* Posts by The Other Steve

1184 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2007

ASA slaps beer-punting ladyboy

The Other Steve
Coat

Meh

"We concluded that the ad was likely to cause serious or widespread offence."

On the basis of only eight complaints ? Out of how many people who saw the advert ? Priceless.

In fact, the ASA will pull an ad on the strength of only a single complaint of this type.

Yup, just one. So, if you see an ad that you particularly dislike for any reason, like say the people in it are to smug, or you just happen to dislike the company in question, all you have to do is have a butchers here : http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/codes/ for the codes of practice, pick one that you can convincingly argue that has been breached (like say it's unfair to some large number of people of a particular gender, ethnicity or having a particular disability, or, my personal favourite that it is likely to harm children (TV Code 7.4.1 "Material which could lead to social, moral or psychological harm"), or encourage them to behave in such a way that they may physically harm themselves or others (TV Code 7.4.2 "Material which could lead to physical harm to children", see esp 7.4.1 s(1) on emulation of behaviour).

Then go here : http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/how_to_complain/ you can even complain on line.

You can make a satisfying, if somewhat pernicious and misanthropic hobby out of "advert sniping", erm, at least, that's what someone told me.

IT departments VAT-whacked

The Other Steve
Flame

I should like to add my shrill voice ...

... to the cries of "idiocy" with regards to the hard coding of VAT rates, as ye sew, so shall ye reap.

I mean honestly :

"... which do have the VAT hard coded into them ... [o]ur system is quite robust in it's design"

It fucking isn't.

And as for you, SImon Hobson (sic) :

"It is NOT as simple as changing ONE field from 17.5 to 15"

I think you'll find it is, or rather, it should be, but clearly isn't due to idiocy.

"there are at least 3 rates there"

So that's three fields, then.

"So it may well be that the easiest way to handle this is to write a routine which applies all the "if <condition> ..." tests and returns the rate"

And the rate should be stored in a DB field somewhere, from whence your code can look it up. The logic you describe is only applicable to deciding which rate to apply in which circumstance, it has nothing to with the actual value of that particular rate.

"but if you want to handle VAT properly, it's probably the only way to do it. Glad I'm not involved in that any more !"

I'm glad you're not as well.

HMRC estimates its IT project costs

The Other Steve

Hah!

"HM Revenue and Customs is running 25 major IT projects worth at least £197m, but is unwilling to provide accurate estimates."

AFAIK due to the way they (and other gov depts) put together (or have put together for them) contracts with EDS and all the other shysters feeding at the pork barrel, they are, in fact, _unable_ to provide accurate estimates. So in all probability, the other departments were simply lying and HMRC represents much more realistically the general state of play vis a vis IT project costs in government.

That's what I heard, anyway.

Home Office team continue work on net snooping masterplan

The Other Steve

@Brian

"It's a socialist plan"

In theory, it's a socialist government. YMMV.

Social workers sacked over Gary Glitter email

The Other Steve
Flame

@ Tester and fellow Daily Mail inmates.

See the problem is that there isn't really any line that you can draw in the sand and say "anything past that is neither funny nor fit to be the subject of humour". Not unless you're a total fascist, anyway. There are just things that _YOU_ don't find funny.

For instance, I was emailed the first 9/11 joke approximately 8 hours 16 minutes after the event, and it was really fucking funny. Of course the death of several thousand people is a bit of a bummer, but that doesn't mean we ought not to be able to have a laugh. In fact, in such grim circumstances, a laugh can cheer things up no end.

I've heard recent amputees doing peg leg and parrot gags, they thought they were riotously funny, far better than moping around, which is presumably what you'd prefer them to do ?

Similarly, child abuse is pretty bloody nasty, but that picture of GG is actually quite amusing, it doesn't encourage paedophilia, or child abuse, or harm anyone, it's a joke. Intelligent grown ups can see tragedy _and_ humour in the same places, try Shakespeare, Dickens, etc, etc, etc.

So lock your moral outrage the fuck back up, or take it to the DM forums where it belongs and you can chorus your outrage along with the other children in the sandpit.

Now,w/r/t the story :

Quite simply, any sizeable org (large enough, say, to employ at least one lawyer) , and much more so in a public org like a council, will have in place a policy that defines what is and is not acceptable use of that org's IT assets.

There will also be a clause in employees contracts that binds them to follow this policy, and most likely stipulates that failure to do so can be construed as gross misconduct.

Straight forward AUP breach, and despite what Dervheid would have us believe, otherwise apparently competent people do, in fact, regularly lose their jobs over just such policy breaches, particularly those who work for councils.

Granted you have to question that apparent competence since it obviously didn't extend to reading and understanding the corporate email and web use policy ...

US couple sue over McNudes

The Other Steve

In before... oh bum!

@Mark W :

No, not just you, that happened to me as well, saw "McDonalds" and "Arkansas" and just auto completed it from context, I guess.

@Jay :

Are you really really sure, given that these are two Arkansas yanks who like Mickey Ds, that you want to see pictures of them in the buff ?

MPs declare their ignorance on the web

The Other Steve

RE : !geek

"So I think we need a disparaging term for the sort of !geek who frankly hasn't a clue about technology or what we think of as technological common sense. Suggestions?"

Other than "users", you mean ?

How about : Wilfully Ignorant Luddite Fucktard.

And it is wilful, I've got geek coming out my arse, but I still regularly mince around art galleries with a glass of wine in my hand rubbing my chin and making insightful comments*, so what's their fucking excuse ?

* Often involving the word "fucktard", but you can't have everything.

The Other Steve
Alert

Christ, where to start with that one ?

Firstly, anyone sufficiently loathsome to use the phrase "I hope that we will not hear the tired old argument about freedom" should be dragged out and shot without mercy. Clearly this idiot is a threat to the democracy that we pretend to have, therefore a terrorist. The fact that he can get away with such a comment without fear of censure or a damn good old fashioned beating gives the lie to the idea of democracy in the UK.

With that out of the way, let's move on to

"Paul Flynn MP has been asked to remove comments about fellow MPs Peter Hain and Lembit Opik. He compared Hain to a Star Trek character"

Really, that was actually quite restrained. I personally would compare the slimy, gerning, weasel faced slaphead with a massive cunt bubble, let me count the ways.

"The authorities have taken exception to some of the language used which, they feel, breaches Parliamentary etiquette."

It didn't happen in parliament though, did it ? And frankly, since parliamentary etiquette largely seems to consist of being smug, making pathetic snide remarks, shouting "waaahh waah wahh, blur muuuurgh!" when ever anyone else is talking and having weird eyebrows, it's not like they can claim that making snide comments on a blog is brining it into disrepute.

Although all this is indeed frightening, it's not surprising. As previously mentioned, diminutive flame haired chipmunk pr0n pinup Hazel blears made it clear, as did Adrian Sanders in his quote to the reg, that politicians in general, and governments in particular don't like the internet and blogging and all the rest of it, because, much as I hate to say it, the internet empowers individuals, or at least has the potential to so (until NuLab gets it's grubby hands on the levers, anyway).

And anything that empowers the individual perforce disempowers the traditional* power elites, viz the cretinous shower of venal bastards that we somehow manage to keep re-electing, not that it matters much who you vote for, as someone once (probably) said "If Jesus and the twelve apostles apostles turned up tomorrow and started running things, but they weren't allowed to change the rules, we would still be fucked."

And how true that still is today, given the dangerous, totalitarian and yet somehow weirdly asinine behaviour described by the story.

* I know, yuk, but at least I managed not to use "entrenched".

BT silences customers over Phorm

The Other Steve

RE: So, I have a question

"Will they purge all the forums and your postings if you were to put up entries in every forum about this mess"

Yes.

"or would they just kill your forum-id"

Yes also, and as well.

The Other Steve
Thumb Down

Stalinist purges and revisionism

Not just deleting the threads, but banning users who asked where any further information would be posted, found their posts missing, and then posted them again.

Like many jumped up fascist forum mods all over the intertubes, BT's moderators will not have their actions questioned. From the looks of the discussions on NoDPI and other places, quite a few users have been banned. Including me, but then I was fairly rude, as is my wont.

There also seems to be an ongoing attempt to edit other threads which may contain traces of Phorm, or that linked to the threads that have been removed.

I'm no longer surprised that BT believe that it's acceptable to treat customers with such contempt, but it still really boils my piss.

Oh yeah : @ Joe K "Why anyone would stick with BT over this is beyond me."

Because some of us are still in lengthy contracts and have to wait until the expiry dates or pay BT shit loads of cash, that's why. Contract ends, BT gone, and if they keep acting like this, contract torn up, BT sued. It will be an entirely futile gesture I'm sure.

BNP leaked list claims first victims

The Other Steve
Flame

@AChristian

Erm, no, sorry, Christians simply bolted their festivals onto the old solar/lunar calendars. Take easter for instance, named after the Saxon goddess Eostre, and basically a celebration of the vernal equinox, and Christmas, you dildo, is smack bang on the autumnal equinox and as a festival had existed for rather a long time before your vaunted god botherers came along and tried to enslave the EuroPagans .

I'm sick of hearing idiots whine on about loosing the true meaning of Christmas, in fact, we're just beginning to get the true meaning of our winter festivals (it's dark, I'm hungry, Let's fuck!) back millennia after they were hijacked by rapacious wanktards who think there's a big beardy bloke living in the sky with a load of naked blokes with wings.

Fucking back to basic tories, not a clue about history among them.

British pilots ramp up opposition to ID cards

The Other Steve
Black Helicopters

Huh ?

"Identity cards will directly benefit airside workers — not just by improving personnel security, but also by speeding up pre-employment checks"

How will that work then ? Here's a clue, it won't. You'll still want to do an enhanced CRB check on anyone applying to be an airside worker, and it's no good if they've had one before, CRB certificates are valid only once, you can't re-use them, the checks must carried out per application.

Perhaps in the ghastly NuLab utopia of the future all criminal records will be directly stored in the ID database, but until that happens (which it won't), there isn't any way that carrying another piece of ID, no matter how chock full of biometric pixie dust can possibly speed up the process of ECRB checks and whatever else is done for airside types. In fact, it can only make things worse, as each person who is already an airside worker will have to be re-checked when they are issued with an ID card, otherwise there really isn't much point is there ?

Well, unless that stupid witch has started to believe her own hype and honestly believes that once someone has been issued with an ID card they will be magically unable to commit any crime or think any unapproved thoughts, thus removing the necessity for any future CRB or background checks. If so, she either knows something very frightening that we don't, or she's drooling batshit crazy.

I wonder which one it is ?

Privacy watchdog issues guidance on FOI exemptions

The Other Steve

A subtle hint of testicle ?

Not like little old ICO to start telling people what to do, for ICO that's quite pushy.

Not pushy enough though, for a start these missives constitute merely 'guidance', and as usual will be largely be ignored. Even more unfortunately, when they aren't just brushed under the table, they appear to stipulate that public authorities must merely convince themselves that there reasoning is sound and then supply a summary of that reasoning.

Of course you can then appeal, and the public authority must have an internal review and convince itself for a second time before you get the right of appeal to ICO, who, if they're in a fightin' mood, might give said authority a stern look.

I would have thought that in order to make the 'guidance' stick in the first instance it really ought to come with some kind of addendum explaining exactly what the consequences of failing to comply with it are. No wait, it does already, there aren't any!

Sigh. In summary, FOIA / ICO, much better than nowt, but still quite shit.

Oh, @AC 09:34 :

The press release is dated 12 November 2008, Kablenet reported it on 13 November. So last week, these guidelines didn't exist, now they do. They are new. As in NEWs. See how this works ?

I _DO_ have an in depth knowledge of both FOIA and the DPA, but I didn't know about the new guidance. Some of us actually have better things to do with our time than constantly hitting refresh on the BBC FOIA blog. YMMV

Auntie Beeb's amazing, evolving, ID card stories

The Other Steve
Happy

But on the bright side ...

... of course, is that since every citizen's identity could be easily and quickly verified, it would be much easier for more critical policy decisions to be put to the plebiscite, I mean a tight ID card scheme pretty much implies secure e-voting*. And once every citizen is so empowered, we won't need so many expense sucking wasters knocking about the place to make our decisions for us.

Someone should point this out to Wacky Jacqui, I'm sure she'd pull the scheme in a trice if she realised it had the potential to make her and her cronies redundant.

@James Pickett

""demented ginger weeble"

Love it!"

Sadly I can't take credit for that, it came from someone's blog post, but it certainly seems to have taken hold, as a quick and amusing google search will show :-)

*OK, it doesn't really, but the applications we're being asked to believe will be possible certainly do**.

**Although I just checked the IPS website, and their three amazing suggested uses of the card in daily life are "Proving Your Age, Collecting a Parcel, and Transferring Money", I'm like, totally astounded, because I've been wondering how to do those things for ages.

The Other Steve
Black Helicopters

Meh

It was abundantly and very quickly clear post Gilligan that the BBC's news operation had been bloodily castrated, and it seems that the downward trend in news quality has continued, along with the replacing of any kind analysis with either the straight quoting of press releases, fearmongering (Peston, Vine) on-message whispering campaigns (Robinson), and erring heavily on the side of caution with anything controversial (Phorm, and many other stories). It's also clear, from their coverage of virtually anything Home Office related (ID cards, The War Against Terror, policing reform, massive snoop database, etc, etc) that someone at the HO has their finger firmly on the beebs jugular. If you try to call them on this, and complain about the lack of balance, or facts, in their coverage, they will tell you, and here I'm quoting more or less verbatim "The BBC doesn't do campaigning journalism". WTF ? Is this a quote from some post Gilligan editorial crib sheet ?

Of course, there's Newsnight, and Today on R4, but I can't recall the last time I saw anyone senior from NuLab on Newsnight since the deputy PM election (outside of the tedious moustachiod Des Brown making pathetic excuses, and recently, badger faced Treasurer Darling refusing to answer any actual questions).

It seems that NuLab don't like to allow their policies to be held up to scrutiny, criticism, analysis or debate by the great unwashed, thanks a bunch to demented ginger weeble Hazel Blears for making that so wonderfully explicit last week.

And why should they eh ? Uncle Gordon and his chums know what's best for us, and we're far to ill informed/under educated/not politicians/unelected/cynical/nihilistic/sickened by hypocrisy (delete as appropriate) for our opinions to carry any weight in any case. What do you think this is, a democracy or something ?

Retro piracy - Should the Royal Navy kick arse?

The Other Steve

@@CNC

"That depends on the material being escorted - spent fuel = CNC, weapons = MDP. (Keith Vaz's secret police force he's never heard of...)"

The MoD Plod ? Erm, not really secret when you have a website, though. With photographs and that.

http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/WhatWeDo/SecurityandIntelligence/MDPGA/MinistryOfDefencePolice.htm

Bless 'im.

UK's 'secure' child protection database will be open to one million

The Other Steve

@AC 19:30

"It's true. IT staff won't have access"

It's not, they will, and in fact your following statement contradicts what you've just said, also :

"It is perfectly possible to administer a faulty webserver without needing access to the database"

That very much depends on the nature of the failure. If the webserver is accessing a DB, and there is a data dependent bug, you need access to the data in order to recreate the bug. EOF. Perhaps in la la land where you live this is not the case, those of us who get our hands dirty with this kind of problem every day know different.

"If there is a fault on a DB server, the DBA can be supervised by a, well, supervisor, to ensure that he only does DBA things and not look at the data."

_When_ there is a fault on _one of_ the multiple servers. And again, you are ignoring the classes of failure mode that involve the data, not simply the hardware or software. Also, your notional DBA (in fact, multiples thereof) has indeed got access to the data, quite the opposite of what you suggest above. Sure, some untainted do gooder _could_ stand behind every DBA every minute of the day and make sure they don't peek (perhaps you could could volunteer your services), but they won't.

"Can you cleanse, de-dupe data without looking at it? Of course you can"

I didn't ask if you can do it without _looking_, I asked weather you can do it without _access to the data_, the answer to which is still no.

"@AC 16:19 Actually it is relatively easy to secure a *centralised* database. Securing a *decentralised* one is much harder."

By what metric ? A decentralised data set is inherently more robust in the face of (inevitable) security or trust breaches, since the exposure is limited to the data available, for instance.

And in any case, your suggestion that any data maintenance requiring manual intervention will be kicked back to a local authority means that access control _is_ decentralised.

The Other Steve

@AC 14:39

"No they wont, IT staff will not have access, only working, approved practioners."

I'd be interested to hear just how you worked that out. Is the backend database going to be administered by an AI ? Clue : No. Will the system be so perfect that it will never need any intervention from a technician ? Clue : Not in this or any other lifetime. Given this, is it feasible for technical staff and developers to diagnose failures in complex multi tiered database systems entirely without access to the live data that was in use at the time of the failure ? Clue : No, it sodding well is not. Is it possible for the staff who will be charged with maintaining the database to load, de dupe and otherwise cleanse the data in the system without access to it ? Clue : Also no.

Even if the whole system were designed, implemented and maintained by "approved practioners", (Clue : Cap Gemini is an IT services shop, not a coalition of GPs and social workers who just happen to have 'leet coding and DBA skillZ), this would make them de facto technical staff, would it not ?

Targeted attacks to add to ISP woes

The Other Steve

There's a suprise then.

"Providers need to have deep application insight into IP services"

But then, they would say that, since they're a DPI kit vendor and therefore hardly likely to publish any 'research' that suggests you _don't_ need to buy some of their stuff.

Hardly likely to suggest that, for instance, adoption of more secure protocols, or application level controls can be as, or more, effective, are they ?

Police vet live music, DJs for 'terror risk'

The Other Steve

Good plan gov, keep it up

Because once you've effectively finished banning booze, music and other forms of enjoyment, made it impossible for people to have a relaxing toke because of random searches and sniffer dog patrols and your faith based anti drug policies, and banned anything entertaining from appearing on the television in case it offends someone, the UK populace will have nothing left to do except sit at home and ponder what an enormous pack of c*nts you are, with predicable results ranging from a humiliating defeat at the next election to a bloody and brutal revolution, depending how many of the house bound dissatisfied get bored enough to switch over to BBC Parliament and watch "democracy" taking place.

Either way, goodbye, it wasn't nice knowing you, please don't come back any time soon.

MPs: Fight grog-fuelled crimewave with PDAs

The Other Steve
Happy

@Chris G

"Rather than ignoring evolutionary and biological fact I was considering the sensibilities of Brits."

Didn't think you were, old chap. Apologies for giving you that impression.

The Other Steve

@Chris G

"Without wishing to compare Brits in general to monkeys"

There's no good reason not to, since we (humans) are, in fact, basically monkeys and most of our social structures and behaviours reflect this fact, as you suggest.

I guess you can blame the monotheists for this, since they have foisted upon human society over the centuries the idea that humans are somehow divinely set apart from animals, and this has become rooted in the culture even of those with more atheistic tendencies to the extent that the phrase "no better than an animal" carries a weight that it really ought not to.

IMHO the fact that we invented neck ties and nuclear fission is not a good reason to discard the hard reality of millions of years of evolved primate psychology, but of course, animals have no morals, and to suggest that humans really don't either (despite millennia of seemingly incontrovertible evidence) just upsets the Paul Dacres of the world, and inflames the passions of the Daily Mail set who honestly believe that they _are_ better than animals, even though most of them lack the ability to lick their own genitalia, and indeed would have the practice banned even if they could.

Bearing all this in mind, it might be helpful to the situation if the lunatics who appear to be in charge of the asylum stopped acting like aggressive, lying, conflict addicted, warmongering, fearmongering, repressive, hypocritical knobheads. Monkey see, monkey do.

Microsoft: Windows 7 ready for Christmas 2009

The Other Steve

"but what can it bring to the table to make it a "must have" upgrade vs XP?"

After XP is EOLd in 2009 , pretty much everything. Driver support, dev tool support, latest .NET framework support, WMP upgrades, DirectX updrades, IE upgrades, run the latest MS Office, etc, etc.

Same old same old.

Sure, lots of folks will just be happy with what they've got for a while, but sooner or later they'll want a new Office/WMP/IE/etc feature, or they'll try to install the latest FPS, or some must have app they DLd from the net and they'll get a dialogue along the lines of "This application requires Windows 7, pay up or fuck off".

Guy Fawkes stunt arrives early

The Other Steve
Unhappy

@dervheid

"Unfortunately, most of the "I've always voted <insert party>, just like my father, grandfatther..." sheeple have forgotten that their MP should be putting them first, and the 'party' second."

Would that it were so, that our glorious "democracy" functioned in such a manner, unfortunately, it's party first all the way unless you're an independent, or wish to become one due to having the whip withdrawn. Political parties in the UK expect their members to toe the party line or find themselves out on their ear, a system which rather obviously leads to corruption and totalitarianism but no doubt is allowed to stand due to being a "great tradition" or some such shite.

Only very occasionally, and even then only by convention rather than protocol are MPs actually allowed to "vote their conscience", q.v the Human Embryology Bill.

New Scientist goes innumerate in 'save the planet' special

The Other Steve
Thumb Down

All well and good but

higher GDP == higher employment rates and higher per capita disposable income, which == more consumption, you need power and heat for the extra employees, and they buy stuff. Sure the technical measure of "economic growth" might be tied to GDP, but in practical terms a growing economy uses more resources, all that added value has to go somewhere, or it isn't, in fact, value at all.

Making a chip might add "more value" (here apparently defined as an increment of GDP) than making a wine bottle, but that's not an either/or choice is it ? We make wine bottles _and_ chips, not chips instead of wine bottles. And if making chips has a more pronounced effect on GDP, and therefore per capita income, it actually leads to higher consumption of other resources, especially ones like wine bottles.

@Parax :

"You know the point is correct when the only holes people pick are in the examples!"

Epic fail, if you use examples that are easily picked apart to illustrate a point, then your point becomes suspect even if it is a good one. After all, if it was a good point, you'd be able to come up with some good examples.

And unfortunately for the above commenter, the singer analogy is equally broken, since it it seems to assume that a professional singer consumes no resources which is utter arsewash. Singers consume resources in food, clothing, travel, education, power, construction of venues, travel resources for spectators, promotional materials, etc, etc. The singers (and indeed other musicians and performers) I know have carbon footprints like a charcoal yeti, so what's your point again ?

No2ID shakes fist at plod print scanner plan

The Other Steve
Flame

No, there isnt a need.

@Anonymous Moron #1 :

"You can't be arrested for no insurance."

<Road Traffic Act 1988 s143 (C2)>

It is an offence to use (or permit to be used) a motor vehicle on a road or public place when there is not in force a relation to the use of the vehicle such a policy of insurance in respect of third party risks as complies with the Road Traffic Act.

</>

What do you think the ANPR cameras in traffic plod's cars are for, dimwit ?

And even if that weren't the case, that is simply an argument for a need for powers of arrest for uninsured drivers, not an argument for universal stop and fingerprint and all that goes with it.

@Anonymous Moron #2:

"To many people talk about civil rights etc but its the criminals who are being protected."

Which criminals are being protected, by whom, and against what, exactly ? Go ahead, convince me.

Police poison speed debate with fuzzy figures

The Other Steve

Hang on a bit

So, the widely reviled speed cameras not only really do reduce accidents (by 20%), but they also turn a profit* ?

I'm sorry, can someone point out the problem with that again ?

Arguments against our new dayglo overlords seem to be largely based on what they don't do, viz catching all the other pricks. While I agree that 'Something Must Be Done'** about the appalling standards of driver competence to which I am regularly witness, this is a bit like saying that screwdrivers aren't much good for hammering in nails. Like, duh!

I would have thought that dropping accident figures at black spots by 20% and making a profit out of it is a Good Thing. After all, an improvement for cheaper than free seems like awfully good value. Sure the state and it's pointy headed enforcers are fudging the figures a bit, but if that sort of thing really bugs you, go live in a democracy.

As a further point, I'd suggest that driving over the posted limit on any road is probably ill advised, since it's become clear to me that traffic engineers are a deeply anti social bunch who would seemingly rather we were all dead. YMMV.

*Although that statement seems to conflict with the GBP 320k for a share of three cams figure, unless there really are an awful lot of utter knob heads on the roads of Swindon.

** Spouting about driver education in this context is an epic fail, since what would really be required is actually mass driver RE education, and I doubt you''d all be willing to hand your licences back in and be forced to undergo a re-test at advanced level, for instance, and even in the unlikely event that it were to happen, it's quite obvious that as soon as a solid majority of drivers get their licence, they ignore everything they werer ever taught.

All Android apps are not made equal

The Other Steve
Coat

Well duh

"At this point, we think it is too dangerous to give a third party application blanket access to install applications without the user being involved."

Actually, It's dangerous, creepy, and really fucking stupid to allow _ANY_ application blanket access to install applications without the user being involved.

Period.

When MS does intrusive and monopoly cementing stuff like this, you can guarantee the freetard jihad will be out in force, and it will be interesting to see just how hard Google can squeeze it's cheeks before their collective tongue is ejected from it's greasy corporate sphincter.

Palin demands $15m to search her own emails

The Other Steve
Thumb Up

ZOMGWTF!! Liberal socialist Al Qadea paedophiles!!!!!!

"After nobama declares defeat and installs radical socialism you may be fighting Al Queada in YOUR HOME TOWN"

Riiiight, and shortly after the US president elect gets done importing insurgents from Iraq and Afghanistan he'll probably embark on a nationwide child molestation tour, stopping only to sell some drugs and pirate a few DVDs. And you really need to look the words "radical" and "socialism" up in a quality dictionary.

I don't know which way this election will go, I mean sure there's a huge number of redneck morons who won't vote for Obama because he's black, or they think he's a terrorist, but I'm sure a quick survey would put those good ol folks into the same bit of the Venn diagram who wouldn't vote for him because he's a democrat, and therefore a "liberal", which is apparently an insult in parts of the USA, though I still fail to understand exactly why.

Either way though, with this kind of quality of political thinking, I'm confident that we can look forward to a brutal, protracted and very entertaining civil war.

I just can't wait for the plaintive cries of the militiamen as Obama ships them off to Gitmo : "No, no, I'm not a terrorist, I'm a PATRIOT! GOD IS ON _MY_ SIDE! Noooo!"

Decades of lulz.

Das überdatabase: Inside Wacky Jacqui's motherbrain

The Other Steve
Black Helicopters

Er, there is just one thing I might mention (well, say four)

for all the "ooh, just encrypt it through a VPN", and "SSL will surely save us all" crew, just four letters :

G C H Q

A potted history (off the top of my head, so probably not the most accurate) :

Just pre WW2, the Government Code And Cipher School (GCCS) was established from bits of other disparate code breaking teams that were lying around the place, their mission, should they choose to accept it, to break any and all ciphers with which they were presented. During WW2 GCCS was moved to Bletchley Park, where they successfully built on Polish cryptanalysis of the Enigma cipher machine and automated it's breaking using machines, invented a whole parcel of computing machinery to break other complex manual and machine ciphers, most notably pretty much inventing the digital computer in the form of Colossus to automate wheel breaking of the (then) fiendishly complicated Lorenz machine cipher, and broke literally thousands of other enemy ciphers, including some of the Japanese machine ciphers.

Subsequently renamed GCHQ and moved into new headquarters in Cheltenham, they continued to be responsible for breaking codes and ciphers, as well as inventing new ones.

That's their job. That's what they do, and they are demonstrably excellent at it.

Now they have supercomputers, lots and lots of supercomputers. Don't count on them not being able to read you SSLd traffic or PGPd email.

Also, don't forget that no matter how much encryption you throw at a problem, your traffic data (ip addys, etc) are still in the clear, and that no matter how many spurious web spiders you throw out, you still only need one site of interest to show up in a trawl to become a _person_ of interest, at which point your obviously suspicious web activity logs will make sure you _stay_ a person of interest. That's the truly scary Big Brother part, any attempt to game the system that can be detected will suggest that you have something hide and mark you out for further attention, so best behave nicely, and let auntie Jacqui see what you're up to, or she'll want to know why.

Oh, and Echelon, not a conspiracy theory, a real system, part of UKUSA. Read about it here : http://jya.com/stoa-atpc.htm section 4.4 "National & International Communications Interceptions Networks". That's a European Parliament report, so no tin foil required. Echelon is a poster child for mission creep in comms interception systems, since the US used it to spy on foreign commercial outfits to the benefit of their own national industries.

The Other Steve
Black Helicopters

Mmmm, doughnuts!

Given that it's already possible, and even routine according to Wacky Jacqui, to use comms data to determine a persons network of interest, and given that it's also already possible, with the requisite warrants to intercept the communications of those networks in real time, what's her (presumably not actually her, but some cadre of techno fetishist spooks) hard on for all this ?

OK, I get that the explosion of IP traffic has put a bit of a crimp in Cheltenham's style, hence the desire for all the new black boxes (I don't know how much the existing ones are able to look at IP traffic, I'd guess they were designed for other types of comms), but OTOH if TPTB go to an ISP, with a warrant, they can already get access to the IP traffic, and I'd be willing to bet it can be done in near real time.

There's just no reason to have all of this shit centralised unless you intend to mine the data. Mining the data will produce gibberish, leading to (even more) massive injustice.

Certainly, any such system will produce a crop of likely looking terrorist wannabes, it would probably have caught the idiot who thought that you can make bombs by dumping nails in plastic bottles full of "kerosene". But guess the fuck what ? He was already on the watch list. So just where are all the atrocities we could have stopped with such a tool ? Conspicuous by their absence. I for one would rather spend the 12Bn on something that might actually have a purpose other than traipsing an increasingly unlikely chorus line of fantasists, social inadequates, the mentally ill and the merely disenfranchised through the courts on trumped up "terror" charges.

Because the ones who really terrify the spooks, and the ones who actually frighten me a little, are the ones with proper funding, proper training, and proper opsec. Who know how to use payphones and old fashioned codes, all the arcana of tradecraft.

And you won't be able to stop them by building a fucking database.

In fact, since the HO and it's spooky masters seem to have been spending rather a lot of time watching catch up episodes of "Spooks" in preparation for the new series, let me respond in kind by outlining a threat drawn directly from the plot :

Bad Men With Guns (BMWG) wish to infiltrate UK and do Bad Stuff (BS), In the episode to which I'm referring, BMWG find out who MI5 are watching by nicking the watch list and send some of them on a sham suicide mission so that MI5 are looking the other way and fail to spot BMWG doing BS until it's (almost!) to late.

Now that's fairly contrived, involving, as it did, not only a Mossad mole in MI6, but a massive false flag recruitment of potential jihadis by said agency, etc, etc.

With an uberdatabase it would be oh so much easier to set up a shit load of false positives that absorb sufficient spooky resources to allow BMWG to waltz in under the radar and commit the One True Atrocity that (presumably) keeps the scenario fluffers up at night.

12 billion quid is a shit load of money to spend to bang up a few wankers who are probably already "on the radar", and it won't stop "real" terrorists, or even intelligent dilettantes, if they sit down and think their opsec through properly.

12Bn quid spent on road safety ? Public transport ? Health ? Education ? Or even, (ZOMGWTF!!!!) basic fucking scienctific research, or a space program to call our own ?

BIG difference.

Tech gadgetry brings about pet-o-geddon

The Other Steve
Happy

I just want to know...

seriously, how the blue bloody hell can you injure a guinea pig with a karaoke machine ?????

Ob Pet : Cat, no predilection for cables at all, but has sustained several sharp static jolts while trying to sleep on top of the (CRT) TV. And if you can't laugh at that there's something wrong with you.

Lehman Excel snafu could cost Barclays dear

The Other Steve
Coat

@Mark

"I talked about who got into the heads of PHB's that EVERYTHING could be solved with Excel. "

And you're still wrong, spreadsheets were a PHB favourite before Excel was even published, and as far as the PC using PHBs are concerned, you can point the finger firmly at Kapor's Lotus Development which spent the bulk of it's $3 Million venture capital specifically on marketing into corporations before Excel even existed as a product.

Not that it would have mattered much, PHBs wanted spreadsheets, they were the killer app for business computing.

PHBs have loved spreadsheets since there have been spreadsheets to love.

The Other Steve
Coat

@Mark

"And why are spreadsheets (especially with lots of markup that can be ignored all to easily) used in this way?

MS touted them as the be-all and end-all of "data presentation". That was their fault."

Wrong a wrong oh. The spreadsheet as we know it was invented by a chap called Dan Bricklin, a programmer who decided to do an MBA, during which he saw a professor doing a gert big dirty calculation (production planning, IIRC) across multiple blackboards, each containing rows of cells, the value of which depended on other values in other cells. Bricklin set out to computerise the whole process and set up a company called Software Arts with another bod, whose name eludes me for the moment (GIYF) and the result was Visicalc, the first computer spreadsheet, and the killer app for the Apple II which elevated it above the status of an expensive toy and placed it onto the desks of corporate 'merka. this would be around 1978/9 or so.

Later, along came Mitch Kapor, set up Lotus, and got another chap (whose name again eludes me, which is shocking really) to knock up Lotus 123, the killer app for the nascent IBM PC. (~1982 ?)

MS had a complete dog of a Visicalc rip off called Multiplan running on CP/M, but it didn't see the light of day on an MS platform (as Excel) until about 1987, IIRC, and for a long time they were playing catch up to 123, which was the tool of choice for professional spreadsheet users such as accountants and the like.

So it's a bit bleedin' rich to blame MS for popularising spreadsheets. Because they didn't, m'kay ?

Man buys new MacBooks, pulls them to bits, takes pics

The Other Steve

@Webster Phreaky

Maybe you should stop dribbling into them ?

Google calls on developers to polish Chrome

The Other Steve
Happy

@dervheid

"maybe so, but you have to admire their gall, just a little."

Admire it, I think it's frikkin genius. It obviously worked.

Also :

You can so polish a turd, if you dry it out a bit, then apply several coats of really thick varnish one after the other, allowing each to dry, and THEN polish the resulting plasticy mess. A bit like the fake bread/cake stuff infant schools used to have before they realised that infants would, in fact, still chew it, and paint and varnish are toxic.

The Other Steve
Flame

Shamelessly fellating freetards

Last I checked the boys at Mountain View had so much money they probably have to be sedated every morning to stop them from dying of glee, and so they can certainly afford to hire talent to write code and QA teams to fix their bugs.

And I'm sure they did, but they also made it 'open', so that a million sticky little fingers can caress the code, form a 'community', and feel like they are 'participating'. FOSS is like, so cute and cuddly!

Release to the dev channel my arse. You'd think that the FOSS 'community' would see through the blatant PR charade and refuse to play, but of course it's not Microsoft and therefore not evil, and so the 'blogosphere' echo chamber rings with drooling praise, and gangs of freetards line up to work for free. For a company whose founders feature in the Fortbes top 20.

Puke. Just puke.

Serial troll bitchslaps Reg hack

The Other Steve

Get back on the special bus, window licker

What a moron. Aside from the more obvious lunacies, I had the misfortune a few years back to do some contracted software work for MSFTs UK legal eagles. (database work in fact, rather appropriately) and I can confidently report that were it indeed the case that this chump had worked for them on virtually anything at all, never mind something of dubious legality (although I can't see how web spidering could fall into that category), MSFTs legal attack dogs would have tracked his sorry ass down and nailed it to a wall along with a copy of the NDA he signed (they don't actually make you do it with blood, it just feels that way) the moment he started going so publicly postal about it on the net.

Say what you will about the quality of MSFTs wares, but their legal people are truly first rate, as well as extremely aggressive.

Besides that, despite what it might look like from outside, MSFT simply don't hire morons. Tedious social inadequates, yes, but not morons.

And why am I not surprised that he's a big usenet poster ? Ah usenet, my favourite database of the metally ill by far.

HP and EDS kill nearly 3,500 UK jobs

The Other Steve

'best shore' ? Ouch.

Christ, I haven't felt so nauseous at learning a new buzzword since I was first exposed to 'right sizing' (although 'follow the sun model' came pretty close).

/" the VR's had to be in by this week and people are exiting by the end of the month. This then enables the compulsory redundancies to be made before XMAS. "/

That's your "consultation period" right ? Last time this happened at a shop I was at (US service company, cut developer headcount by 50 percent over three rounds, bastards), we all applied for VR because it was the fastest way to find out if you were still going to have a job. We figured they would only allow VR to people they were probably going to CR anyway. Made for some interesting all hands sessions.

Whatever my feelings about EDS as a corporate entity, you have my sympathy, I've been there, and it really, really sucks.

Geode - the Firefox add-on that knows where you are

The Other Steve
Coat

If you unexpectedly find yourself in a coffee shop ...

... and you don't know where you are, well hell, welcome to Amsterdam. Cheese toastie ?

Mines the one with, oh wait, I had it just.. did I leave it on the tram ? .

Home Office defends retaining comms data

The Other Steve
Black Helicopters

I for one welcome our new jackbooted goose stepping overlords, oh, wait...

If all she wanted to do was upgrade the facilities for storage of traffic, she could spend a fraction of that amount by giving cash to ISPs and telcos to buy storage. In fact, telcos and ISPs can already get cash for this, as per the legislation the HO is trying very hard to hide behind, and I haven't seen any of them asking for anything anywhere near 12 bn quid.

So this is fuck all to do with efficiency.

I'm not buying the necessity in The War Against Terror either, if there was such a desperate threat, and the current system wasn't working, we'd be knee deep in dirty bombs by now, and we aren't.

It would be, should it come to frution (thank fuck for ukgov IT cock ups), simply, a technology of political control. Read all about it in this European Parliament document from 1998 : "An appraisal of technologies for political control." http://jya.com/stoa-atpc.htm

From the executive summary :

"It identifies the continuum of control which stretches from modem law enforcement to advanced state suppression, the difference being the level of democratic accountability in the manner in which such technologies are applied. "

Hmm, no oversight, no judicial control, fuck all accountability, which end of that continuum are we at ?

http://www.writetothem.com/ Don't wait until your door gets kicked in at 4am in the morning because a computer in a bunker says "yes"

Scottish NHS data safeguarded by bizarre questionnaire

The Other Steve
Happy

@arran

With you there, and not just dahn sarf either.

Lots of former asylums and psychiatric facilities (all the ones that haven't been turned into nasty little 'luxury' flats anyway) are pretty Marie Celeste like, they look like all the staff and patients just wandered off, which sadly is more or less the case.

A word of warning though for anyone tempted to pop down to their local abandoned NHS facility and have a shufty for confidential docs : derelict buildings exert a gravitational pull on smack heads, and not all the pshyce patients wandered off, some still live amongst the ruins of their former homes, even decades later, it is achingly, heart breakingly sad. Never urbex alone. And remember, when it rains, no drains!

UK.gov £12bn comms überdatabase 'wouldn't spot terrorists'

The Other Steve
Unhappy

Ah, expert opinion

Herr Braun's government love to see expert opinions based on research and experience. So that they can completely fucking ignore them andvdobthe thing they first thought of.

So this report is basically a big green light for Project Stasi.

'Overplayed' privacy concerns rile Symantec boss

The Other Steve
Flame

What a dick!

"If someone is searching for cancer treatments there is nothing that links that search to the health status of an individual. They could be running the search on behalf of a friend."

So, potentially sensitive information should be classified as "not really sensitive, because there's a small possibility it might not be". That's ass backwards.

"Thompson questioned whether there was any likelihood of harm from the release of such information"

Then I'll happily answer him, yes Mr Thompson , yes there is. Which is exactly why the law recognises such information as being sensitive.

"and even if you don't, cookies are placed on your machine to serve up ads by most websites"

Not on any of the machines that I administer, and I'm sure that's true of most reg readers. That argument is straight out of the Kent Ertugrul playbook. In fact you can see it in any Phorm press release you care to look at. Coincidence ?

"encrypted data ought not to be covered by breach disclosure laws so that firms who have protected sensitive data are not affected by the "expense and brand damage" such public notifications bring."

Bollocks. Firstly, the loss of such data still suggests poor data protection practices, and in fact in the UK, that alone puts you in breach of the DPA* . Secondly "encrypted data" covers a lot of ground, encrypted how ? To what standard ? If companies are sure their protection scheme is secure, then they should have no difficulty revealing what it is, If some company loses my data and then says, "well look, it was on a CD, but it was encrypted using IDEA with a 1024 bit key, which we keep in a safe" I'm going to say "oh, okay then, that's pretty safe". I'm more reassured by this, not less. I notice there's a trend now to say "it was encrypted, but we wont say how, for security reasons". Any fool knows that a cryptosystem which relies upon the secrecy of the algorithm is broken. There can be no advantage in not releasing this information, unless the system is shite or non existent, and would therefore result in embarrasment.

""Businesses have a responsibility to protect sensitive data. The public should not expect the government to protect them," he added."

That's a bit of a non sequitur isn't it ? I'm not all sure how the two relate. Certainly businesses have that responsibility, usually mandated by legislation, written by governments, whose job it is to prosecute businesses if, and when, they breach that legislation**.

If governments don't exist to protect the public, then just what the hell are they for, exactly*** ?

* Yeah, I know.

** ibid

*** ibid

Spy chiefs plot £12bn IT spree for comms überdatabase

The Other Steve
Black Helicopters

@Luther Blissett

For once we agree almost entirely.

Your MoANN concept is quite scary, and also quite probable. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are pretty inextricably linked with data mining, and indeed telcos and banks use them for fraud detection.

ISTR (and it's a while since I was involved with ANNs , so this is a bit stumbling and open to correction) that the value of their use as a data mining tool is based at least partly on the fact that to become usefully predictive, you don't actually need to know how the underlying variables relate to each other, or even which ones are important, and in fact even if you are some way to this knowledge, ANNs can still predict even for types of relations that can't be expressed in term of statistics.

If that's about right (anyone ?), then that sounds ideal for this sort of thing. It also sounds expensive, since an ANN of sufficient complexity to work on a dataset of the size we're imagining here which is expected to produce results before it's implementers are in their graves would require a substantial amount of parallel processing power.

And of course, you'll notice that I've used the word "prediction" in there a few times, and prediction is one of the four Ps* we've been hearing about w/r/t our all new War On Terror strategy, which looks suspiciously like the one we had before.

As you note, mining of traffic data to show connections is already done, apparently quite effectively, to link individuals and groups. What we're really shite at is prediction, and this is especially the case, if, as you also note, the admission of the fact that not every threat actor is visibly connected to Al Q means that our existing profiling tools (and profiles) are inadequate.

Given that, you would (if you were some kind of totalitarian blow hard with a paranoid streak a mile wide) want to be able to predict which individuals that are currently not on your radar, and currently don't fit any of your profiles are likely to become threat actors in the future, and more importantly, you want to be able to generate new classes of profiles that can be applied to flag up these individuals. Hello ANN based predictive data mining.

A sort of silicon based Pre Crime, if you will. Of course, it probably wouldn't work, and it's a Stalinist's wet dream, but those haven't been deterring factors in any of NuLab's other IT projects.

*Those would be Prevention, Prediction, Protection and Pursuing, ISTR.

The Other Steve
Flame

@Strappy

"Some commenters appears to have missed the point of this project. "

yes, yes they do, you prime amongst them.

"It's not going to scan content"

We're told. But you've missed yet another pint, although you're by no means alone in that, the name of the project is the "interception _MODERNISATION_ program", which rather suggests an upgrade of present capabilities. If you think that present interception capabilities don't extend to content monitoring than you're living in la la land.

"(there's already plenty of systems that can do that)"

Name some. I can think of one. I'd be interested to hear of the others.

"it's going to map the connections between people. Only the most naive terrorist would send an email containing such obvious trigger words as "bomb" and "assassination" and those emails would doubtless be flagged and filed..."

You have just contradicted yourself, postulating here that content will indeed be scanned.

"but I doubt serious action would take place."

Why ? There have already been high profile cases where people were detained and charged based on such things, or don't you watch the news at all ?

"If the Security Service suspects that a potential terrorist cell is communicating with other cells, however, they will be able to track communications through IMP to locate the others even if those comms are fully encrypted."

They can do that already, got software for it and everything, real time even. Why spend £12bn quid to reimplement an existing, and effective, system ?

"Sure, there are wider implications for personal privacy but I don't recall seeing mass protests about the number of CCTV cameras that watch your every movement."

So it's OK as long as no one protests is it ? And again, you miss the point entirely, an expectation of personal privacy has fuck all to do with objections to this project.

"It's exactly the same type of data gathering as carried out by supermarkets through loyalty cards or Phorm targeted advertising that's been reported by El Reg recently.

Knowing how people move about, communicate or even idly surf is now valuable data for mining."

Either you are a troll, or you are magnificently clueless. That argument is so stupid that I can barely bring my myself to refute it, but just in case you actually believe it, and in no particular order : You seem to have missed the fact that people aren't happy about phorm, this is about as far from targeted advertising as sheep are from nuclear physics research, supermarket loyalty cards don't track peoples movements or intercept their communications, and you seem to be confusing commercial marketing activities with mass surveillance by the state, which suggests some rather serious mental distress on your part.

"To bastardise the Marshall McLuhan quote, the medium has become the message."

If, by "bastardise" you mean "take completely out of context, misunderstand, change and then use in a way that renders it totally meaningless and makes makes you look like an utter knob", then yes, otherwise, no. It's very clear from that statement that you haven't actually read McLuhan, who had nothing whatever to say about mass interception of communications. Do you even know who McLuhan was ? Prat.

Cold War comfort on software engineering’s birthday

The Other Steve

Software engineering

is like programming, only you do it properly.

Unfortunately for large software projects, virtually no one does SE properly either. And no, XP and it's ludicrous progeny don't count.

Stick health warnings on gays, says Stock Exchange chaplain

The Other Steve

@Roger Pearse

"How dare he suggest that the favourite vice of the establishment might be WRONG!?!?!"

How dare you say such a thing about cocaine.

Mono delivers Foundation-free open .NET alternative

The Other Steve
Flame

"Stick to perl, python and ruby"

Erm, no, fuck off.

Ruby is just a fucking horrible bastardised, crippled, lovechild of Smalltalk and to much vodka cruelly superglued into a web 2.0 flavoured box and stripped of all the good bits, python is just a scripting language with LISP pretensions, and perl, well, I happen to like perl a lot, but I wouldn't want to write an enterprise class application it, and it's as idiosyncratic as all buggery. I don't especially like coding enterprise apps in C++ either (although I have a serious fetish for it as a language) enter C#.

And as for Monodevelop, well I for one rather like being able to develop and demo .NET apps (which clients require) on my Apple laptop which runs linux (PPC, so there's no chance of a wine based solution)

Horses for course innit ?

Sergey Brin descends from Mount Sinai with Android API

The Other Steve

@Neil

If you think that the Windows API is trivial, you've clearly never tried to code against it.

And if you think that developers should be made to jump through cock size defining hoops by APIs in order to prove their metal, then you're a dickhead. Coding prowess in the face of some unholy turdspurt of a poorly written API is just fine, for hobbyists and spotty teenagers with nothing better to do with their time and everything to prove, professionals like productivity. It pays the bills.

Stupid fucking freetard.