHz i7 some video operations can be done at 8,000 fps which is impressive. OK these are trivial tasks but seem to be the ones that are done often such as stripping the audio from a file so that you can add your own soundtrack.

Two new Raspberry Pi models emerge steaming from the oven

Lotaresco

Re: Off topic (a bit) but...

> Burma Shave

Iolo is that you?

Lotaresco
Coat

Two new Raspberry Pi models emerge steaming from the oven

You'll need to put them on the shelf for a couple of hours to cool off.

Credential-stuffers enjoy up to 2% attack success rate – report

Lotaresco

Re: Aha - for once somebody correctly stating that it's the user-name/password combination reuse...

Yes, a good point, well made. Have an upvote.

Lotaresco

Choosing a password

It should be fairly easy. Nothing on a list of compromised credentials. Nothing with more than two repeated characters, reasonably long (at least nine characters) but permitted to be very long (255 chars?), read XKCD, some guidance on memorable passwords, stop trying to insist that people use "special" characters and random passwords because they only way they can use those is to write them down. SpandauGold45 is a perfectly good, strong password but many sites won't accept it the same sites will accept 12345! because their rules state that a special character makes a strong password.

And, possibly, supply a password generator that applies these rules and suggests a password to the user. Render the password into a bitmap and present that to them, rather than the text.

AI and robots? Will someone think of the jobs, says HPE CEO Whitman

Lotaresco

Not so fast...

This is news that's relatively long in the tooth. Both HP and CSC have been keen to ditch puny humans and replace them with robots. They want to do away with unskilled jobs and replace them with software or hardware robots where possible. They were talking this up about two years ago and promising organisations processing payroll, insurance etc that they could replace their data entry and form processing operations with robots.

Revealed: How Nvidia's 'backseat driver' AI learned to read lips

Lotaresco

Cool

Can I get it coupled with a laser to burn what I'm saying on the forehead of the oncoming idiot?

Calls for UK.gov's tax digitisation plans to be put on the back burner

Lotaresco

Re: Tax really is taxing

"Lol, hmrc are straight from 1970 in thought before deed."

You can tell everything that you need to know about HMRC from the self assessment forms they provide.

They send out a form with your name and address printed on the cover. Turn over the page and you are asked to give your name and address. Writiing "The same name and address you sent the form to, the same name and address on the first page of this form, you idiot." in this space is frowned upon.

There isn't even a check box to be used that says something like "address not changed" or something similar. They actually want you to waste your time filling it all out again - presumably because it's not their time.

Later you will be asked to sign parts of the form. The places requiring signature are not completely obvious. Nothing obvious like "sign the last page to confirm that what you stated is true" Oh no, it's search for the declaration on page 4(b) subsection 2z or whatever timewasting nonsense they can dream up.

HMRC hates taxpayers.

DANGER ANECDOTE APPROACHING.

A friend of mine was "invited" to have a meeting with HMRC about his tax submissions which were, as far as he was aware, honest, open, legal and complete. Part way through the meeting the tax inspector said "I can't help the feeling that you have a bad attitude about paying taxes." My friend admitted that this is true, he believes in a minimum tax system where the state only takes the minimum of tax and doesn't waste the tax money on vanity projects. The inspector then said "Yes, you seem to have the bad attitude that this is your money. It isn't. All of this money belongs to the government, however the government generously permits you to keep some of it and you should be grateful for this."

Lotaresco

"Modern, microservice- and API-based, using modern non-waterfall delivery processes using all the funky cloudy tools"

BINGO! I have a full card!

Minus points for not using "going forward", "amplify", "ecosystem", "actionable", "scalable", "platform" or the evergreen "synergy" but still a creditable attempt at corpspeak.

Just give up: 123456 is still the world's most popular password

Lotaresco

Re: 18atcskd2w

It's not a mnemonic, it's most likely to be an account created by a spambot. The spammers will want a strong(ish) password and will use the same password for every compromised account because it saves working out which password applies to which site.

Lotaresco

Re: 18atcskd2w

" If it's a mnemonic I can't figure it out."

Which started me thinking about mnemonics.

I used once, but no longer use, book codes for passwords. The reason that I stopped using them was down to me no longer getting a Christmas freebie. I will explain.

My Christmas freebie was a slim, leather bound diary from one of my clients. Each page was week-to-a-view and had a suitable life-affirming quotation at the top and bottom of each page. You know the sort of stuff - "Start each day with a smile and every meeting will be a happy one." at the top of a page and "The time is always right to do what is right." at the foot of the page.

So a mnemonic for a password could be a date at the top or bottom of a page followed by a numeric reference to some of the words. e.g. 170116-010608 for "StartSmileEvery" or 170118-050208 for "RightTimeWhat". As long as you don't write down the codes in the book or reference which book you are using it's strong enough.

Lotaresco

Re: Just get a password manager..

I have some sympathy with you. However I have used three password manager applications. The biggest weakness for all of them is that the developers responsible for them have all gone belly-up. One of them in particular just shut up shop without warning. Gee thanks guys. OK I was able to use password recovery to get back into the sites that I could no longer access but that in itself is a weakness.

I'm finding that the one durable password storage technique is a little black book in a safe.

Lotaresco

Re: Don't Just Blame Users

"as well as a strong password"

As long as it doesn't have a lame algorithm to work out a strong password. I've seen strength checking algorithms that force a user to create weak passwords.

Lotaresco

Re: Don't Just Blame Users

One of the banks I use has a "PIN" security scheme for online accounts that could be phished, rick-rolled and the PIN extracted from the user as follows:

Please enter the following characters from your PIN: [1][3][4]

Authentication failed, please try again.

Please enter the following characters from your PIN: [6][2][5]

Sorry, website closed for maintenance. Please try again later.

Even the bank's official security notices look like phishing attacks, so users are unlikely to spot what is going on.

SpaceX makes successful rocket launch

Lotaresco
Coat

Culture

So the rocket "Pretentious? Moi?" manages to land on the drone "Just Read the Instructions."

Just kidding.

The chap obviously has good taste in reading material.

UK's largest hospital trust battles Friday 13th malware outbreak

Lotaresco

Re: Scenario

At the risk of sounding like Mr Grumpy, a boundary pair of firewalls isn't going to do much to control this type of outbreak. You are talking the talk of an awful long time ago. Network security has moved on and you would need to consider endpoint protection as well as firewalls and having your IPS somewhere other than (just) the boundary.

Firewalls are not where you do sandboxing.

The argument about a Firewall costing as much as a round of chemotherapy is a busted flush. It's as sensible as arguing that the PC on the hospital administrator's desk cost as much as a year's insulin for a diabetic or that an Ambulance costs as much as a round of chemotherapy. Is that a valid argument for not having either?

Network security appliances enable the hospital to continue to treat patients. They protect against key systems required to deliver patient care being compromised. They also help with data loss prevention and the consequential fines that would hurt the ability of the hospital to deliver care. Given the weak security profile of embedded systems that are used to monitor patients, provide clinical chemistry (etc) adequate protection of the network is essential not optional.

Finally if you're getting charged £3000/day for a callout then the Trust is being ripped off, or some administrator is getting a massive backhander. That is so far above the industry average that I smell not just a rat but a rat king.

BTW, I used to work for the NHS, consider I've paid my dues and these days I work as a Security Architect.

Lotaresco

Malware infections at NHS hospitals are rare

I think you mean "are rarely reported" or possibly "are rarely of a type that requires all networks to be taken offline". Bad practices are rife within hospitals with a culture of medical staff, particular senior medical staff being able to access patient's data using the same iPad that they use at home. The presence of malware isn't, in my experience, rare but the spread of an infection is controlled by AV.

Drone biz Lily Robotics takes $34m in pre-orders, ships nothing, shuts down, gets sued by San Francisco DA

Lotaresco

Re: TBH Steve Jobs and Clive Sinclair also too pre orders and used the money to fund the project

"Difference is they results."

Yeah, they resulted alright. Except when they didn't. Clive and Steve were bad boys with their promises and failure to deliver as was Lord Sugar. Sinclair in particular took money for several promised products that either failed to work, weren't delivered at all or were delivered but managed to last no more than a couple of days before breaking.

Still, good to see that the spirit of the industry from the early days still thrives.

Outage-hit Lloyds Bank in talks to outsource data centres to IBM

Lotaresco

Re: What can possibly go wrong?

ROFL.

I've worked on many outsourcing projects. If we say "Well that went well." It's always with irony. A bit like on The Grand Tour.

Brother-and-sister duo arrested over hacking campaign targeting Italy's bigwigs

Lotaresco
Headmaster

Many thankings!

That should have been molte grazie or grazie mille. Given that you're presumably not BFF with "Milan based Alex" La ringrazio tanto is a more formal way to say thank you. Google Translate was not your friend.

Weaky-leaks: Furious fans roast Assange in web interview from hell

Lotaresco

"I was insinuating that Putin was doing the double plunge."

And enjoying it. When someone gets as rabid about gays as Putin is while producing their own line in lame homo-erotic soft porn you just know that the banging noise is the closet door vibrating.

The top doc, the FBI, the Geek Squad informant – and the child porn pic that technically wasn't

Lotaresco

Re: This is repair?

"Caveat - I'm not suggesting anything was planted, just that it could have been trivial to do."

It's just as well because there are principles in law that make the chain of reasoning that you came up with difficult to establish as a defence.

There's cui bono? or "who profits?" to help establish motive. In this case the tech gets his $500 for finding the evidence on the computer he examined. He doesn't get more if the defendant is found guilty. He doesn't get more if more evidence is found on other systems owned by the defendant. His incentive to plant evidence on other systems is therefore non-existent. If he gets caught he goes direct to jail. For nothing.

There's the standard of proof required which is phrased as "beyond reasonable doubt" although not usually expressed in those terms in court. The long, shaggy dog style, of circumstances that may lead to the same outcome had better have some supporting evidence or it is unreasonable. There's lots of case law to show that defendants have tried to use a bizarre chain of supposition to establish innocence and failed because there's nothing to underpin a "The dog ate my homework" defence.

Lotaresco

Re: This is repair?

"But what about people who have tendencies that way but don't want to cause any harm? Keeping a stack of what is presumably wank material on their computers may be what is keeping them from going out and carrying out actual abuse."

I take your point and have sympathy with it, but you're missing something important which is the difference between adult pornography and making "wank material" that uses children. Consent. A child cannot give consent for the making of these images.

The images in question can only be made by abusing a child and there's an industry behind that. It's a bizarre industry with many tentacles. So some of the images are made by relatives who will abuse a child on camera for cash. The more extreme material appears to be made by the modern-day version of slavers who will buy a child from the parents or from a kidnapper. Some of the people involved in this will just go out and grab a child off the street.

What happens afterwards depends on the child and the degree of coercion, ranging from a lifetime of servitude in prostitution to disposal of the body.

The law against the making of pornographic images of children is an attempt to address the root of the problem. By shutting down demand for these images they hope to remove the source of revenue and prevent the abuse happening. I'm not personally convinced that it works and I think that events are showing that the demand for this sort of material is infinite and no amount of prosecution of the voyeurs will stop the trade in abused children. I also don't see that letting the crime go unpunished will help either.

Catch-22

Lotaresco
Holmes

Re: My 2p worth

"so I spent the next 2 years going through family photo albums image by image to find and delete the nasty stuff."

In my world statements like that usually end "And that concludes the case for the defence m'lud."

Lotaresco

Re: This is repair?

"Problem is, is $500 enough to put it there yourself?"

Do you then think that the technician then broke in to the doctor's home and loaded the images onto a Mac, his iPhone and two hard drives? I'm sceptical about the technician's motive for probing around a hard drive, but any explanation of motive and actions needs to take account of the few facts given.

Lotaresco

Re: "To be clear, our agents unintentionally find child pornography"

"Still, got to be a special brand of stupid to have child porn on a computer, then send it off to a repair shop and get them to find deleted pictures."

Digital forensics is one of the things I do. You'd be surprised by how over-confident, dumb and technically illiterate the porn addicts/pornographers are. I suppose there's a valid argument that the ones who get caught are the stupid ones, but boy are they dumb.

I'd have a guess from the details given that in this case the doctor had a problem with his computer and realising that it would have to go in for repairs deleted his kiddy porn stash, probably by dragging it to the trash and emptying the trash bin. Job done in his mind. I've no idea why the tech was searching through the free space on the drive, although it's not unknown for techs to try to grab porn for their own use from systems in for repair. Just that some of them draw the line at kiddy porn.

It wouldn't be an issue in the UK. Any photograph of a naked child, with few exceptions, is automatically "indecent".

Microsoft sued by staff traumatized by child sex abuse vids stashed on OneDrive accounts

Lotaresco

Re: So many problems on so many levels

"First MS should have asked for volunteers."

Not a good idea. What sort of person do you think it is that wants to see this sort of stuff? In places where this sort of work is done, volunteers are treated with great suspicion.

Lotaresco
Paris Hilton

@diodesign Re: private v public

"Their servers, their rules."

Quite. I know it's great to go off on one about the privacy issues, which IMO don't exist in this case. You put your stuff in the cloud? Read the T&Cs of the service (they are all slightly different) and the legislation of the jurisdiction in which the service is provided (it's not the UK in this instance). There's no presumption of privacy with cloud storage[1]. This is why my industry will not put its data with a cloud service unless there's a contract that states that the data stays in an EU member state and significant penalties if the service provider breaks that rule.

Do people not realise that (some) admins have godlike permissions that let them see *everything* on the system?

Paris, because she's dumb enough to stick her sex tapes in the cloud.

[1] As some "celebs" who chose to put their selfies and home made porn on cloud storage have discovered.

Lotaresco

Returning to the point of the article

I know it's great to go off on one about the privacy issues, but slightly irrelevant to the point of the article which most commentators seem to be ignoring (hanks to the few who have addressed the issue). The action against Microsoft seems completely reasonable. Sifting through this sort of material - it's difficult to call it "porn" it's simply evidence of abuse, rape and murder - would induce nightmares for most reasonable people. Doing it day in day out when you didn't want to do the work in the first place is even more degrading and distressing. I'm involved in digital forensics, don't do this sort of work and don't want to. I know police officers who have to do this sort of thing. Their employers try to take care of them because it's known that constant exposure to this material can cause PTSD and other mental problems and at the worst can de-sensitise people and turn them into consumers of this filth.

Police investigators therefore get rotated in and out of the work, have counselling and are monitored carefully by their employer. I doubt that the sort of care needed was even recognised by Microsoft management. MS don't have either the background or the experience to undertake this work. They don't even have the experience of managing workers in this situation. This is clear from the periods of time mentioned in the article. The police tend to rotated staff out of the job after a few months. I don't know anyone who has been asked to attend and look at this class of images over a period of years.

EU wants power to fine behavioural data bad boys and the ad men aren't happy

Lotaresco

Re: When I first went online...

"When was this semi-utopian time?! "

I don't think it ever existed, or if it did it had the half-life of a transactinide element.

I first went on-line while at University, in the early 80s. Porn was a thing back then, just not a commercial thing and not images, words. One of the prolific internet "erotic" writers from way back then is still going, I see with a blog and a kickstarter project to publish porn adult fiction etc.

D-Link sucks so much at Internet of Suckage security – US watchdog

Lotaresco

Re: Cheap - Reliable - Secure ... pick any two.

"It's your choice so quit complaining."

So, if I may summarise, your view is "Eat shit, 17E15 flies can't be wrong."

Lotaresco

Re: AC without AC icon.

"When a user is deleted they become an AC. He or she wasn't an AC before."

A quick search shows that "djzoey" is a prolific poster in the D-Link support forums. Always posting breathless feel-good opinion and shouting down anyone who dares to say that there may be a problem with a D-Link product. This is typical of his line of patter:

"Might have to wait for morning. I don't' know enough but I know they are good and my stuff works great man. I love this router. Im off to play BF3. Might send a PM. Good luck."

A definite turfer. Hell, he's dumb enough to be a moon chromer.

Lotaresco

Re: Sympathy for the Devil

"I work with D-Link products everyday and there products are solid and safe. "

Hmm well they may be safe there, wherever "there" is, but here they are buggy, fragile and useless. I've got a shoebox full of failed D-Link products and none at all working. All the Draytek products bought at the same time still work reliably.

Anti-smut law dubs PCs, phones 'pornographic vendor machines', demands internet filters

Lotaresco

Land of the brave and free?

The US seems to modelling itself on the former East Germany. Mind you the UK's gone that way also.

GCHQ feeds first crop of infosec startups to Cyber Accelerator

Lotaresco

Re: Office space

"The portacabins are in the visitors car park, next to Dmitriy and Vladimr's Hot Dog Van."

Would sir like a doughnut with that?

Lotaresco

This should be a resounding success

Well, as much of a success as anything else commercial that GCHQ turns it's hand to. There's a problem in that the spooks don't understand business or even the need to provide a service that customers want. The wheels have fallen off their other attempts at supporting and getting involved in business.

For example they started their accredited advisor scheme with a fanfare and a desire to get the best of industry and the best of government working together. A praiseworthy objective but they struggled to support the scheme and often refused to listen to the same people that they had selected as the "best of the best". That resulted in them binning the scheme. One of the many headaches with that initiative was that CESG didn't want to give the advisers either authority to make decisions or provide the advisors and industry with information. GCHQ takes in information, it's not good at giving it out.

Plusnet? More like Plus-naught: Mobile data on the fritz for days for some unlucky punters

Lotaresco

Yes, Plusnet are becoming awful

The support team were good and would often go "above and beyond" the call of duty to sort things out. BT originally didn't seem to interfere much but recently (12-18months) support seems to be becoming BT support standard. A problem at the local exchange took broadband off-line for my business (which we pay for at business rates) for three weeks as they pissed about trying to do something. In typically BT style they now always start with a refusal to log a call until some pantomime of "turn it on and off again" has been done. After that there's a scripted response which will take forever to run through.

Getting it fixed will involve OpenRetch turning up at our premises to tell us the problem isn't in our premises. Then going away again. Days later they will appear at the exchange and tell us there's a fault at the exchange. Then weeks later someone will fix it.

Mail seems to a particular issue at the moment. Several customers have complained that mail is bounced by PlusNet. PlusNet won't raise a call about this and in fact have been rude, surly and downright snotty about the issue saying we have to send them the failed email. Since they are bouncing all mail from those customers, how do they expect the customers to get that mail to us or to PlusNet support?

Top cop: Strap Wi-Fi jammers to teen web crims as punishment

Lotaresco

Re: I don't know wether to laugh or cry.

"My spell checker says that "spellchecker" is wrong."

Does it accept "spool chucker"?

Lotaresco

Re: Every so often...

"IIRC there is something like a driver part of some USB sticks which could be infected, again bypassing any security and loading your nasty to a nice low level."

What you are talking about, I think, is BadUSB. This has been used for a number of different attack types, most of which are trivial to stop. They rely, as the distribution of Stuxnet did, as much on spear phishing as on a technical exploit.

If you want to play with this yourself you can get a rubber ducky which comes with a nice range of tools and GitHub distributed scripts to do all sorts of things. However it's also trivially easy to defeat.

At the time that the MoD spokesman was trying to scare people about the iPod these exploits didn't exist, BadUSB came along about five years later.

The linked article should give you some ideas about how these things work and what people have done with them. However an iPod isn't the vector since you need to reprogram the firmware on the USB device to make this work.

Lotaresco

Re: Every so often...

"The guy didn't get it completely right as he said USB"

I would say he got it wrong because he said USB.

If he'd said that there are attacks that can be run from portable media devices and storage (keeping quiet about the type of interface) then if would true. But the specific example he chose to give is wrong and doesn't work. It's an example of someone being at a briefing and not understanding it, or alternatively it's an example of a journalist misquoting the explanation that they were given.

My heartfelt thanks for the downvote to whoever couldn't be bothered to think about what I had said.

BBC surrenders 'linear' exclusivity to compete with binge-watch Netflix

Lotaresco

The bit that puzzles me is...

Several series have already been published on the iPlayer as "box sets" - the pedant in me says that should be "boxed sets" but not for iPlayer because there's no box. I spotted this with some surprise recently when I went to the iPlayer to find some series my wife was watching. Sorry I can't remember what it was, it was that exciting. Although on TV they had got as far as episode 2, all of the series was on iPlayer. I then noticed several other unboxed/never likely to see a box "box sets" on there. This was back in November. So it's not "news" as such unless the news is that this is now policy, not just something that was happening.

Possibly it was the BBC trying out the idea.

They also seem to be using the on-line BBC 3 channel to try out series and then later transmit them on another channel. For example, "Class" is now being aired on BBC One.