* Posts by Lotaresco

1501 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2007

UK snubs Apple-Google coronavirus app API, insists on British control of data, promises to protect privacy

Lotaresco

Re: Here in Belgium...

"something to convince the military police (carabinieri), flying squad (pol-strada), police (polizia), local police (polizia locali, urbani, regionali, communale), tax-police (guardia di finanza) and forest police (really), any whom of which might demand WHY you are outside the home region?"

As a fellow Italo-Brit I have to say that you forgot the polizia penitenziaria, the polizia postale and the vigili urbani. No doubt there are many others.

Due to an unfortunate decision to return to the UK to cope with family matters I'm now stuck in the septic isle unable to drive home. I'm getting to the point where I'm tempted to issue a certificate from my own company declaring that I'm a courier, complete the paperwork for France and Italy and drive home delivering essential agricultural supplies.

Lotaresco

Re: Fear not people...

"The Apple/Google hybrid (now there is a terrifying thought), is not being adopted in the UK because of the very high Not Invented Here factor, a major reason for non-adoption by any British government."

The primary reason for turning down the Apple/Google app is that it has a high level of independently verified privacy. It doesn't use a central database. Data is stored only on the phone and that is in the form of unique tokens. There's no central register of tokens and each phone creates a new, different token for every phone it interacts with. Even if you had access to all of the tokens on all of the phones with the app you could not trace the movements of an individual easily.

The secondary, but very important, reason is that the Tory party won't be getting funding from Apple or Google. By handing the contracts to friends, relatives and past collaborators the government ensures that the cash goes to an organisation that has either made donations to the party in the past or that will make donations in the future. See also Dyson.

Lotaresco

"I wonder if Mr Cummings had any input with regard to the system that was chosen?"

I don't know why you got downvoted. It's clear that Cummings and Ben Warner are involved via SAGE. Warner used to be the commercial principal for Faculty which, surprise, surprise has now been given an NHSX contract as has the US company Palantir. Both companies were involved in Cummings' data gathering to push Brexit through via social media.

Details here

It's also noteworthy from that article that Deliveroo and Uber were falling over themselves to blab details of their trips to the database. So even if you don't have a smartphone there are other ways of tracking your movements and contacts. I'm halfway expecting to hear of someone having their front door kicked in because they live alone but ordered two pizzas.

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

Lotaresco

Re: The mirrors, the mirrors

"I'd sort-of worked out that x-ray telescopes would have to use mirrors where the angle of incidence was tiny, so the x-rays actually reflect,"

I used to work next door to the physics department at Leicester. They had one of the old telescopes left outside the back door for a time. It looked like a set of nested drainpipes. Possibly the least exciting looking bit of exciting scientific kit that I have ever seen.

Lotaresco

Re: Collaboration is the word

""On the whole I think there is a tendency to underestimate the quality of Italy and its industry."

The UK tends to underestimate the quality of Italian science in general. I live near LNGS in Italy and get used to the astonishment of British visitors that there's a world class observatory and the largest underground laboratory (Bond music) in the world on our doorstep. My dream job would be a little further south at Telespazio Fucino. Sadly jobs are very hard to come by and Italian nationals get priority.

It's not just the UK that has anti-science politicians though. A group of local mayors have been rabble-rousing for years now trying to get LNGS shut down because of the perceived threat of radiation. There's also some pitchfork waving by yokels locals who insist that it's causing three headed sheep and that it's all witchcraft.

Nine million logs of Brits' road journeys spill onto the internet from password-less number-plate camera dashboard

Lotaresco

Re: ANPR has come a long way...

It's been an age (late 70s?) since I first saw an ANPR setup. Cameras on the Watery Lane overbridge just north of junction 9 on the M1

That seems unlikely. Although the concept was developed in the late 70s the prototype systems didn't appear until 1979 and those were installed on the M25 and A1, not the M1. Maybe some misremembering going on? Prototype systems were available in the 80s and Prime had 80386 based systems by the 80s.

Lotaresco

Re: Always abused

Always make a Subject Access Request. It costs them serious money to respond.

Lotaresco

Having seen in the past that someone was caught out cheating on his wife when she spotted his car on Google Maps, outside the flat of the mistress he promised he had given up, which resulted in much nastiness I can't see how the leak of number plate and location information can be considered harmless. What he means is "We didn't ask, we didn't look and by not bothering to find out if anyone came to harm, we can deny it."

Coming next that standard letter "Despite having built the system to the highest possible security standards a sophisticated attack by a network of hackers was able to exploit a rare software vulnerability that was the responsibility of the manufacturer. An innocent person employee has been disciplined for this unacceptable, but fortunately rare, lapse of professional standards."

Lotaresco

Brownie?

" along with the folding Brownie camera-like graphic"

The bodies of folding Brownie cameras were much thinner than shown in the graphic. The graphic also doesn't suggest a folding camera. It's more like a medium format bellows camera such as a Mamiya RB67 although the tall shape is similar to a twin lens reflex. Mostly for some weird reason these signs are erected upside down with the bellows pointing to the left. I'm guessing most roadside sign installers have never seen one and the signs don't come with "this way up" markings on the back.

We could have pwned Microsoft Teams with a GIF, claims Israeli infosec outfit

Lotaresco
Joke

Don't worry

Microsoft managed to patch the vulnerability in a GIF.

Wakey-wakey! A quarter of IT pros only get 3-4 hours' kip – and you won't believe what's being touted as the 'solution'

Lotaresco

I had a good long sleep last night

Yep, I managed a full five hours before having to drag my carcass in to sort out some problem that wasn't as urgent as the person yelling about it thought it was. I think many middle managers seem to think that there's a chain of bottom kicking in which IT staff are at the bottom of the heap. This particular "emergency" turned out to be that someone just doesn't read the emails that told him that the work he was shouting about isn't scheduled for delivery for another six months and that if we prioritise the delivery he wants then all the other programmes will be delayed by six months. So no, he's not having his way. Oh and there's no point in him going purple in the face and shouting at me because (a) I'm higher up the tree than he is and (b) not impressed by that behaviour and (c) HR are still working even in these Covid-19 times and unprofessional behaviour is still a no-no.

Sadly I did have to get out of bed and into the office because if I hadn't I would be in the wrong for refusing to help.

Escobar lines up COO... for lawsuit: Controversial bendy phone slinger sues exec over 'missing cash, YouTube hijack'

Lotaresco

Re: I can't believe

Well there seem to be at least four commentards who are outraged that the good name of Escobar is being sullied.

Lotaresco

'I'm not sure it's fair to call Escobar a "pharmaceuticals executive".'

I'm glad it's not just me that sees "Colombian" and "pharmaceuticals" and thinks "Colombian Marching Powder" especially when the name "Escobar" features. I suppose it's a sign of the times that this is being pursued via the courts rather than the concrete overshoes route.

Lords: New IR35 off-payroll tax rules 'riddled with problems, unfairnesses, unintended consequences'

Lotaresco

"IR35 was put in place because contractors were exploiting a (rather big) loophole"

That's really not why IR35 was put in place. The IR35 legislation was introduced because of the government being embarrassed by prominent media characters such as newsreaders, game show hosts and directors of the BBC setting up a company and supposedly free-lancing to supply their services. These people only had one client and were, quite frankly, taking the p*ss. IT contractors were, for the most part, performing task-related contracts that are excluded from IR35 and tend to move on when the task is complete. The rules that they pay tax under are exactly the same as people like Jacob Rees-Mogg use where their role is paid a stipend and in addition to the basic they receive bonuses and share dividends. Tax is paid on these payments at the appropriate rate.

The problems is that politicians want to grab tax from IT contractors but not pay it themselves. The fair way to deal with this would be to may dividends subject to income tax and NI at the same rates as salary. Then there would be no advantage to structuring payments to avoid tax because there would be no benefit to doing so. Making the use of off-shore companies to avoid tax illegal (as the EU is doing) would also sort out the mess. However that would deprive MPs of "nice little earners" the preservation of which was their main reason for becoming an MP.

We are where we are not from high-minded ideals about tax equality. The truth is IR35 is a complicated vehicle established to perpetuate tax inequalities.

Lotaresco

And the weird thing is...

As the director of a microbusiness that supplies staff, including me, to undertake IT work for larger businesses we have to have our contracts and actual working practices reviewed each year by our accountants who are taxation specialists. For over twenty years they have reported that we comply with the requirements for a genuine services company and more recently they have assessed over and over again that we are outside the scope of IR35. However two of our clients are running scared of IR35 because they don't want to risk having to pay fines of back-dated employers' NI so they have declared contracts to be inside IR35 when they are not. This is, as far as I can tell from other companies in the same boat, typical. Hence we will suffer a drop in turnover because our staff are being unfairly classed as employees of the wrong organisation. HMRC not interested at all in this.

After intense scrutiny, Zoom tightens up security with version 5. New features include not, er, spilling video calls to network snoops

Lotaresco

Re: So they are using AES-GCM? and decrypting at the server? With what keys?

"What does "using AES-GCM" even mean?"

AES-GCM is an implementation of Galois/Counter Mode which gives high speed encrypted comms on inexpensive hardware. NIST Special Publication 800-38D gives guidelines for reducing stream cipher attack and I'm guessing that Zoom's techies didn't bother to read it, because it sounds as if they are using nonces more than once. GCM isn't good at handling large messages because there's a relationship between short tags and large messages that permits an attacker to construct a ciphertext forgery with increasing probability of success. If the attacker has a good run of success they can determine the hash subkey which means that the authentication assurance is compromised.

AES-GCM is used widely and gives decent security if used in compliance with NIST guidance. Fail to implement it properly and there's not much point using it.

Lotaresco

Re: Makes my job harder

"Nobody expects to have to read the T&Cs"

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.. including without possibility of rescinding the contract surrender of your immortal soul for the exclusive purposes of EvilCorp SA blah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Surrender of any and all vital organs blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah without right of restitution in law. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah… Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Blah blah blah...

Baby, I swear it's déjà vu: TalkTalk customers unable to opt out of ISP's ad-jacking DNS – just like six years ago

Lotaresco

"best fix: Pi-Hole"

As others have said you don't need a RaspberryPi to run Pi-Hole. In addition to the ways already suggested, you can achieve the same functionality on a pfsense firewall by installing pfblockerNG and configuring it with the same publicly available lists that are used by pihole.

Lotaresco

If I Were Forced To Use Talk-Talk

I can't foresee a future in which this would happen, but if every other ISP disappeared overnight and I had to use them I'd be sure to have my own firewall, use PiHole's block lists and to blackhole the Excrement Replacement Service.

Bad news: Cognizant hit by ransomware gang. Worse: It's Maze, which leaks victims' data online after non-payment

Lotaresco

Last time I checked no one was flying with Ryanair, other than Ryanair crew.

Lotaresco

"recovering from this with minimal disruption, data intact and no documents leaked"

Did you miss the information about Maze? Escaping from this with no documents leaked is an unlikely scenario.

Lotaresco

Significant failures

As usual when an organization reports a successful malware attack there are significant gaps and elements of whitewash in the announcements. Two areas that interest me are the vector for the attack - it looks like it may have been spear phishing, the usual vector for ransomware, and the apparent weakness of any security controls.

For the first part it appears that Cognizant permits users with administrator access to access the internet/corporate mail from privileged accounts. Oops.

For the second it appears there are no controls to prevent lateral movement, no SOC, no alerting when there's unusual activity such as large volumes of data being transmitted, no IPS, no IDS, no AV on the wire... (etc).

I'm guessing that they are already working on the standard letter that says that they have the best security in the world but were unable to defend customer accounts because of the extremely sophisticated attack.

Cloudflare outage caused by techie pulling out the wrong cables

Lotaresco

Re: Imprecise?

"Is it just me or is the instruction “remove all the equipment in one of our cabinets” not imprecise, but just plain wrong?"

I refer to this at work as "Star Trek Management" based on the famous command "Fire All Weapons!".

A manager did it at one place that I worked "Get rid of everything in that cabinet!" I asked if he had a decommissioning plan and a list of the specific assets to be decommissioned and was called a time-waster. Someone else started to remove and chuck into the secure waste disposal (a ball mill) everything in the cabinet. An hour or so later I got a call. "There's something wrong with the network, the time source has failed."

The Meinberg Lantime was in that cabinet, or rather wasn't because it was now dust.

Lotaresco

That's bringing back memories

In 2008 I turned up for work to find access to the car park a bit difficult because of the number of emergency service vehicles parked on the access road. There were several buildings close together with a number of IT businesses on site. It turned out that the director of one of the businesses had hanged himself from the mezzanine floor of the office block. The reason was because someone at Telehouse had pulled out the wrong cable then spent the early hours of the morning randomly swapping cables to try and fix the problem. The business factored credit card sales on behalf of e-commerce sites and had been able to authenticate and authorise payments but not debit the cardholders' accounts. In a few hours overnight the business had gone spectacularly bankrupt.

Oh Hell. Remember the glory days of Demon Internet? Well, now would be a good time to pick a new email address

Lotaresco

It doesn't affect my Demon email

I was one of the early Demon customers. Due to various disputes with the "crack legal team" I ended up buying one of the demon domains and still own it today. So there is a lonely corner of the internet where a Demon server lives on[1] and has a single long-term Demon customer as user and owner.

<waves hand>

Hi Giles, if you're out there.

[1] In spirit there's no implication that the server was ever owned by Thus, Vodafone or anyone other than me.

Minister slams 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories as 'dangerous nonsense' after phone towers torched in UK

Lotaresco

Re: Millimeter wave auto-immolation?

"You mean he went outside where his body would be subjected to cosmic ray cascade showers, increased solar radiation and the same neutrino flux as indoors?"

Actually the funny thing is that the visitor was Australian, but they left in such haste that I could not tell them about the Arkaroola Hot Springs, that have very high natural background radiation and high radon emissions. Not only that but they live in a high radon area in NSW.

Lotaresco

Re: Conspiracy fruitcakes

"Former Vodafone Boss Blows Whistle On 5G Coronavirus!"

Curses, YouTube are removing this since it's fake.

Here is another version of the same thing.

I like "tektonology" and the fairy unicorn dust explanation of 5g.

Lotaresco

Conspiracy fruitcakes

One of them tried to convince me yesterday that 5g causes ozone molecules to "oscillate" which prevents them from binding to haemoglobin in the blood Therefore people show the symptoms of coronavirus by choking for air. Even a ventilator can't save them because there's no way that ozone will bind to the blood cells while 5g is in use. He was very puzzled when I pointed out that we don't breathe ozone, we breath oxygen. Also all molecules "oscillate" at room temperature and if you want to stop that, you would have to reduce temperature to absolute zero.

Meanwhile, he posted this as "proof" that the evil Telcos are engaged in a plot to spread coronavirus. Warning, very long, very boring, complete nonsense but possibly worth it just for the first few moments of someone trying to pretend that he is a "Vodafone boss".

Former Vodafone Boss Blows Whistle On 5G Coronavirus!

Sadly the fruitcakes believe this nonsense. It is, as Feynman observed, "cargo cult science".

Lotaresco
Boffin

Re: The good thing about Michael Gove is ..

"The Daily Mail is still being printed I believe."

The Daily Mail causes cancer of the anus. The ink is carcinogenic.

Lotaresco

Millimeter wave auto-immolation?

All human bodies emit W-band millimetre waves. That's how the security scanners at airports can scan bodies for concealed weapons. The scanners work at 94GHz which being a bigger number than 60Ghz should be at least 50% more scary. By climbing into a foil-lined sleeping bag these people are reflecting the radiation back into their own bodies. Maybe we can start a scare story that anyone wearing tinfoil roasts themselves from the inside out with scary millimetre wave radiation?

This is reminding me of a visitor to our home which is close to an Italian nuclear research laboratory under a mountain. Obviously this is very scary because it's concealed under a mountain in best Bond villain style. Although the big signs in the road tunnel pointing to the laboratory are a bit of a give away. The visitor asked what they did there. I said it's a neutrino detector and it is used to detect neutrino beams from CERN. Then the visitor asked what happens to the neutrinos? Oh I said because of the curvature of the earth they go back into space, although given the location of our home they travel through our house on the way out. Visitor had a major panic attack. Fainted. Left the house the same day. Result!

Poured your info out on a call to 118 118 Money? Bad luck. Credit provider 'fesses up that hacker nabbed customer service phone recordings

Lotaresco

Complacent

""It would be extremely time consuming for anyone to attempt systematically to extract or copy your personal information."

And there's where someone's shallow thinking ended, was it? It's only time consuming if it is one person trying to listen through the recording trying to pick out information. But that's not how the job is done. It is farmed out to a warehouse full of people with good English skills working for very low pay. Each is given a chunk of data to process and the details can be recovered for relatively low cost.

The same thought processes used to apply to shredding "No one would take the time to sort through the chad and piece the documents together." Yet that's what happened in Iran and now they offer a document reconstruction service commercially.

Capita hops on UK's years-late, billions-over-budget Emergency Services Network to keep legacy system alive

Lotaresco

Re: The actual question is

I worked on delivery of Airwave systems back at the turn of the millennium. The "teething problems" were legendary but it has settled down into being usable and most of the emergency service seem to like or at least tolerate the terminals with the capability to work over long distance that VHF never had. The feature all of them appreciate is the emergency button.

I still haven't seen any proposal how that feature would be implemented on ESN using personal/business mobiles. Several police officers I spoke to are concerned about losing push-button emergency calls. I would be if I were in their position with attacks on police officers now being relatively common. They aren't super heroes.

Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, surely has no frozen water, right? Guess again: Solar winds form ice

Lotaresco

Re: Disappointed

OK, if you insist. I found out when camping that making water on a hot rock isn't a good idea. It's the smell it causes that is the problem.

Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket

Lotaresco

There's a 2.900m mountain that dominates the view to the south from our home. I can drive up it in less than an hour. I can also drive back home without suffering an unexpected disassembly event.

Lotaresco

"A pure-random-evolution model doesn't make a lot of sense. A "guided evolution" model [whether the guidance is gods, aliens, cosmic consciousness of a species, or who-knows-what] seems to make more sense."

No one ever proposed a "random evolution model" the title of Darwin's book is "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". Evolution *is* selection. For evolution to occur there must be inheritance, mutability and selection. Genes (inheritance) are arranged in groups (chromosomes) and shuffled during reproduction. There are also random errors arising from mistakes in reproducing genes and from damage to genes (mutability). As in poker organisms are dealt a hand, if it's a poor hand they die and don't pass on their genes, hence favourable genes tend to dominate in a population.

Except it's all much more complicated than this.

Try reading "Chance and Necessity" by Jacques Monod for some detail about how random events + selection pressure = evolution.

Don't worry, IT contractors. New UK chancellor says HMRC will be gentle pushing IR35 rules

Lotaresco

Re: Staggering indifference and uncompetence

This is the sort of mess you get when a government ignores the fact that a company is a separate legal entity and tries to game the system so that they, their mates, and their supporters can run a company to avoid tax while trying to prevent others doing the same thing. IR35 is targeted specifically at microbusinesses that provide services. Since there's no logical distinction between a company with a handful of customers providing IT services and ones with double handfuls (note that big consultancies actually have very few customers with "Government" being the biggest in most cases) there is simply an arbitrary division based on "probably too small to take this to court".

Lotaresco

Re: Gentle? ROFL

"Sad, so sad."

The Donald, is that the bigly you? Have you time for a quick covfefe?

Don't Flip out or anything, but the 'flexible glass display' on Samsung's latest pholdable doesn't behave like glass

Lotaresco

"Looking to the future though, imagine something the size of a large fountain pen which unrolls into a screen about the size of an A5 sheet of paper"

By that time we'll have Expanse style hand terminals with holographic screens. Just like we're all zooming around on hoverboards today.

Lotaresco

"What is this obsession with foldable screens?"

I'm with you on this. The screen on my phone is good enough and having a phone wallet that protects the screen takes care of scratching the case or screen. The folding phone seems to solve a problem that no one has. It's probably just another shiny designed to extract money from wallets a bit faster.

Lotaresco

Re: inevitable byproduct of encounters with keys and coins

"It's not known for being particularly flexible, unless it's a strand of optical fibre thickness"

With a rule of thumb bend radius for fibre being 15 x the diameter of the cable, optical fibre could not be bent at the tight angle seen in folding phone displays. It's a reasonable bet that "glass" is probably an marketing person's untruth.

It is with a heavy heart we must inform you, once again, folks are accidentally spilling thousands of sensitive pics, records onto the internet

Lotaresco

Re: Just goes to show...

"Would you mind sharing your recipe for recepie, please?"

First catch your Rece.

Lotaresco

Personal Data Security

I get reminded by my colleagues from time to time that sometimes we in the IT industry are more worked up about sensitive data than the public. Examples are, a friend who is running an experiment with an appropriately secure alternative to Facebook, no ads, no customer profiling, good server farms built by people who know what they are doing and rigorously tested. The catch is it's a subscription service, £70 per year. Uptake is low, as he expected. The conclusion is that to most people their personal data and that of their kids isn't worth £70 a year to protect.

Last week a friend enthused to me about his experience of having surgery. His doctor sent him for X-Ray and by the time he got back to the consulting room the doctor was looking at the images on his personal tablet and phone. He got a rapid diagnosis which please him immensely. I asked if he was in any way concerned that these images and his personal data had been transmitted over public networks with no requirement for him to give informed consent or even know what the security was like on this distribution of sensitive patient data. He didn't care, not one bit.

We get worked up about it, the customers don't seem to care at all.

SpaceX's next Starlink volley remains stuck on Earth to glee of astronomers everywhere

Lotaresco

Meanwhile...

Competitor OneWeb no doubt rubbing their hands with glee after the event-free launch at Baikonur.

B-but it doesn't get viruses! Not so, Apple fanbois: Mac malware is growing faster than nasties going for Windows

Lotaresco

Re: Malware infections on PCs and Mac are so passé

"Barely any kid I know still uses Facebook. Ad overload has driven them all away."

There are ads on Faecebok? When did that happen?

Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

Lotaresco

Trailing Edge

A few years ago my office systems were run on a Sun V20Z with ESXi and a handful of Linux and Windows VMs. Over the years, I dropped that idea and replaced the VMs with J1900 NUCs one box per function. It's quieter, doesn't guzzle electricity and works without fuss. The use of separate boxes improves availability since I'm not dependent on one expensive box. I adopted a similar approach with laptops, getting rid of my old MacBook and HP Pavilion and using a single, cheap, Chuwi Lapbook Air with 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. That works fine for the limited uses I have for a laptop on the move and it's light and sturdy. Back at the office it's mostly used to SSH into the headless boxes so if anything, way over-powered for its tasks.

If I need processing grunt, which I do from time to time, I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre i7 which is still fast enough for my work needs. All of this stuff cost a fraction of the amount I once spent on systems, the NUCs are £130-150 each, the laptop was £240, the ThinkCentre was about £250, bought as unused stock from an eBay supplier. The most expensive item in the office network is the 24TB NAS. I'm also finding that I need to do much less maintenance than I used to. Despite being an IT professional, I don't want to spend all my time doing work in my own office. It's better to do that stuff for the paying customers who simply have to have the latest and best of everything.

I'm very happy to not be on the leading edge, and certainly not the bleeding edge.

Boris celebrates taking back control of Brexit Britain's immigration – with unlimited immigration program

Lotaresco

Re: Good, good.

"I assume you are so upset you are moving to your beloved utopia?"

He can't. You voted to end free movement and therefore you prevented British subjects from permanently re-locating to a country within the EU unless they go through a lengthy process of application for residency then citizenship.

It's as if those who voted for Brexit didn't know what they voted for.

Lotaresco

"Can I suggest an armband?"

Back in 2016 when our wonderful fellow citizens started to treat me as a pariah because I can speak "forrin" and I like to travel and work in other European states I designed my own armband. Blue, with a yellow five-pointed star and the letters "EUDEN".

Lotaresco

Re: Like Brexit or loath it...

" I grew up in a leafy Hampshire town in the 80s, and in my class at school probably about a third of the kids were from up north, or their parents were."

I'm one of the northerners who did that because in the mid-80s the government was putting people like me out of work in the north. I later took the option to explore freedom of movement in the EU and worked across much of the EU and EEA. The "Auf Wiedersehen Pet" life was a reality for many of us. Back then it was seen as "plucky Brits doing what they must to survive".

Now that the UK has prospered from its EU membership and it's time to give something back, by encouraging EU workers to come to the UK to do the jobs we don't have people to do, some mean-spirited individuals have decided to treat these mostly pleasant and hard-working people with whom we share a common culture as alien invaders.

I'm disappointed by my fellow citizens.

Lotaresco

Re: Good, good.

"Is it because we have such large and generously-funded programmes of science research across all fields, carried out in state-of-the-art laboratories and research institutions?"

I'm taking that as evidence that you have never worked in research in the UK. Each of those statements is a myth. Try again with "small, poorly-funded programmes of science research in a limited set of fields, carried out in ancient and decaying laboratories in moribund research organisations."

The government has been running down and closing research organisations since the 1970s. The miracle has been that good research has been done despite chronic underfunding and piss-poor pay.

Lotaresco

Re: Good, good.

"Ummmm how about the non-EU countries of Iceland, Norway and Lichtenstein? I think you'll find they all have freedom of movement within the EU."

Iceland - Member of EFTA, also part of the European Economic Area (EEA). Iceland participates with a non-voting status in EU agencies and programmes. Iceland also contributes funds to the EU. Iceland aligns with the EU foreign policy. Iceland participates in EU peacekeeping missions. Iceland is a member of the Schengen Area, under EU law. Iceland's participation in the Schengen Area allows free movement of people between Iceland and the rest of the Schengen Area. Iceland accepts free movement and EU citizens are free to visit Iceland to live, run businesses etc.

Norway - As Iceland but also accepts EU laws, participates at high level in defence and pays substantial membership fees to the EU.

Liechtenstein - As Iceland

All of these states have accepted the very things that the UK Brexiters have said they will not accept. If you're saying that it's now OK to accept full freedom of movement, all EU laws, EU peacekeeping duties, Schengen and continue to make our EU contributions (with no rebate) then freedom of movement will happen. However that's not what the UK is offering, is it?