* Posts by Tom 13

7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Most of the world still dependent on cash

Tom 13

Re: Asshole American banks

It costs banks money to store money, cash checks and process loans. They use to make this by making loans at a fair price above what they paid on deposits. Along came freetards like you who objected and the government set limits on what they could make. Then the governments forced the rates even lower with inflation. So now the only way for banks to cover those fees is to enact transaction charges to cover the cost.

Life is tough. It gets tougher when you're stupid. The rest of us wish people like you would keep your stupidity to yourselves instead of sharing it.

Tom 13

Re: puts competitive pressure on the banks

Bullshit.

Best rate I've managed in the last 8 years is 1%, which given inflation is still a negative return for keeping my money in the bank. And these days the banks don't get their money from those accounts. They get it directly from the fed because it is cheaper.

Tom 13

Re: If that purchase is legal

Mostly, not always.

One of the other great data mining stories on this side of the pond is about the police and 7-11. It seems 7-11 was doing data analysis on things purchased in their store and grouping together things that were frequently purchased with each other. One day while wandering through the store a police officer noticed three perfectly legal things grouped together on a shelf. They were the sorts of things you and I mostly likely wouldn't associate with each other. IIRC it was alcohol, mothballs, and anti-histamines. At the time these happened to be a popular method for cooking meth. Conversations ensued and 7-11 showed the police the analytic data. Since there was no bad intent 7-11 wasn't prosecuted, and they stopped grouping the items together on the shelves.

Tom 13

Re: I want £100,000 in cash available for collection tomorrow

They'll lose your account. Not because they want to, but because despite what you think, they simply DON'T have that kind of cash available to them. They will probably willing to write you a cashier's check or equivalent.

There was one occasion on which we needed a mere $17,000 in small bills (nothing larger than a $10) and coin to make change for our convention over the weekend. None of the three branches of our bank could supply it with less than a week of notice. Even trying to go to three different branches to get the total amount would have been difficult. No, it wasn't our fault. We called 3 months in advance and asked what lead time they needed. They said a week. When we gave the a week it was insufficient. Then to completely bollux things, when I arrived at the first location, we discovered that although I'd been making deposits for well over a year and the teller knew me, there were NO names authorized to make a withdrawal. I called the previous treasurer in another city who also happened to be a banker and she straightened it out.

Tom 13

Re: would use cash for any dodgy ones

I've redefined "dodgy" for those purposes.

I do generally swipe the plastic for my grocery purchases, and restaurants, but not fast food and definitely not any of the quickie places near work where I pick up my cold bottled water and snacks. Too many people have had credit card details stolen at one of them.

Tom 13

Bankruptcies are not the cause of bank runs.

Why a detachable cabin probably won’t save your life in a plane crash

Tom 13

"Not only would such a design be prohibitively expensive, it would also be unlikely to save any lives in all but a very few airline disasters."

But if it saved even one Life, it would be worth it!

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I hear that line of crock every time some do-gooder wants to spend exorbitant amounts of money on something.

Nice analysis.

State Department finds 22 classified emails in Hillary’s server, denies wrongdoing

Tom 13

Re: We need to know the truth

You almost had me there. But whereas b) will get you jailed, you're a liar.

If you have a clearance and you receive spillage, you are REQUIRED to report the spillage. This in turn kicks off an investigation to castigate the culprit.

Tom 13

Re: We need to know the truth

Oh, and yes, if you through no cause of your own receive a classified email, and the government traces that email to your server, that server now BELONGS to the government (at least in the US, YMMV depending on international treaties if you aren't in the US). So long as no nefarious intent is determined you will be reimbursed for the cost of the hardware. Eventually. You know how long it sometimes takes them to process those payments. You might or might not get your data back. Yes, they will also take all backups which may contain the classified data. Also, you WILL be responsible for providing details about anyone else to whom you may have forwarded the email. If you fail to provide full details, when the forensic check on your mail server is completed, charges may be filed against you for failure to comply. If you forwarded the message, any recipients will likewise be subjected to the same process.

Yes, this is scary shit and hangs over the head of ANYONE handling classified materials at any level.

Tom 13

Re: We need to know the truth

You start from a false premise. You start from the premise $Hrillary had no knowledge about what is and is not secret and its various gradations. In order to be read into the programs she had to be trained and sign legally binding agreements to protect such information REGARDLESS OF MARKINGS. As such, she had a POSITIVE duty to report violations of secret information when she saw them. If the email was sent to her it was sent to be read by her. She is therefore culpable for the message regardless of whether she read them or not.

a) Irrelevant. Even if as she claimed she only read them, she caused them to be sent to the server by circumventing normal Dept of State processes in the first place. As I've outlined repeatedly above, there is no way this server could EVER comply with ALL relevant federal law. That why you use Dept resources when you work for the government. It gives you actual plausible deniability when something goes wrong.

b) Again actually irrelevant. If she knew she broke the law. If she didn't know she broke the law because she was legally obligated to know as a result of being read into the programs authorizing her to see the intelligence information when she used the proper devices.

c) Because she regards herself as above the law. See item a) about the possibility of complying with all federal laws using one server/account.

Tom 13

Re: Shouldn't Be Allowed To Run

While I emote the same way, when I pause to allow my brain to interject it rejects the idea.

That gives the executive branch of government effective veto power over any and all candidates. Indeed even without it, all too frequently in the last decade politicians have been brought down on thinly sourced allegations that have ultimately been found to be without basis and undertaken for purely partisan purposes.

Tom 13

Re: But, WHY?

Anyone paying attention know that question is irrelevant to the question at hand. There is in fact NO WAY TO MAINTAIN A PRIVATE SERVER WITH ONE EMAIL ACCOUNT AND OBEY ALL THE LAWS REGARDING USE OF EMAIL ACCOUNTS FOR GOVERNMENT PURPOSES. The very act of setting up such a server meant she was intentionally setting it up to break the law.

The most basic conflict is between the requirement to maintain all emails which are records, and never using a government account for partisan campaign fund raising. EVERY elected politician in the capital maintains at least TWO accounts and most maintain at least THREE:

1) Email account for official government business.

2) Email account for campaign fund raising.

3) Private email account for use with family and friends (this is the one the troglodytes who use phone and snail mail get to skip).

Tom 13

Re: Thursday's lunch menu

Only raving progtards regard that as a truism about classification.

Tom 13

Re: was classified when sent has not been reported as yet.

Liar. It has been reported that the information was classified, much of it was born classified, and some of it is so sensitive we will not even get a REDACTED version of the email.

Tom 13

Re: either blocked or overturned by Congress.

You obviously haven't been paying attention to our current mini-Mao.

Tom 13

Re: Um... da fuq

Liar. They WERE classified at the time they were sent. $Hrillary explicitly instructed her minions to remove the classified headers and send it via unsecured channels.

Tom 13

Re: She is deliberately running an illegal mail server

You're thinking too small. She wasn't running the illegal mail server in order to commit one crime. By my count it was at least three types, with each message being a new violation of the law:

1) Handling Classified information

2) Ensuring a record of all Official Records

3) The Hatch Act, which prohibits Federal Officials from using their government email accounts for partisan fundraising.

4) Hide paper trail for selling access via the Clinton Foundation.

Note that merely trying to use her original excuse of only wanting one account (which somehow got convoluted to one device even though she's been seen with two cell phones) necessarily means she is violation of #3.

Tom 13

Re: Let's hear you name some of these US officials

I'll name one. And he's the official who actually confirms you're point that $Hrillary should already be behind bars:

David Petraeus, (R) who barely missed spending the rest of his life breaking rocks for sharing a notebook with someone who had a clearance but wasn't actually authorized to see the data in the notebook. That is, the person had the necessary level of clearance, but hadn't been read into all the programs listed in the notebook.

Tom 13

Re: The original statement is correct

No, the original statement is a flat out lie. We've been through this already. Much of the information being identified as classified was by its nature "born classified". As such it is ALWAYS classified regardless of markings, which was the first lie $Hrillary told with respect to THIS scandal.

Tom 13

Re: So 22 out of 1000 emails

This is another lie by distraction. As of the middle of December 2015 the number of classified messages is over 1000. El Reg's other significant omission is the reliable report that at least 5 messages have been deemed so damaging to national security that they WILL NOT BE RELEASED EVEN IN REDACTED FORM. The reason is that they provide operational details for Human Intelligence and since the raw emails are likely to be in the hands of foreign intelligence agencies it would confirm even the redacted information to those agencies.

Tom 13

Re: Clinton campaign claim that the messages were not classified

Only because you believed the first Clinton lie (and probably all the rest of the afterward).

Data in not classified based on whether or not the message has headers that says it is classified. Data is classified based solely on whether or not it meets the requirements to be classified. AND as both a handler and originator of classified material $Hrillary had a duty to KNOW what was classified and what wasn't.

And yes they HAVE released the email in which she clearly instructed her minions to strip the headers and send the information unclassified.

Tom 13

Re: Spot the oxymoron

Wrong word. The correct word is "Lie".

The data most certainly WERE classified, and higher, at the time they were sent. We know this from several sources, not the least of which is an unclassified email in which $Hrillary directed her minions to remove the classification headers and send as unclassified.

T-Mobile USA’s BingeOn is a smash hit. So what now?

Tom 13

Re: Everybody wins.

Not necessarily.

Yes, as currently implemented by T-Mobile, it is unlikely to have adverse affects. But the sample size is to small and to short to extend over time. But I can see implementation schemes that are little different than what T-Mobile has done which WOULD have adverse effects on content producers.

Tom 13

Re: a limited resource, especially wireless

Wireless is actually the example that most proves Andrew's point that all Net Neutrality advocates are Holier Than Thou freetards out to control the interwebs.

For precisely the reason that there are physical limitations and bandwidth is limited, certain data DOES need to be prioritized over other. Voice being the most obvious type of data that needs to be prioritized, and events like blizzards and 9/11 being the most obvious examples of times that prioritization is even more critical.

Tom 13

Re: What this firmly establishes

No it doesn't.

The price for using the service is significantly reduced quality of image. Yes, it's good enough for a cell phone or tablet but still significantly reduced from posted quality. When coupled with the caching in which T-Mobile is engaging, the cost to the company isn't the same as it would be without the service. Furthermore, there's insufficient data about the long term effects of profitability of this service. Honestly, here in the US if you aren't on Verizon or AT&T for wireless service, it's pretty much crap. So we don't know anything about how sustainable such a service would be if they had either a) the geographic coverage needed to be a proper supplier or b) the rate of subscription either of the major players has.

The truth of the matter is that unless everyone is paying for their particular mix of speed and amount of data consumed, we'll never get an accurately shaped service market. And it doesn't matter how much you "dislike" that fact.

Tom 13

@Andrew Orlowski

That assessment is both harsh and wrong. And I say that as someone who regards the freetards promoting net neutrality as the sort of vermin who cause one to shoot first and asks questions later.

While I concur the potential damage from T-Mobile itself is limited, if the same thing were applied by the big US providers for only their own content, the potential market distortions are more easily seen. Maybe that's difficult for a Brit like you to see because in the US, anti-trust is about method, not market share. So if the FCC, FTC, and Courts hold it isn't a violation for T-Mobile, it follows that it isn't a violation for the big US providers either.

Patent Troll Unit set up by Virginia government to slay lawsuits

Tom 13

Re: will ever be misused by the Virginia government?

and most certainly never by an AG who has already proven himself to be the ultimate progtard with regards to constitutional protections be they Federal or Commonwealth.

Yep, Herring got himself into so much trouble with voters he desperately, desperately needs any positive press he can get. And El Reg is more than happy to oblige.

We Googled the ex-Google guy and Google said he was clean, says Wikimedia

Tom 13

Re: Off-topic, but...

Actually, 19 fundraisers out of 300 isn't bad for a non-profit employing that many people. Most places that would be 250 out of 300.

As a non-profit, they're required to file a return with the IRS and they are required to provide you with a copy of it if you request one. Whether or not it will tell you anything useful is yet another issue.

Looks like you can find an electronic copy of their 2014 return at http://www.guidestar.org.

Tom 13
Joke

Re: Doesn't Wikipedia have an article on "due diligence"

Yes, but it's riddled with "Needs Citation" notes.

Land Rover Defender dies: Production finally halted by EU rules

Tom 13

Re: It won't matter whether the UK

So sad yet so true. Except here in the US, we lament the fact that we're all stuck following California's rules. So this is actually a case of California dictating what the UK can build. Which just makes it that much sadder.

Tom 13
Devil

Re: Bit confused here.

Gasoline produces CO2 which is bad for the environment but diesel doesn't. Because AlGore said so.

Death to clunky, creaky rip-off cable boxes – here's how it will happen

Tom 13

Re: population density and the historic wiring of telephone lines

True within certain limits.

Remember the whole reason broadband as such took off the way it did was that the Telco's demanded legislation to fix the 56K limit for modems back when real modems were all the rage. I expect that were it not for that legislation we'd have modems today that would out perform DSL and you could still do it over your POTS line.

Also remember the current cable monopoly is an advent of the 1985-1995 cable consolidation. Up to that point cable companies were all local things that typically had a bunch of antennas sitting on top of a mountain a couple miles away to receive OTA broadcasts and send it down the valley to houses that otherwise wouldn't get decent reception of those OTA signals. Those local outfits were usually barely breaking even at the end of the year. Yes there were some cable access channels and what not, but mostly it was about getting those OTA signals to places that otherwise couldn't get them. Same thing in the big cities, but for different causes.

Tom 13

Re: This is LONG overdue but they missed one thing.

Two things. The second is the right to record the shows to watch later. Granted that gets more into DCMA abuse but it's the main reason we part with $21.90 x2 per month for our DVRs.

NSA’s top hacking boss explains how to protect your network from his attack squads

Tom 13

Re: Wouldn't you think?

No, but only because of experience.

About a decade ago the IT department I was working in was so fucked, the CEO of the company ordered the CTO to hold a retreat where the entire IT department was free to speak their mind. And things were so bad they actually did. After airing a fair lot of dirty laundry the CTO made an unprecedented gesture. He actually opened the floor to the entire IT staff to plan the next set of upgrades. Mostly it was the networking team, as was appropriate. So they all sat down in a big meeting, discussed all of the things they'd like to do, and proposed what the next step for the organization would be. There were several projects, an upgrade to the current version of Exchange server to replace the aging 95 version we were running, a proposal for a secure wireless system, some server replacements, a new core switch to replace the used one that was purchased four years before when we moved into the building, and building out a new high end SAN.

After discussion and looking at the budget everyone (including the Exchange guy and you know how much THEY hate to pass on upgrades) agreed that although it would require the entire budget for only one project, the SAN should be the next project. So they wrote it all up including the options to do everything but the SAN. The one project they absolutely didn't want to do was the secure wireless. So they handed it to one of the junior techs and said "price this out gold plated so it gets rejected" which he happily did. The first project that was approved? Yep, the gold plated wireless proposal. The project that was scrapped without much discussion? The SAN. Yes, it did get built about two years later.

Tom 13

Re: Flawed car analogy.

I am reminded of a tale a reformed car thief once told me. While he was still in the business he had a friend who repeatedly robbed a gated mansion. It seems the owner was want to park his unlocked car in the driveway thinking the gate actually deterred entrance to the property. So his friend would hop the gate, get into the car, and then use the garage door opener to enter the house. At which time he could leisurely loot as much as he wanted from the house. And as the car also had the gate remote, his buddy with the loot car could easily enter.

These things are frequently far simpler than the convoluted ways we construct for thieves to carry on their work.

Oh, about a month after he told me that story he demonstrated a HUGE problem with the physical security in our building. All the entrances on all the floor had magnetic locks. Of course the primary entrance had nice fancy glass doors to impress prospective clients. With a half inch gap between them. So he took a yard stick and used a piece of scotch tape to attach a page sized piece of paper to it. He proceeded to stick the yardstick through the gap and wave the piece of paper on the inside of the door. This set of the internal motion detector which was conveniently installed for easy exit. Voila! Unlocked door, in walks the malcontent.

Tom 13

Re: Just a PR friendly, long winded way to say:

More like, "When we want your base, it's ours. Until then, we appreciate you building and maintaining it for us."

Israeli academics claim they can predict botnet attacks

Tom 13

Re: Camouflage

Nothing is ever foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

And it's not possible for machines to become that ingenious.

Oracle to kill off Java browser plugins with JDK 9

Tom 13

Re: But who do we blame

The answer to that is a definitive YES!

Billion-dollar blood-test unicorn biz Theranos 'putting lives at risk'

Tom 13

Hmmm.....

"This survey of our Newark, CA lab began months ago and does not reflect the current state of the lab," says an emailed response. "As the survey took place we were simultaneously conducting a comprehensive review of our laboratory’s systems, processes and procedures to ensure that we have best-in-class quality systems."

But, if you are a start up that just got a bundle of VC cash to build out your facility, shouldn't you have had those "best-in-class quality systems." already without the need for a review?

Something smells rotten in Denmark Palo Alto.

Cops hate encryption but the NSA loves it when you use PGP

Tom 13

Re: no faith that these twats have any idea of what to do but collect data.

Wrong point of failure. The guys collecting the data know exactly what to do with it. It's the "Islam is the religion of Peace" twats in charge of them who won't let them use the data they collect, or even correlate it properly. Same story during 9/11, the guys who were practically screaming for an investigation of suspicious activity were told they to shut up and stop being racist.

Tom 13

Re: No catch yer with Captcha

Captcha's value is greatly over rated. I read somewhere a year ago that the truth of the matter is that at this point a computer actually has a slightly better chance of correctly decoding most captchas.

Tom 13

Re: managing the public key infrastructure required to use it effectively

And the bigger the effective public key infrastructure, the less valuable it is in keeping out the riff-raff. This is the essential problem with the various certs for websites. Processing all of the inputs leads to the bad guys getting stuff too.

Tom 13

Re: drove through a red light district every day at 5mph

Difficult to say. I have some friends whose state government office was located such that their best route home is straight through the red light district (in fact I believe they said they pretty much had to walk through it if they decided to go out for lunch). At rush hour, you're going to tend to be doing 5 mph there even if you don't want to.

Tom 13

Re: So much this...

It's not so much about finding the needle as it is about identifying the needle's contacts after he's been identified by other means. Mostly they aren't looking for the needles, they're looking at the patterns the needles make.

Feds slap Rentboy.com boss with further charges

Tom 13

Re: Hmm...

Probably because of the Human Traffic charges.

Would you like fraud with that? Burger chain giant Wendy's 'hacked'

Tom 13

Re: A Question

Spot on. The linked article is even more vague about the nature of the breach.

This isn't to say there aren't problems that might be addressable from the corporate level. I have a friend who works in POS support for a Wendy's franchise on the East Coast. They do their own payment processing. Last time I checked they had about 150 Wendy's, plus various two other brands that I now forget (maybe Chili's and Popeye's). The Franchise support team consists of him, his CTO boss, and three other support techs. That's a pretty thin team given the geographic area they cover. The system has a fair number of attack points. You have the terminals themselves, the Windows systems to which the terminals are connected, and the fact that you're frequently working with the lower half of the median on intelligence pool for the workers at the actual stores (ie, think about your average idiot, remember half the people are dumber than that, and in this case, when you find the average idiot, you've got the smart one). Pile on that the mini-networks at each store are exactly the same except for the server name and probably its password.

So I expect a compromise of a big franchise in the Midwest that might have been leveraged to some other franchises. It wouldn't take long to rack up a lot of stores and more importantly even more victims. Fast food has lots of customers and I'm always surprised at how many people will swipe a credit card to pay for a meal costing less than a yuppie food stamp.

Tom 13

Re: The company should never need your CC number,

Actually, the company DOES need the CC number. If you dispute the charge and they need to counter dispute, it's the only way to confirm the charge was legitimate. The consumer is protected because any record of the cc number is required to be destroyed within a fixed time period. When I was involved in this 15 years ago that time period was 90 days. It could be shorter than that now.

Women account for just one fifth of the EU’s 8m IT jobs

Tom 13

...reported hard-to-fill vacancies...

Hard to fill vacancies? Or impossible to fill vacancies because they don't want to pay enough to fill the job?

Self reporting is a horrible way to measure this statistic. And that's just the first mistake in this article.

Tom 13

Re: An old fool.

Not any more.

It sounds like you are supporting both your daughter in her career choice and your sons in theirs. In my book that makes you a fine father, and I will not fault you for initially trying to encourage your daughter in a career you love.

May the peace of God and His Blessings be upon you and your family.

Tom 13

Re: I think you'll find that's just 90% of middle managers,

Perhaps. But the males don't get to scream "sexual harassment" with a presumption that you're guilty if they are offended, which makes them more manageable.

Of all the incompetent techs I've worked with (and thankfully there have been very few) the worst was a woman on the networking team who was obviously promoted to make their quota numbers. She rarely offered an opinion at the opening of a debate, and the only one she held onto firmly was a horrible one about patching something that couldn't BE patched, yet senior management had accepted the risk because of the service model they chose. Still every time there was a special award for an IT Project, her name was on the list.