* Posts by Christian Berger

4850 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007

Ofcom can prise my telly spectrum from my COLD, DEAD... er, aerial

Christian Berger

It's not like you'd even have more spectrum to pump through more data

You can also make smaller cells or more advanced base stations... however that costs more money to the mobile operators.

Of course the sensible thing to do would be to make data networks a tax financed public service. Communities would then lay fibres whenever they dig up the ground anyhow, and over years we'd have a dedicated pair of fibres into every household, with public Wifi available to everyone. You could put a hotspot into every router or junction box.

Ubuntu smartphone to go on sale: It'll be harder to get than a new iPhone

Christian Berger

Re: Excellent news.

3. Will you be able to get rid of all that GUI crap and just get an "xterm" window above your virtual keyboard... and will that be usable?

I personally don't care much for "apps" no matter what language they are written in. I want a portable terminal/computer.

Forget Norks, Russian hackers are in Sony Pictures' servers – claim

Christian Berger

Attribution is hard

There is no even slightly sensible way to do attribution. Sure you can find out the country an IP-address is hosted at and you can find out who pays for it. This doesn't mean they are the culprit. Sure you can compile your software on a machine with Chinese locales set, but that doesn't mean you are Chinese. (apparently most laptops in North Korea run pirated Chinese Windows XP)

Those are all things that can even be done by a disgruntled employee, let alone some larger organisation which can put in a couple of man weeks into disguising their identity.

So it's unlikely we will ever find out what exactly happened there.

Siemens sighs: SCADA bugs abound

Christian Berger

Yes, but that's not the point to learn from this

The point is, that where ever you look for bugs in that field, you will find them. It's just not an area where people work who have grown up with well designed systems. It's more or less an echo chamber where bad ideas re-inforce themselves.

Plus Siemens can't do software/firmware. I've been at a daughter of Siemens and the state of the art of software design is truly bad, both with what get shipped to the customer and what's used internally.

Enough is enough: It's time to flush Flash back to where it came from – Hell

Christian Berger

Re: Plugins are actually the symptom, not the root problem

To be honest I see little difference between Java and ActiveX, both are horrible ideas just one is sand boxed a little bit better. Plugins are just a horrible way to solve such a problem.

Again for web apps, which use a completely different layouts than web pages, we should have gone for something completely different. Something that's essentially an intelligent terminal. Perhaps it could use Javascript or Lua for the bit of local processing you need, but something completely different for the GUI.

Christian Berger

Plugins are actually the symptom, not the root problem

The question is, why did people even get the idea of using plugins?

I mean the WWW did have a promising start. HTML was a simple standard with a couple of tags telling the browser how the document was structured. The design aspects were entirely left to the browser. That's why you could set your fonts in early versions of Netscape.

What we need to do now is to kick out features of HTML. It was never made to provide "pixel perfect" GUIs. CSS has turned into a Turing-complete mess, and Javascript is abused more and more. Maybe we should replace HTML/HTTP with something new for "Web Applications", something that's been designed for it, allowing for simpler code on the browser and on the server.

New claim: D-Link router exposes unprotected config controls to web – DNS hijackers, ahoy!

Christian Berger

Hardware vendors usually don't have the whole product in mind

For them the firmware is just some kind of component they can source cheaply.

Plus the chipset vendors often have pre-made or largely pre-made images available for their chipsets.

Turbocharged quad-core Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed, global geekgasm likely

Christian Berger

What's sadly still missing is a common plattform

It's already great to see that the Pi2 only needs a different kernel to boot, and that it can find that kernel on the SD-card on its own, but what would really be great would be something like a BIOS. Something which sits in between the hardware and the kernel so it won't have to be different for every device. Or at least a simple list telling the kernel what hardware there is.

That way it would be just like on the PC. When new hardware comes out, I won't have to wait until the operating system you want supports it, but you can just run it on that system. Even if you don't have specialized drivers you can use the ones provided by the BIOS.

Quantum of Suspicion: Despite another $29m, D-Wave doubts remain

Christian Berger

Actually considering what _could_ come out of it $174m is peanuts

Seriously, Instagram was sold for over 5 times of this. Considering that there are _lots_ of institutions willing to spend many billions on such a device, $174m is not really a statement of anything. It's like buying a lottery ticket.

BTW if you really want to learn about the state of the art in that field, here are some talks on it:

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6261_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201412291245_-_let_s_build_a_quantum_computer_-_andreas_dewes.html#video

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6157_-_en_-_saal_6_-_201412301245_-_diamonds_are_a_quantum_computer_s_best_friend_-_nicolas_wohrl.html#video

Sorry, admins: Microsoft says NO new Windows Server until 2016

Christian Berger

In a way, Docker support on Windows is a piece of art

I mean there is a certain crowd of people who don't understand how to do simple and elegant solutions. They will write software using SQL databases to store their settings in, they will require lots and lots of libraries and frameworks, and when one little subversion changes, the whole thing will break apart. That's exactly how Windows software was designed back in the 1990s when I still was doing development for that platform.

Now that mindset of developers has moved on to people using unixoid systems. However they grew up with chroot, virtualisation and the ability to just copy your operating system to a subdirectory. Logically they came up with ways to just package your crap into little containers which are easy to deploy.

And in that way, Docker on Windows kinda closes the circle.

Privacy alert: Outlook for iOS does security STUPIDLY, says dev

Christian Berger

Probably a combined problem

Ignoring the obvious possibility that they use the man-in-the-middle server to exploit the data of their users, there are other ways to explain this.

Modern app developers, and you can assume that most of them are new to programming, go by the design pattern they are used to. And those include using an external server accessed via HTTP/Websockets, instead of doing local computation. They have been taught that local computation is slow and battery draining, so they do remote computation which requires data communications... which is slow and battery draining. Nobody does Profiling to see which way would be better in that situation. Furthermore they have never been taught in the ethical aspects of their trade, so they don't understand why it's a bad idea to more external components than necessary.

Then some mobile operating systems don't support "raw" sockets so you could do IMAPs. Windows Phone, for example, didn't support it on early versions. Plus there may be a certain irrational believe that using raw sockets is somehow bad, and you should have a layer in between.

Now if you actually control that server in the middle, the concept may actually even make sense. Done right, you can avoid having to store e-mail on your mobile device, which means that it'll be secure against theft. A server is much easier to secure than a mobile device since you can literally guard it from physical access by your attackers, and you can reach a far higher level of FOSS on your server.

Microsoft 'showers gold' on anti-Google Cyanogen and its Android alternative

Christian Berger

Result of the many problems with Android...

... that make it a rather unfree system.

Android just takes up a great amount of development resources. Not only does it need to be ported to every single model you want to support, but the code is a huge mess far more complicated that it needs to be.

In order to survive freely, FOSS needs to be simple, plus you need to have a common hardware so you can run it on different devices without wasting your time on porting.

Linux chaps want to recycle your mobe as a supercomputer

Christian Berger

There are 2 problems with that

First of all we are far from a common hardware platform which would be needed for this. Our mobiles currently are just different enough to prevent you from installing a common operating system without having to port it for every single phone. Even large projects like Cyanogenmod can only do this for a small part of the market.

Second, mobile processors are rather slow. Combine that with the overhead, and you'll most likely end up with something that's much more expensive than just getting a computer that's much faster than the equipment to connect the mobiles. However this might work if you use already existing hardware. Your "rack" could consist of just some charger ports and you could do communications via Wifi.

Landlines: The tech that just won't die

Christian Berger

The ISDN network is sheduled to be turned off by 2018 in Germany

(or at least somewhere in that region)

What the company I work at does, is to provide VoIP to people. We have 3 kinds of offers, the simplest one requires you to have your own network connection and equipment, the next one will get you an ADSL or SDSL line (without ISDN or POTS) depending on how many channels you want and a router, and the most advanced one will get you a CPE with up to 4 S0 (actually T0) Ports to connect your ISDN PBX to.

If you just want a telephone number in Germany you can use competitors like Sipgate which offer a free telephone number as well as pre-paid telephony. So if you have only a few calls, you can save a lot. However rules in Germany are different than in the UK, so the phone company might actually have to pay for a phone number. In Germany they are free, except for a small management fee.

Sly peers attempt to thrust hated Snoopers' Charter into counter-terror and security bill

Christian Berger

We need to make clear...

...that a modern society needs computers and data networks to be free and democratic. Spying on people on a massive scale only turns your society into one of the worst kinds of dictatures. Since people use IT systems as an extensions to their brains, just like they already did for ages with books and pen an paper, controlling IT systems means controlling the people. If you censor the Internet, you censor peoples thoughts. Suddenly there are ideas that cannot get through to them. Furthermore with widespread surveillance you can find out what your populous is thinking, you can use that to oppress opposition rather easily.

We must stop this now peacefully, before it has reached a level where people start to think that violence is necessary.

Developers, developers, developers! But WILL they support Windows 10?

Christian Berger

Changing strategies to quickly

I mean Microsoft always talked about the "next big thing", a technology which should revolutionize everything. Usually those turned out to be just a couple of half baked libraries implementing a fraction of what's advertised and even that fraction often doesn't work. And shortly after the project gets usable... the project will be axed in favour of "the next big thing".

Now there are 2 groups of developers. Some are continuously keeping up with the latest fad, producing applications which, in their installation routine, install the last 20 years of external Windows packets.

The others are just limiting themselves to Win32, they create statically linked applications, often even without any installation routines. You copy your binary and it'll just work.

Now Microsoft made one mistake, they hinted stopping to support Win32. Windows RT doesn't support Win32 anymore, and so does Windows Phone. The operating systems they consider to be the future don't support Win32 any more. For both groups this means that their software won't run any more. And usually that even means they will have to completely re-implement their software. Now if you completely re-implement something you are likely to re-evaluate what platform you develop for.

Christian Berger

They don't know better

There is a group of people who only grew up on MS-DOS and Windows. They believe that the problems they face on their systems are intrinsic to all computers. They believe that distributing software in binary form is a good thing, often claiming that if they would give out the source code, everybody could just copy it... as if that couldn't also happen with the binary code.

In a way it's similar to the "Facebook"-Crowd. Those are the people who believe that the Internet solely consists of Facebook and other large companies. For them it makes sense to host your website "in the cloud" as they think it's normal that a server cannot easily saturate a gigabit connection with web traffic. They think tracking their users is OK and even outsource that to companies like Google or Adobe. Those people believe that the main problem with the Internet is that there is no payment infrastructure.

Those crowds may seem weird and appalling to us, but they do exist.

Beam me up, Scotty, And VAPORIZE me in the process

Christian Berger

Hasso Plattner is not a scientist

The institute where those people work is named after "Hasso Plattner". He's not a scientist, but a business man who founded SAP. SAP finances some research into the futile parts of software design. You know the areas where trivial problems are solved with lots of code.

I mean this is hardly science, it's more of an art project of what can happen if that kind of technology falls into the wrong hands. Technology is not there to mimic the limitations of the past, but to overcome them.

BTW it's sickening how much they advertise their artificial restrictions as progress! That's why we need to teach ethics to people.

US military finds F-35 software is a buggy mess

Christian Berger

Never mind the software...

... just look at that "shield" sticking up there. I don't think that's particularly aerodynamic.

Netadmin wanted for 'terrible, terrible, awful job nobody wants'

Christian Berger

Can't be that bad...

... I've worked at the engineering department for a household appliance manufacturer.

Nothing to do, except for sitting in fruitless meetings and waiting for outsourcing companies to complete code a 5 year old could write while being oxygen deprived in a vacuum chamber... and the code they provide looks like they used exactly that method.

An IT infrastructure relying on horribly bad software, some made with Java, others made with .net. Most departments install their own "shadow IT", by getting some laptops with Linux or Windows on them. The main operating system is some proprietary crap made by Siemens which I think it based on an old version of Windows with added stuff to make it work even less than normal Windows. You can actually work with that if you spend 4 weeks waiting for your user account to be enabled... Yes that's 4 weeks engineering time wasted because of management snafus.

Want a cheap Office-er-riffic tablet? Microsoft Windows takes on Android

Christian Berger

The "bargain basement" strategy isn't new for Microsoft

It's already what made MS-DOS and Windows to popular. Back then you could either have a home computer which set you back less than 1000 DM, some "IBM-compatible" PC for 2000-4000 DM or a proper workstation for much more.

Microsoft provided just enough functionality (i.e. a filesystem) while IBM kept the hardware compatible so the lack of drivers was no issue, so companies wrote software for MS-DOS, making those systems more or less usable.

Of course everyone who had enough money and knew what they were doing was getting some sort of UNIX workstation. This only changed when the 386 became affordable and free Unix and unixoid systems emerged. By the 1990s the cost difference between a Linux workstation and a Windows PC was 4 megs of RAM, since Windows for Workgroups 3.11 could crawl along with 4 megs while your typical Linux needed at least 8 megs for X11.

Remote code execution vulns hit Atlassian kit

Christian Berger

Seems plausible

Atlassian software, as least the parts I've seen, was incredibly complex. Probably much more complex than what you'd actually need.

Remember, high complexity means more code, and more code means more bugs, and more bugs mean more security critical bugs.

As for features you need to distinguish between "explicit features" which need to be coded explicitly, and "implicit features" which emerge from already existing features combined in new ways. Ideally you have the later with a small and orthogonal set of explicit features combining into lots of implicit ones with as little code as possible.

Polish chap builds computer into a mouse

Christian Berger

Re: What I'd like to see...

I think you misunderstood me. I didn't mean an X-server, I meant a simple "VT100" terminal, but roughly with the feature set of xterm. So in a 1920x1080 screen you'd get about 240x67 character of text. That's roughly 16 kilobytes, or roughly 6 full updates per second at 1 MBit, not thrillingly fast, but you usually only update a small part. If you throw in 10MBit Ethernet, which would require additional hardware, you could update the screen roughly as fast as it's refreshing.

The problem with 8VSB, and I assume you want ATSC to go with it, is the high price of equipment. In 2008 I've been to my local TV station. They had an ATSC receiver there, it cost as much as a car even though it was locally produced, which makes sense as it contains 2 complete PCs connected via an Ethernet cable. One does the ATSC/VSB decoding while the other one runs VLC to display the video. DVB-* on the other hand is cheap as dirt.

However even DVB would be prohibitively expensive since you need to do MPEG2/H264 encoding. And again, people will end up displaying fixed

Christian Berger

You wouldn't expect a Windows CE machine to sell....

... even though the market share of Windows went _down_ with the move from CE to "Phone".

Christian Berger

What I'd like to see...

Is a monitor with a fast serial port (i.e. based on RS-485) with a megabit per second or so which uses its OSD hardware to emulate a high resolution xterm with nice crispy sharp bitmap fonts.

Eurovision tellybods: Yes, you heard right – net neutrality

Christian Berger

Actually there are some people in that area who are rather progressive

though those are probably mostly the older ones. After all broadcasting is seen by some broadcasters as a public service. We all pay, either directly or through advertisements, to allow programmes to be broadcast to us all. It's in a way like crowd funding an open source project.

Therefore those people see value in making their content available as open as possible. Some stations are even pushing towards releasing as much as possible under Creative Commons licenses, others just put it online for everyone to download. Compared to the difficulties it takes to convince a large corporation to change its way, many stations are making extremely quick progress towards being a part of an open society instead of just seeing their consumers as a product to sell. Even some commercial stations, which have to sell the attention of their consumers, are learning that they will get more viewers if they just make decent programming, programming the people making television would actually like to watch themselves.

'If you see a stylus, they BLEW it' – Steve Jobs. REMEMBER, Apple?

Christian Berger

Re: Fascinating how things always evolve back towards the Dynabook

"The iPad eventually fulfilled Kay's vision. Many of Kay's writings are online and are all interesting reads."

No, not really. The Dynabook was meant to be an education and work device. The iPad is an "App-Player" you cannot even draw on, let alone have an environment that is conductive to learning. Anything good enough to allow for experimentation would, in effect, be a programming language, and the Apple Store has explicit rules against that.

Christian Berger

Fascinating how things always evolve back towards the Dynabook

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

A pad-like device with display, pen and keyboard as well as wireless connectivity, from 1972 when people still had powerful visions of the future.

Whisper keeping schtum over abuse of user data

Christian Berger

It's probably not that they don't care, they just don't know about it and they don't know the alternatives. The sudden increase in people attending "crypto parties" where normal people get taught how to do basic e-mail and disk encryption is a sign that those who know about alternatives do care.

This is also why politicians try their best to discredit encryption, so the common people believe encryption is only used by criminals and commercial companies. (there's surely quite a bit of overlap here)

Just WHY is the FBI so sure North Korea hacked Sony? NSA: *BLUSH*

Christian Berger

If they saw that attacks were coming...

... couldn't they have just told Sony to prevent the whole mess from happening? Shouldn't the FBI be punished for not helping them when they could? I mean a simple warning like "this is a set of IP-adresses we expect attacks to come from" would have been enough, they wouldn't have had to give up any of their operational procedures or capabilities.

This whole thing doesn't quite add up if you assume the FBI is one of the good guys here. One plausible story might be that the FBI computers found out about it, but it was just somewhere in their database, or they did actually know about it, but let it happen in order to foster support for new surveillance laws. Keep in mind large organisations act like living beings. They might act in self defence.

Dongle bingle makes two MEELLION cars open to exploit

Christian Berger

Re: Actually that's rather a non-issue here...

> All you need is a simple dongle and some software for the PC.

Actually such dongles are readily available. All you need is a bit of cabling, some resistors for pull-up and termination and off you go. The rest can be done in software.

Christian Berger

Re: Actually that's rather a non-issue here...

"A little box which messes with GPS signals?"

Doesn't need to be so complex. Those boxes don't have GPS, they are connected to the CAN bus in a car. It should be fairly simple to emulate that.

Christian Berger

Actually that's rather a non-issue here...

Since those problems are only relevant if you connect the dongle to an actual car... in that case they even advertise that they will track your every move.

If you use it the way it's intended, on a "car simulator", you should be safe. Never ever connect it to your car. That should be common sense.

Future imperfect: A UK broadband retrospective

Christian Berger

Actually ISDN still is popular in Germany

Though not for the Internet, as the phone company insisted in charging per minute making it _hugely_ expensive. It is popular for telephony as it gives you features like direct inward dialing, 2 voice channels and even in the simplest version multiple phone numbers. So everyone in your family could have their own phone number. Or you could have a phone number you advertise at work so you can selectively ignore it, etc.

ISDN also gives you considerably better voice quality and faster dialling. Most companies with more than one phone have it, as well as plenty of households.

Since the ISDN network is going to be turned off in a couple of years, there's a market for CPEs with ISDN ports. The most common ones are the "Fritz!Box" series from AVM with usually one internal S0 bus. If you need more there are less and less companies providing decent ones, unfortunately.

Christian Berger

Re: About time councils put their foot down

Well or at least running tubes so you can put in any sort of wiring. I mean those current passive optical networks will eventually be outdated and hard to upgrade, but once you have tubes, you can easily upgrade them to dedicated fibres into every home.

Venture Capital investment in Silicon Valley hits dot-com boom levels

Christian Berger

My guess is that there will be 2 differences

1. We now have the concept of "to big to fail". Just like with banks, we will have Internet companies which are seen as integral to the structure of what governments will claim to be the Internet. One example might be Facebook. There are whole companies which base their business model around Facebook, if it is gone they are gone.

2. There will be little left from that bubble. The first bubble brought us loads of glass lying in the ground. This and cheap used equipment from failed companies made it easy for new companies to get a head start. One example is Cogent. The investments we have now mostly go into marketing. The value of Facebook or Flickr or whatever doesn't come from anything substantial, but from brands and the hope that one day they can turn their user data into money.

Prez Obama snubs UK PM's tough anti-encryption crusade at White House meet

Christian Berger

Re: The problem is...

Edit: Wow that didn't take long: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/229787-obama-backs-call-for-tech-backdoors

Well look at the track record. Skype has end to end encryption, but they happily share the encryption keys with everyone claiming to have something like a warrant.

Look at the Clipper Chip, a deliberately broken encryption device which many companies wanted to build into their systems.

Or think of the Lotus Notes "workload reduction factor".

There's plenty of instances where commercial companies deliberately and knowingly implement faulty crypto, and I'm not even talking about the recent ones.

Industry espionage is just an argument to use against governments. In reality even the companies that do use e-mail encryption use it on deeply flawed systems. This isn't a problem as the really important internal information is usually not leaving the building. Companies tend to broadly overestimate the benefit of their work falling into a competitors hand. Few companies have much knowledge that isn't also known by their competitors.

Christian Berger

The problem is...

that Obama, as well as many parts of the industry, would be in favour or at least not opposed to a ban on strong crypto. Obama (or more precisely the US government which is far more than just him) could use it to control their people a lot better in order to prevent/contain public uprisings as early as possible, and the industry would need to spend a lot less on cryptography.

The industry doesn't need crypto and it won't give us proper crypto in a time when selling the data of your users, or even mining it for yourself is seen as something acceptable. Even those few promises we get now are worthless, as those companies can be made to sabotage encryption on command.

Apple wants your fingerprints in the cloud

Christian Berger

There's been next to no research on the security of those hashes

Those hashes aren't cryptographic hashes, they cannot be as the fingerprints will change depending on how well they are read. It's extremely unlikely that you get 2 pixel perfect fingerprint reads.

So I certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility that you can get from "hash" to fingerprint within acceptable amounts of time.

Why has nobody researched this yet? Because it's so easy to get a fingerprint in another way. People leave their fingerprints everywhere. And this was known for ages. In the episode "The Human Factor" even MacGyver used latent handprints on a handprint sensor to get access.

'F*** you', exclaims Google Translate app, politely

Christian Berger

That's actually even a problem for human speakers

For example the upper palliatine dialect of Bavarian I speak has the 2 words "affe" for up and "obe" for down. Near Weiden, they use the words "obe" for up and "unte" for down.

Christian Berger

To be fair

Microsoft also demoed that "extremely well and clearly spoken German to English"-Mode as well as the "English to Gibberisch"-Mode.

I'll build a Hyperloop railgun tube-way in Texas, Elon Musk vows

Christian Berger

He's at least trying

He's at least trying to bring out products which are not like the ones everyone knows. He's taking risks. This is what the word "enterprise" originally meant. Enterprises haven't always been the risk-minimized entities they are now.

Google unleashes build-it-yourself 'Ara' slablet phones (in Puerto Rico)

Christian Berger

We will see...

So far the concept was geared towards fairly boring components. There's little use in swapping a camera as even cheap ones will usually do the job just fine. Same goes for CPU and memory. Those are all largely non issues.

What would be interesting would be unusual peripherals, for example a proper keyboard, or things like an additional SDR.

Also we'd need to have some proper way of enumerating those peripherals so we can, in the long run have a common hardware platform where we don't need system images ported to each and every device.

Then, in the next step, we could have alternative operating systems for those mobile devices. You wouldn't be stuck with Android or whatever, but could run an actual Linux or *BSD on it.

Acer slips Wang Andresen into senior Euro slot

Christian Berger

Hiring people named after competitors

It always feels a bit strange when companies hire people named like their competitors.

For those who don't know, Wang Laboratories is a fairly large US computer company which came from the desktop calculator business.

http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/wang360e.html

It's 4K-ing big right now, but it's NOT going to save TV

Christian Berger

Re: 4 screens vs 1

"Spot the vi power user..."

Or the tmux user :)

Christian Berger

Re: 4 screens vs 1

"Good luck affording a graphics card that can put out an image at that resolution, with decent detail level, antialiasing and a frame rate suitable for gaming (~60fps)."

I think there are already such cards. After all the workload for the graphics card only increases linearly with the number of pixels.

However not everybody is into gaming. For many people simply having a 480x135 character text console with decent bitmap fonts is already rather comfortable.

Remember Corel? It's just entered .DLL hell

Christian Berger

Considering how often that thing crashed...

... I wouldn't be surprised it had lots of security critical bugs. I mean from a security/reliability perspective they did just about everything wrong. They even supported OLE!

This $10 phone charger will wirelessly keylog your boss

Christian Berger

There is no sensible way to encrypt those on a budget

To keep costs down those systems have a simplex wireless connection. With that you have no chance of securely exchanging a key.

If you want moderate security for wireless keyboards use Blutooth. It may not be very secure, but it's a _lot_ more than secure than this... but then again that's probably not an option for Microsoft as not all versions of Windows support it. And unlike USB HIDs the BIOS will not emulate a normal AT keyboard for you.

Mr Cameron goes to Washington for PESKY HACKERS chinwag with Pres Obama

Christian Berger

For governments IT security is a double edged sword

I mean just imagine a government would promote IT security, for example by helping people to use end to end encryption and open source, or demanding minimum IT security standards from suppliers. (i.e. don't hire complete idiots)

This would automatically mean that the secret services would have a much harder job at mass surveillance. Better IT means your population gets harder to control.

Apparently Cameron already end to end encryption:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/whatsapp-and-snapchat-could-be-banned-under-new-surveillance-plans-9973035.html

Sony post-mortem: Obama lobbies for new legal powers to thwart hackers

Christian Berger

Re: The Answer is simple

"I think the market is doing a fantastic job of punishing Sony as it is."

There is no evidence of the market ever having had any impact on a company because they acted against the interests of the users. The market is just an idea. It might work in theory if you had a transparent market, but then again when was the last time you bought a car and the salesman told you that the manufacturer may have killed opposition leaders in Argentinia and last year has avoided going to court about that?

If the market would work, DRM would be gone by now, as people would buy DRM-free versions of what they want.