* Posts by P. Lee

5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007

Oh UK.gov. Say you're not for weakened encryption – Google and Facebook

P. Lee

Re: One crime one warrant

>Perhaps a more enlightening statistic would be how many she refused to authorise.

"Perhaps a more enlightening statistic would be how many she read"

FTFY

Ten warrants for every working day? This is why we want judges not the home secretary approving these things. The implementation of law is the work of the judiciary, not the legislature. That helps make sure its non-political.

Trend Micro: Internet scum grab Let's Encrypt certs to shield malware

P. Lee

Re: What....?

>It is glib to say security and identification is someone else's business, when your sole business is providing security and identification.

But they have fulfilled their role. They have identified the content as coming from the certificate site owner and allowed the owner to securely deliver the content.

What you (and trend) are suggesting is having ca's arbitrate relationships. That is not their role. Trend know this but it doesn't stop a good publicity stunt.

The new Huawei is the world's fastest phone

P. Lee

Re: who cares how fast it is

If you just want a phone it doesn't matter.

If you want a pocket computer with a phone attached, it might.

GCHQ mass spying will 'cost lives in Britain,' warns ex-NSA tech chief

P. Lee

Re: Terrorists?

> terrorist are not the only reason the government wants RIPA

Terrorists don't harm the government at all. In fact, they are likely to help them, by uniting the populace behind them.

Expense scandals, on the other hand, that terrorises governments. Exposing illegal mass surveillance programs, that terrorises governments.

That is what cannot be allowed.

We're all really excited about new smartphones, laptops, tablets – said no one ever

P. Lee

Here's a question

If you had an idea for a killer must-have new mobile device, do you think you would be able to turn that idea into a reality and become a global success?

Or do you think that IP laws, supplier-deals and predatory pricing would be used to squash your fledgling company like a bug?

Where in the world do we have the most vibrant market with the most diverse mobile products available?

Ready for DevOps? Time to brush up on The Office and practise 'culture'

P. Lee
Devil

Re: and legislative speration of duties

>he who builds shall not run, he who runs, shall not fix.

For we shall silo our expertise into different outsourcerers on the grounds of cost-cutting, in honour of the mighty god Mordac, Preventer of Information Services. Our fixers shall fix in the Philippines, our runners shall run in India and our builders shall build locally. For lo, MultiNational Enterprises are a Success by Definition, are they not? And the explicit cost savings shall be half my bonus for achieving them, while the hidden costs shall be identified and moved around by a new incarnation of Mordac, who shall appear after the opening of my parachute of gold.

We have taken the holy words of Scientific Management and repackaged them, for we know that McDonalds and Foxconn practises are great in the eyes of Industry.

AMD to nibble the ankles of Nvidia this summer with 14nm FinFET GPUs

P. Lee

Re: power consumption

>I've never understood why someone who spends £300+ on a graphics card cares about it using an extra £10/15 per annum in electricity.

Probably isn't the cost of electricity, but the reduced noise from running cooler, or increased power from cramming more in, for a desktop system.

I'd hazard a guess that the desktop is also the proving ground for mobile, where power consumption is important.

Intel, Warner lock horns with hardware biz over HDCP crypto-busters

P. Lee

Hello Ms Streisand!

You're full of interesting facts today!

Some say the crypto is useless.

That depends on whether your aim is to stop piracy or to keep cheap kit out of the market.

At $89-400 it isn't a cheap work-around for home piracy. This action is to make sure all the vendors keep paying their patent taxes.

Cat fight: Watch out YouTube, here comes Facebook

P. Lee

Re: Facebook stats, pah!

>Facebook just needs more users spending more time on its site

WRONG!

FB needs ad-impressions and click-throughs. If you stay in one place watching user-generated content, that will suck their bandwidth without increasing ad revenue.

The destination model is different. FB is for "content about friend X" whereas YouTube content is about things, which are more targeted/target-able in terms of market data.

Microsoft to begin alerting users about suspected government snooping

P. Lee

Re: Is this exciting new PR move to include warnings of spying perpetrated by the US government?

>1 - Microsoft can be legally barred from disclosure - not only in the US, but in plenty other nations too. To be fair, this makes sense

If you don't follow the argument through, it does. What happens if you're a Chinese criminal? Is it then ok to tip the user off?

No MS, I don't fear the Chinese government more than I fear your attempts at lock-in.

You can keep your onedrive!

What did we learn today? Microsoft has patented the slider bar

P. Lee

Re: Performance...

>Spreadsheets are useful for very complex modeling and calculation

The biggest problem with spreadsheets which I've come across is that they are really easy to modify accidentally and very difficult to verify.

A recursive piece of code is far easier to get right *over time* than a calculation which ripples across hundreds of rows and multiple sheets, any one of which may be accidentally altered.

May I recommend, the perl hash... or perhaps that newfangled php or ruby or JS or whatever the kids are using today.

P. Lee

Re: Performance...

>For me, the performance difference is real because the startup time of Libre office is much longer than MS office.

I'm pretty sure you can set LO to do the trick MS-O does - preload everything into a cache at boot time. If you have ram to spare and use LO a lot, its probably worth doing.

2016 in mobile: Visit a components mall in China... 30 min later, you're a manufacturer

P. Lee
Paris Hilton

Re: "ignited the PC revolution"

>I missed that one. When was Apple claiming that?

Before you were born. ;)

In the good old days when computers were interesting and when "pc" didn't mean Intel.

Got a pricey gaming desktop from PC World for Xmas? Check the graphics specs

P. Lee

Re: Its in the PSU.

I seem to think (based on hazy memories of years ago) that over-speccing the PSU is also bad in that they don't always deliver efficiently well below their power rating.

Says the man with the 125w cpu... ;)

iOS 9 kludged our iPhones, now give us money, claims new lawsuit

P. Lee
Mushroom

>One suspects Apple's response will be "well what did you expect?"

I expect to be able to roll-back an inappropriate software installation.

I expect an *appliance* vendor to prevent or at least flag the installation of its software on its own hardware as inappropriate, if that is the case. I expect the vendor to have tested the usability of an upgrade on its own hardware.

I don't mind the upgrade cycle. I do mind when applications are inappropriately tied to the OS. I do mind if the vendor knows the software, knows the hardware, knows it won't work properly and still pushes the upgrade.

If Apple, MS or Google ties software to hardware and then fouls up my usage, none of them get money from me. You can keep your stinking ecosystems. You may be pretty but you are not cool and every time you do something like this I'm reminded of the fact that I hate you every time an application doesn't work as well as it used to. For example, with MS' shenanigans I will no longer purchase Windows-only games. No Linux version - no purchase, even if I want it badly.

I have a very particular set of skills. I will hunt your customers down. I will find them and when I do, I will badmouth you to them.

Forget anonymity, we can remember you wholesale with machine intel, hackers warned

P. Lee

Re: These detection methods don't scale.

The question is, how thorough can your investigation be?

With a dev environment and code on a tiny removable storage device. Only the incompetent are going to be caught. Perhaps that is enough though.

This is not hand-writing. I can't see why those statistical markers cannot themselves be reverse-engineered and used to obfuscate the authors code.

Upset Microsoft stashes hard drive encryption keys in OneDrive cloud?

P. Lee

Re: How dare you...

Quite sensible, but not that useful.

Hard-drive encryption is only useful when transitioning from unmounted->mounted/logged in.

Is "switching your computer on" still a thing?

If you want to improve security, chroot/jail those browser tabs to stub directories. Otherwise, that flash flaw Is going to provide malware with access to to your onedrive and its game over.

It is a modest improvement. It may defeat the casual disk-swiper and help when you ebay the thing and forget to wipe it properly.

Microsoft in 2015: Mobile disasters, Windows 10 and heads in the clouds

P. Lee

If you want the latest AAA FPS then Windows is going to be your choice. And by "AAA" I mean over-rated and over-priced franchise engines (Hello BlackOps you "barely-interactive-just-run-around-because-there's-no-point-shooting-anything" thing.) which haven't been updated for the last five years. Meh.

Having said that, looking down my list of installed linux games... Witcher, TALOS, XCOM, Bioshock, Worms :), all the Valve stuff, Strike Suit Zero, Torchlight, Trine, Metro, Serious Sam :), Defence Grid, Stanley Parable, Penumbra, Killing Floor - there's quite a lot out there.

I've found WINE isn't a great option for games. Perhaps I just haven't fiddled enough.

I see no particular reason not to take MS' offer of W7->W10 upgrade just to keep current, but all that its going to run on it is Steam for a few of the nostalgia games which haven't been ported - Magika, Lara Croft, Monkey Island. I'm not trusting it with any serious data and I'm certainly not going to run it day-to-day as my main OS. Its just a wrapper for some games - the right tool for the job. Eventually, I hope that vmware player is going to be up to the job.

Boffins unwrap bargain-basement processor that talks light and current

P. Lee

>We will see what comes out of this.

Cheap small 10G optical switches?

Lightpeak (finally)?

Hopefully, since its a research establishment it will be licensed to all, not locked up in some single-vendor product to maintain the profitability of the rest of their product line.

Bookstore sells some data centre capacity, becomes Microsoft, Oracle's nemesis

P. Lee

A risky game

Win10 has depleted a lot of trust.

My feeling is that Azure pricing is predatory and temporary, but AWS genuinely runs their business as they see fit, almost ignoring the competition. This feeling isn't altered by news of MS offering, then revoking free storage or wanting to charge for CALs for a DHCP server.

I know who I'd be going with on the long haul, especially since an expensive application re-write is almost certainly required either way. I'd be picking the Cloud from the company which doesn't want to license my core2 home server as an eight-core monster because, well, I have trust issues. If I see money-grubbing rather than service, I start to have concerns for the future.

You ain't nothing but a porn dog, prying all the time: Cyber-hound sniffs out hard drives for cops

P. Lee
Holmes

Re: Woof!

Sniffing other people's data, file kidnapping, obscene screen estate usage, its all there Officer. I'd lock 'em up and through away the key if I was you, bang 'em up behind cryptowall along wiv all them other filthy "as-a-service" types.

No, Kim Kardashian's plump posterior's pixels did not break the App Store – just this El Reg man's mind

P. Lee

>You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.

Exodus 20:4-5 "You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them..."

That includes fat cows, because He knew it would end like this.

They didn't listen then, they don't listen now.

Australian government urges holidaymakers to kill two-factor auth

P. Lee

Re: Blimey

>I imagine if you can afford to holiday off-shore, you can afford a couple of international SMSes.

That isn't the point. Most people swap out their sim cards for a local one so they don't receive anything at all. I had a similar issue in Europe with Australian banking codes sent by phone. I had no roaming and couldn't do anything.

Upshot: perhaps using a particular SIM for 2FA is the wrong way to do it. I have an electronic doodad from NatWest which does challange-response type stuff for the bank when used with a card. I wonder if these could be made generically so you can use them for all banking, government (with an issued card) etc.

Christmas comes early at US Patent office after massive IT outage

P. Lee

Major power outage.

A good time to wipe log entries, even if its just the one, eh Juniper?

Feds widen probe into lottery IT boss who rooted game for profit

P. Lee
Trollface

Re: Broke the fundamental rule

Do it once, do it big, collect through a very good law firm while in a non-extradition country.

Software bug sets free thousands of US prisoners too early

P. Lee

49 days?

Hardly anything to worry about.

Unless of course, you're a US whitegoods manufacturer and your labour pool shrunk...

OK Google? Firefox to nibble Chrome extensions from 2016

P. Lee

I care not a whit for the engine

I care quite a bit about the UI and the features - desirable or otherwise.

That means...

- Noscript & flashblock, certpatrol.

- A separate url and search box. When I type in a word into the URL bar, please assume its a host name rather than going off to <searchengine> to search for stuff. That is really annoying (I'm looking at you IOS Safari)

If I haven't specified a protocol, try https and http in the background. Give me an option for one or the other and to default to one or the other, if both work.

- don't autofill unless I ask you to. Don't even pre-fill boxes for real (maybe just pretend) because browsers can send back data before the submit button is pressed.

So no, I don't trust Chrome, even if I have Chromium installed for occasional use and even if I think there's a chance it is technically a better browser (I like its sandboxing).

Firefox it is for the foreseeable future.

YouTube puts T-Mobile US on naughty list for throttling all vids to 480p

P. Lee

Wiretapping? Interference in electronic communications?

Anyone?

IT bloke: Crooks stole my bikes after cycling app blabbed my address

P. Lee
Childcatcher

Re: Social - adjective used to be associated with diseases

>I grew up in a place where "sharing" was taught in schools as a virtue.

It still is. However, we still have semantic errors which mislead people. I don't "have the internet on my iphone," I do allow random people on the internet to send stuff to a computer I neither really control nor understand but to which I trust an awful lot of personal information. I do not "have" this app, I HAVE installed a random bit of code, from people I don't know, with whom I have no discernible relationship, on a computer with lots of personal data on it.

Its good that people share these stories. The more publicity this sort of thing gets, the more people understand that the more (even transient) information (such as whereabouts) is stored and shared with code of unknown origin, strangers, government, corporations, cloud storage organisations, the more dangerous it is to you personally. Stop contributing to these infrastructures.

My take on the matter is simply don't do it. Don't bother trying to secure a zillion and one apps, just stop sharing where you run, cycle, walk, what you had for lunch and where it was. No-one needs to know that. My weather app doesn't need my location. I can use privacy mode in the browser and give it a postcode of a major town nearby - it doesn't need to know I'm down at the bottom of my garden. That URL gets stored in the local history, not synced up to some cloud, not even for Firefox.

Give me rsync over ssh over a vpn to my machine at home for "cloud," and I'll be happy. OneDrive I do not want even if it did have unlimited free storage. Application-level clouds are even worse. Per-application storage protocols? No thanks.

If I want to socialise and share with friends, I'll schedule some time to be with them. "You're my friend, but I'm only going to broadcast my information to you, not spend time listening to you" doesn't cut it, not even if the broadcast is two-way. Why have have something as inhuman as a computer mediate social activity? Go back to the clubhouse or pub or invite people home and regale them of stories of the close calls you had with a bus on your bike ride. That is how you build friendships - not by clicking "like" or sending them GPS coordinates of where you ride or where you had lunch.

Stop sharing with corporates, software and devices and start sharing directly with people you know. That is how you develop appropriate trust boundaries.

Windows 10: What's coming in 2016?

P. Lee

Re: Here's how you do that

>Sadly that website insists that you "Please enable cookies and refresh the page" (without telling you exactly which cookie they want enabling) - thus slurping even more info about you :)

Privacy Mode.

Also handy for telling gmail what it can do with its remembering of you when you're logged out.

Who would win a fight between Cortana and Android?

P. Lee

>Microsoft's smarting because it mostly missed mobile.

Maybe, but it was always going to be a struggle to sensibly license MS apps on a less capable platform. That's why Apple started from scratch and has only recently brought Pages et al to its mobile world. Without its existing code- and developer-base, MS really doesn't have a lot going for it. As low power systems catch up, things like the surface4 become viable and MS has a chance.

As for voice control, outside of controlling a phone while driving where fingers are verboten, I doubt there is much call for it.

Hello Kitty hack exposes 3.3 million users' details, says infosec bod

P. Lee

Re: Monitor your databases people

Assuming the data was pulled from an active db and not from a backup dump.

You'd also expect canary records and that sort of thing, right? Well, if they cared about security. However, if they got past the hardened web-server defences, I'm guessing the middleware and database bits were easy. Unbreakable they are not. Security in depth? We've heard of it.

The problem with security is that its difficult (expensive) and tedious. Hello Kitty will suffer for this, but how many firms think it won't happen to them. It appears companies are not willing to learn from others' mistakes.

I've had to teach my kids not to provide details online and that its ok to lie to websites. False names, ages, addresses, disposable email addresses, that sort of thing. The rule of thumb is, if you wouldn't be happy handing over a sheet of paper with all the requested details on it to a stranger coming out of prison, don't hand it to anyone you don't know, who may well leave it around for an organised crime gang to take.

Skilled workers, not cost, lured Apple to China says Tim Cook

P. Lee

Re: Horse shit, Cook.

Its like pre-Snowden security. Everyone knows they are lying, but they still pretend and will continue to do so until someone dumps internal memos on pastebin.

Apple likes to dual-source so the India move is expected. Its is about keeping supplier-competition alive. Apparently suppliers in China have been consolidating behind the scenes and not telling anyone. Cost is not really an issue for them, though they do like to keep the logistics lean - so lean in fact that I've needed a PC twice now and would have bought a Mac, but the Apple store simply had no stock of the spec I wanted and I wasn't willing to wait for several weeks while they made it, so they lost the business. Meh.

As far as worker locations go, its probably important to think of these companies as not being American. That's what the money indicates. The management may be American and in Apple's case the design is, but they point of going multi-national is to insulate yourself from government influence and taxation.

New HTTP error code 451 to signal censorship

P. Lee

Re: IETF were not persuaded is was a good use of a limited number of status codes

>>"But what the browser do? "

>Route the request via a different route.

In Mozilla's case, auto-redirect to TOR.

Facepalm time: MS Office update wipes custom Word autotext

P. Lee
Devil

> UAT?

That job has been outsourced to you.

Hillary Clinton says for crypto 'maybe the back door is the wrong door'

P. Lee
Mushroom

>*ANY* door is a problem

Mebbe its a radioactive door... its installation is a cancer on both privacy and security.

Big Brother is born. And we find out 15 years too late to stop him

P. Lee

Re: modulated outrage...

>But they already have this data. And they have not stopped terrorist attacks and crimes.

Its to stop those who would terrorise the State - i.e. Snowden v2 & Expense Scandal v2.

Threatening suicide bombers with anything is missing the point.

The Register's Australian technology headline predictions … for 2017!

P. Lee

BYOD

It was never really about laptops was it and realistically, BYOD means remote desktops, so the Macs aren't really that much of a problem.

It was mostly about using private smartphones for business - the result is pretty much the same as safe harbour agreements. Multi-jurisdictions don't work. Security is very difficult. We'll just ignore the problem and hope we don't get a Sony.

After safe harbour: Navigating data sovereignty

P. Lee

>You cannot export EU citizens' personal data from the EU to the US. If you want to process it in any way you have to do so in the EU or any country with equivalent rules and with a sufficient legal air-gap to stop the US's view that they're entitled to go anywhere they please to get any data they choose.

Absolutely true, but the USGov will lean on any organisation it can to get the data. The multinational is stuck with doing something illegal no matter what it does. I haven't heard of a resolution of USGov vs MS(Ireland) so even not being officially a US company is no protection. The only protection is the company being more afraid of the EU than it is of USGov - no appreciable US assets and no desire by directors to visit the US.

Having a (US) multinational unable to play in the space is viewed as intolerable by the USGov, so they are stuck with not wanting a resolution either way. They would rather play in a grey area. The latest US "cybersecurity" bill pretty much formalises this. "You give us everything we want and we won't tell." They won't need the NSA after that.

As far as Cloud goes, I'm not a fan. "We gave all your data away, but hey, it didn't cost us much to do it!" isn't the argument we want to hear. If you can't automate your IT, find someone with skills. AWS might be cheaper, but if you are a large business and your business model relies on that kind of cost saving, you've got the wrong business model. Perhaps the banning of US Cloud companies will spur the growth of Non-US cloud companies which fall only under national jurisdiction. Isn't that the point of it all - control of the data by those from whom the data is taken? Wouldn't Americans be incensed if their banking data was all processed in China? Guess what, despite the US' self-image, much of the world doesn't see them as "the good guys." If you want to be seen as the good guys, fix your legal system and your attitude of complete disregard for the rights and legal systems of others.

Juniper 'fesses up to TWO attacks from 'unauthorised code'

P. Lee

The source of the code is irrelevant.

More importantly, was the source code updated or were the binaries changed?

Where is the QA?

Was there no code audit followed by md5sum?

Here in Oz, stuff "made is China" has a pretty bad reputation, whereas European stuff is "premium quality." Which is funny because "European stuff" is usually made in China too, but someone has applied decent QA to it.

The next time, someone tries to shout down the implementation of security policies and procedures as administrative dead-weight, I think there is now plenty of evidence that you will lose customers if you don't do security effectively.

Researcher claims Facebook tried to gag him over critical flaw

P. Lee

Re: There is a difference

>As I see it, he had to get into the S3 bucket he had access to to find that they had (in an act of mind-blowing stupidity) left the keys to the rest of their stuff in there.

Not so much rifling through the underwear drawer as pointing out that if you run a business looking after other people's security, maybe you shouldn't keep all their keys on a pin-board just inside the front-door-with-the-dodgy-lock.

He doesn't seem to have been aggressive or looking to break fb's services. Why not thank him and be nice? He has proven value. Why not give him a little extra and ask him to keep digging?

Let's shut down the internet: Republicans vacate their mind bowels

P. Lee
Paris Hilton

>I do not for a moment doubt the ability of politicians of ALL parties to get things wrong, often deliberately because it suits their purposes.

UPVOTE!

These people are not dumb, but like Ms Hilton, make a very good living out of playing dumb for the amusement of the electorate and the benefit of their sponsors.

In this case, the message was, "America is Better than the Others" which the electorate is free to interpret to mean whatever he's in favour of whatever they want him to be in favour of.

The average man doesn't understand why encryption can't be done with a backdoor. Why would you insult him by telling him it isn't logically possible?

Microsoft beats Apple's tablet sales, apologises for Surface 4 flaws

P. Lee

Re: In Other News...

>fanbois won't fully grok "more than one awful OS". :)

I suspect non-Windows platforms are harder to manage in the enterprise. What may be relevant is whether users need managing to the extent which Windows allows. Windows is fine for running Office, but I tend to run it under VMware because while windows is good at Office, *nix has far better tools for processing data. Horses for courses and all that.

Congress strips out privacy protections from CISA 'security' bill

P. Lee

>haven't we been heading steadily toward an enlightened and idealised age?*

*citation needed

--

Why do people think this? We have more advanced tech, that is all. A better age requires better people. If you look around, do you see evidence of that?

Lettuce-nibbling veggies menace Mother Earth

P. Lee

Re: Strawy man, strawy man, does whatever a straw, er, can...

Was a crazy research result expected? Check out the funding source, The Coleman Foundation.

Why yes, yes it was.

The first item on their "Funding Interests" page: http://colcomfdn.org/funding-interests/

---

The Foundation supports efforts to significantly reduce immigration levels in the U.S., recognizing that population growth in America is fueled primarily by mass immigration.*

* Based on U.S. Census Bureau data, immigrants and their children account for 75% of the nation’s population growth.

---

The Coleman foundation, working hard to erase the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, since 1996.

Microsoft steps up Windows 10 nagging

P. Lee

Re: And another notch further down

>on the "how likely am I to ever install Windows 10" scale...

Ah, Mock the Week - how appropriate!

My guess is that MS is wants to get to the point where there is no excuse to not have upgraded. If you haven't by then, you'll be stung for a big upgrade fee when you finally do. It's the old, "if you want it that badly, you'll pay for it" ploy.

If W10 is licensed to the device, you may end up paying for a license for a device which only has a year or two of life left.

P. Lee

>Funny, I've had a tuner for a few years now:

>http://amzn.to/1Noa6mK

I love my one of these. I moved to it from a Hauppage PVR-350 and I've been really happy with it.

It works with MythTV on OSX too, apparently, if you're that way inclined - I haven't tried that for a few years though.

Samba man 'Tridge' accidentally helps to sink request for Oz voteware source code

P. Lee

>How about a kick starter ...

How about the govt hires some devs and pays them for the code which it can then release for inspection. What is this Kickstarter nonsense?

Election operations should be transparent, not outsourced to some company which can hide what it is doing.

Mozilla backs away from mobile OS as Android looks invincible

P. Lee

Re: "This depressing picture"? Aye right...

>Seriously though: you destroyed your own point when you said "enthusiast-oriented"

'Twas but a personal opinion.

I agree. I'd be happy to be function-deficient in return for some privacy. Give me a bog standard linux install on a phone. I'd be happy with a bigger battery and I can live without your Play/App stores. I'd need a touch interface for control settings and less than 10 applications. I'll bet someone could whip those up pretty quickly. Web, mail, maps, ebook reader, video, addressbook, phone dialer, messaging/sms.

As the hacks and id theft numbers grow people will begin to question the dominant platforms as they have with Windows. more so, since the functions are less critical and easier to replicate. Sure there are lots of apps and purchases, but these are personal devices - time spent setting up a "new shiney" isn't a problem. We don't need a new Android to rule the world, we just want to be able to easily load an OS of our choice and have a play with it.

NZ unfurls proposed new flag

P. Lee

Re: Yes please

>let's ditch the symbols (and monarchy) of another nation.

Isn't that your monarchy?

For my money, the top two look like a cereal packet trademark, the third looks like a semaphore flag, then debian and the last two are sadly colour-deficient.

I'd be a bit upset if those were the options.

The Maple leaf is a clear, clean design. The fern is a bit busy, as are dual-coloured stars.