Posts by Alan Brown 15097 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Stand and deliver will have never been so easy when you smash the door windows and take what you like, having made it stop."
Those sensors you mention will also make it trivially easy to identify the perpetrators, especially when sensors in other cars are going to be able to track where they came from and where they went.
How many cases of carjacking do you think will happen before crims realise that they may as well just walk into the Old Bailey and take a dump in the foyer?
"Because of the slower traffic pedestrians take more risks venturing into the road"
The interesting part is that the idea that pedestrians don't belong on the road is relatively recent, pushed by motor vehicle makers (The idea of 'jaywalking' bring a crime in the USA being one very specific example)
This is a movement for pedestrians to take the road BACK - and quite frankly it's about time.
If pedestrians start walking confidently into the road despite the presence of cars then city traffic will revert to the old days where the vehicles would simply slowly roll through. They don't need to stop unless there's a wall of bodies in front of them or someone lays down in front of the car.
With London traffic averageing less than 10mph (probably less than 5mph in the core), this won't produce much in the way of slowdown - and with robot cars meaning that the desirability of personally-owned vehicles being lowered (insurance costs of owning, vs lower labour costs for being driven meaning that in most cases it will be more expensive to own than hire), the number of vehicles on the road (AND parked on the sides - a parked car isn't earning revenue) is likely to plummet, making streets far less crowded and congested than they currently are.
"In addition, you are potentially making yourself unpopular with people with whom you are about to share an enclosed space."
You're forgetting that annoyed passengers in a vehicle can get OUT and confront the sociopath.
This is likely to be a self-limiting problem.
"If you're folding anything, then everything should be shuffled"
Take a look at how many military forces the USA has, none of whom talk to each other if they can avoid it and not counting the subunits within each one (who also don't talk to each other).
$HINT: It's a lot more than 3
At some point the whole mess is going to collapse simply because the GDP spend on military systems is unsustainable.
"Think of why Google is getting in to this space in the first place..."
Google (the original company) was always working towards AI.
Alphabet (what happened when Google ended up buying out a few of the less ethical marketing companies) is soley focussed on marketing and money. It sees AI as a sideshow.
Doubleclick was a poison pill that killed innovation.
"... these will break just like any other piece of electronics that gets routinely smashed about and soaked in fluids." Or tossed on police station roofs.
These will break when it suits the users to have them broken and it will behoove those who administer this scheme to pay very close attention to how often they break and who they break for.
Personal experience with police is that _most_ are ok, but there are enough psycho/sociopaths in the organisation (with increasing numbers further up the ranking structure) that accountability and oversight needs to be strict. Instead these people try to get police held to a lesser standard than the general public - and frequently succeed in doing so.
One of the single largest problems within any police organisation is that calling such individuals out results in the caller being tainted by claims of "grassing people up" and gang-mentality revenge kicking in. Such accusations and attitudes are what you'd find in criminal circles and have no place in law enforcement/peace keeping.
With any luck "optional activation" will be declared a failure and the things will be on 24*7. For shits and giggles it would be interesting if the things were recording anyway, even when cops thought they'd disabled them. It's amazing what people will say if they think they've shut down recordings (which is why it's always worth carrying _2_ recorders and letting them see you turn one off).
"With this in mind, now we are giving however many police officers full access to our browsing history and all phone calls via ICR records and other powers, with just as little oversight from abuse."
It underscores that oversight is absolutely necessary - and that police shouldn't get off lightly because they're police. If you want to enforce the law and keep the peace then you have to be seen to be held to higher standards - otherwise you end up with situations like the Flying Squad being unable to secure convictions of armed robbers despite catching them redhanded (because the jury don't believe a word they say)
"Follow that up with contaminating the Andrex paper mill feed stock with a good proportion of naga chillies? "
For maximum effect you want the "contamination" to be injected randomly. If it's provable back to one source people will dump the lot, or find a replacement water source.
This kind of stuff does get done, although the thought of glitterbombing your enemy does strike me as cruel and unusual.
"Perhaps counter-intuitively, war has pretty much no effect on population numbers. "
That's not entirely true. War, Famine and Pestilence cause slight dips in population (major dips in the case of Black Death), followed by those numbers being more than made up in the 1-2 generations following.
This is why anyone advocating war as a means of population control clearly hasn't studied history.
> Cockup.
> Conspiracy.
Deadlines.
My (and many other people's) policy used to be that if I found something I'd give the outfit in question 30 to 90 days to issue fixes before publishing. This was in response to some outfits never fixing things and demanding that vulnerabilities be embargoed until they were.
Once "certain outfits" started getting gag orders to keep things quiet, the politeness of giving them a heads-up went out the window. Liability for creating vulnerabilities lies with those who create them, not those who discover and publicise them. Reacting to a headsup with hostility means that you've burned your bridges with the security community and should expect to be treated accordingly.
"I'd be interested to see exactly how these cameras are allowed to operate"
Simple. Noone's reported them yet.
If a device is causing interference it must be switched off, even if it's been declared as compliant, etc etc etc - and we know how reliable a lot of declarations on equipment are.
"The First Amendment can ONLY be legally applied in regards to government action."
Except that in a privately owned publicly accessible environment (like a mall), the administration is legally treated as "government" for the purposes of the first amendment (of the USA constitution) and ends up being subjected to those rules. This has been thoroughly thrashed out in US courts.
The question is whether a conference area is classified as publicly accessible.
And then there's the question of whether walking around with a "wifi detector" is 'technical means' within the FCC's definitions even if enforcement is meatspace.
"What grants the venue owner the sole arbiter of who gets to use the unlicensed spectrum in that area?"
Nothing, as it's not the venue owner's to arbite.
This will get interesting but in the longer term expect that outfits which want to hold you to ransom over connectivity will shield their premises. That way they can block 4G access too.
"ARIN could identify the 'dark' IP ranges themselves and allocate them legitimately "
No, ARIN can't. It doesn't own them. Jon Postel handed them out and he's dead, so unless you're a medium it's hard to unilaterally cancel the allocation.
ARIN only owns the ranges it inherited when it was setup. Everything else (which is the first 64 class A ranges at least) it can only take if freely given.
"Yet IPv6 essentially eliminates NAT, which is the #1 Internet security device in use today"
NAT == "security by obscurity"
Decent firewalling rules aren't hard. NAT protects devices behind the router by good fortune rather than good design (and uPNP blows that all apart anyway)
"I ended up getting my IPs removed from 105 different blacklists over that time, and most of them were awesome people, some were actively hostile"
That was predicted when the early ones got stomped on by spam-friendly ISPs.
The flipside is that the more hostile ones aren't used much and you're probably better off worrying about the tens of thousands of privately operated blacklists running on individual mailservers which you'll never get out of.
You could resort to taking legal action against your ISP for supplying IP addresses which were unfit for purpose due to past customer misuse. Or you could take the easier option and take your business elsewhere, instead of staying with a spam-friendly ISP (which is one of the goals of a lot of the blacklists. Hurting spam-supporters economically is the only way to make a point)
"How about forcing ISP's to issue them.."
At some threshold point, Ofcom have a plan to forbid ISPs without IPv6 from selling their service as "Internet" (That was their response to a complaint that not selling IPv6 isn't full Internet, therefore misleading)
They won't say what the threshold is.
Perhaps it's time to start lobbying Ofcom and the ASA.
"I tend to be more specific and just block the ports I don't EVAR want accessed, like internal network sshd ports, Samba, X11, VNC, and anything "listening" on a windows box."
It's important to block traffic OUT from your network too.
Boxes which don't need external access shouldn't be given access to it. In particular webservers (which should be treated as disposable) shouldn't be allowed to initiate connections to virtually anything on the outside world. That way when they get compromised they can't be used as staging posts to attacks elsewhere.
"I'm assuming that wasn't the case in the US"
Yes and no. The USA has legislated local monopolies. It's supposedly open to competition, but the major telcos got monopoly concessions from the state PUCs in exchange for promises to invest in infrastructure.
The investments never actually happened, but when the telcos went back to get more concessions (such as baby Bells remerging) in exchange for more investment, the PUCs didn't ask any questions. The end result is that the investment never happened and AT&T (Ma Bell) has been reassembled into 2 pieces (to avoid any antitrust action) and is no longer subject to the "universal service" obligations from its 1935 antitrust settlement.
This is known as the "ten trillion dollar swindle".
"Because backwards compatibility is such a success."
In the case of IPv6, you CAN'T make it backwards compatible.
The actual TCP/IP side is pretty much the same (16bit port addressing), but no v4 device can talk to a v6 one without some form of NAT entering the game and the sheer numbers make it impractical. (FWIW tunnelbrokers usually embed the public IPv4 address as the first part of the IPv6 anyway)
"Much better to have it supercharged.
(yes yes there are ways to mitigate turbo lag, but never mind that)"
Ever seen a turbo supercharger with a one-way clutch to allow mechanical drive at low throttle settings? (No, not a twincharger, this is a single unit driven both mechanically AND by exhaust gas). They were and are a "thing" on 2-stroke railway locomotives.
Back on topic, what we need is IPvInfinittyAndBeyond. :)
"eventually your provider will start doing NAT and your own router won't even have a public IP address unless you pay a premium"
It's been like that for years in SE Asia and sometimes multiple layers of NAT before the enduser gets a connection.
On the other hand it's frequently impossible to get IPv6 from the ISPs
"As a cyclist in Birmingham, all I really want is for the council to fix the sodding pot holes: serving round them puts me in the way of things and they're easily big enough to have me off my bike"
A few substantial damages/injury claims tend to make councils revise their liabilities. One Yorkshire council ended up paying out in excess of £30k to a cyclist who broke his arm and unsurprisingly the roads there are now very good.
> "!ve set the answering machine to automatically answer all calls on two rings saying "Hello, all calls are screened for nuisance callers....."
> ... Most telephone sales people hang up as soon as they hear the answering machine
Most autodiallers will determine it's an answering machine (humans say "hello" or other greeting, then wait), so the odds are pretty good that the telesales dweebs never heard your message.
If you'd like to waste their time a little, make the start of the message sound like a human answering and leave the message part 10-15 seconds into the call.
The interesting thing (for me) is that when I moved away from BT to TT, I dumped the old number, made sure it was ex-directory and registered it with TPS. It only started getting calls after Experian got hold of it and started selling it.
Because TT wouldn't change the number because of nusiance calls, I dumped _that_ number when I changed provider again (people do it on mobiles. i don't see why we get so attached to landline numbers) and did the same again. I _also_ picked up a 070 number for £12/year (the last 5 digits spell FUCK-U as a clue to anyone with half a brain) and give that to businesses or anyone else untrustworthy.
If they want to pay £1.50 to call me then they're welcome to do so (I don't get any revenue and when I explained to the telco why I wanted them to charge the max rate anyway, they went along with it) So far that number's had a few sales calls. I had one guy talking for 15 minutes before letting slip how much the call was costing him..... <mwa ha haaaa>
"Though I don't think they gave up ARM licence and I think they did keep at least one communications controller with an ARM core."
The management engine in Intel vPRO boards is ARM. They've used it for decades in controllers but that's all they've used it in.... up to now.
"shouldn't we stop calling them "closed circuit" cameras"
Much of the world has called this stuff "surveillance cameras" or "video survellance" for decades.
"CCTV" is a particularly british term.
When I was a nipper one SF story I read had a world full of cameras where covert survellance _wasn't_ the issue, because every publicly placed camera was required to be publicly accessable. The scenario was that if you were wondering if the streets ahead were safe you could dial up the cameras along the way to see who was hanging around nearby.
It's going to be interesting to see how Avtech handle this. Judging by what I can see on Aliexpress there are a lot more knock-off devices on the market than genuine ones.
"It's not a cheap alternative to real Fibre"
It's not cheap at all.
The advantage from BT's point of view is that they can charge you 250% of the cost of the terminating equipment upfront and still get to keep it. if they run fibre there's a much longer payback period.
The flipside is that most copper in the Uk is so rotten that they'll need to run new stuff anyway. At that point it makes long-term sense to run fibre, but BT is so pathologically hidebound that they'll insist on running copper anyway even if it costs several times as much to do so.
"Take teen pregnancy, for example, what do the graphs show? "
It's lower than it's ever been in history. Bear in mind that 150 years ago kids used to get married at 13(*) and accurate reporting has really only existed since the 1960s
(*) Yes, really and 11-13 was the common age for losing one's virginity unless you were upper class.
. When the UK introduced consent laws, 16 was rather arbitrarily chosen - and not on maturity grounds (people arguing for that were shooting for 21). It was set to try and stem trade in child prostitution.
"Even the Barclays advert showing how they regretted the online name they chose when younger should make it clear, you chose wrong and will be punished for it."
'tis better to have a stupid online name as a kid, which you can change later than post in your own one and have it linked to your adult profile forevermore.
"As it stands, guidelines or not, it is possible for a 15-year-old to be imprisoned for having pictures of their 15-year-old girlfriend, obtained with their consent. They have committed a crime. Just because the guidelines state they shouldn't be prosecuted for it doesn't mean that they never will."
I can think of exactly such a case from when I were a lad and reading court transcripts in the local paper for part of my homework.
A 15yo boy was in court on charges of underage sex with his 15yo gf.
The judge, courts and police didn't want to deal with it, but the girl's father had taken legal action to _force_ the criminal case to go ahead.
The boy was convicted, discharged and given absolute name suppression. The judge did NOT have kind words to say about the girl's father or the stupidity of a law which allowed such a case to proceed when it was not in the interests of natural justice.
It's not just police with this problem.
There are as many fire services and school departments, with wildly varying degrees of funding and managment ability
Which leads to wildly varying degrees of quality on a county-by-county basis.
The idea of regionalising/nationalising these is nice, but the problem is that it's extremely likely that those who end up running the show will be the incompetent trough-snufflers rather than the ones with decent ability.
Https is just a transport layer.
The website itself needs to be securely setup and the vast majority are trivially subvertable.
The problem with pointing _that_ out is that you end up ruffling the feathers of some self-declared expert who in this case has the power to give you a bad day, instead of being forced to fix it.
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