Anyone find the antics of the serial downvoter ironic?
Someone so afraid to state, or argue, or even be recognized on their position on state surveillance that's the only way they can communicate.
Staggeringly pathetic.
16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"a.k.a. the Home Office, the Intelligence Services,the Police and so on. You can vote for any tint of government you like, but when the dust has settled, one layer down from the Home Secretary and the PM you'll still have exactly the same people scaring the new bosses rigid with the same intelligence stories and scenarios (accurate, exagerated and imagined) as they did the old ones, and pushing for the same "absolutely essential" measures (i.e. greater powers for them) that are needed "for the county's safety". Oh, and the terrible political consequences of not doing so."
You are correct.
Which is why something like 10 Home Secretaries all sound like the same sock puppet on this. :(
The group behind them simply have no concept of any limit on state surveillance. As far as they are concerned it's impossible to have too much data on too many people, despite the fact this is the equivalent of putting the haystack with the (terrorist) needle in it (the excuse for this in case anyone has forgotten that) into a field of haystacks.
This has no logical basis in reality. It's a compulsive desire (or fetish) to collect such information.
It's not a policy, it's a disease.
"It was a Tory who took the case to the court, one of the few who voted against it in parliament as well."
It was a Tory and a Labor MP that took it to court.
Forget the party manifesto.
All MP's have just 2 variations.
The "democrats" who believe in the will of the people and the "authoritarians" who believe in the will of themselves.
And the authoritarian view is very seductive to the more feeble minded law maker, especially if they have a sense of entitlement.
"plenty of resistance from the SNP (who will certainly be opposed), Tory back-benchers (many of whom are not nearly as right-wing as the front bench), and the Labour party.
SNP. Probably.
Tory back benchers. Torn between their "hang em high" and "small government is better government" memes.
The Labor Party. Who brought this in? The party whose leader wanted the UK to start carrying Identity Cards after the UK's only significant persistent terrorist (1 explosion a week or month on the mainland, not 1 a decade) threat had been disbanded?
I wouldn't be putting up any "Mission Accomplished" banners just yet.
So like the "Machine Level Interface" used by the IBM AS400 and later iSeries machines.
But there you could see the swap from CISC to POWER PC inside at work.
But as others noted with the complexity of the 8086 ISA I think it's more an interpreter than a compiler
And exposing it would of course mean you'd freeze the architecture.
So the code museum runs on.
"Only a few generations of shrinkage to go. "
If I've got the math right 14nm is about 60 atoms wide.
But normally the oxide is 1/10 that.
So about 2 generations unless someone finds a really clever way to make high aspect ratio conductors, like 20 atoms high by 1 atom wide.
But I'm not sure how good insulators can be when they are 1 atom thick.
But lawering up and screaming "copyright" on a number just makes the company look like whiny ass b**ches with clueless legal representation.
I think the fellow who reported holes with the remote access to a CCTV system used by a lot of day care centres (reported by El Reg) did it better.
That companies reaction (called in the lawyers as well) was also pretty cretinous.
Companies. If there is any kind of serious competition in your market sector you will lose sales if you behave like this.
It's not like there aren't lists of "stupid s**t to avoid doing when writing software" already available.
They just didn't bother to check the law in the first place?
The group toured GCHQ with blindfolds on ?
It's not "intercepted" till a human listens to them ? Just feeding it through speech recognition / key word detection and archiving it to unlimited storage is not "intercepting."
I see why it's difficult to develop English language parsers.
What's said is not in doubt. What's meant OTOH is a whole different question.
"Even if you design the chips, you still have to make sure that you design any IP blocks you use. It is easy enough to slip attack vectors into something like an ethernet controller."
True.
If you're really serious about this you have to have either complete control or complete visibility of the whole chain from layout to finished hardware executing code including all links between the stages to guard against substitution of doctored data files.
If you're a government whose' studied the Snowden documents and you want to keep your secrets a secret and your hardware invulnerable you have to make a very serious investment in time and trouble to do so.
"Well, they did test the "throw nukes out the back and ride the shockwave" idea, but with conventional explosives. If the world's nuclear weapons arsenal was appropriated for a spaceship, it could send a toddler to Alpha Centauri before the toddler's retirement age."
Orion uses much smaller propulsion packages (in the kiloton range) than most nuclear weapons.
You could built a lot of them them from the worlds nuclear arsenals.
"One question I've often wondered. At our current technology level, what speeds would be be able to achieve if the motivation and cash was there? I"
With no new technology you're basically looking at hooking a nuclear reactor to a cluster of ion thrusters, possibly boosted by a booster stage that takes beamed microwave power from solar cells in LEO while inside the solar system. Biggest space nuke however was Russian at about 5Kw.
Once outside this you're looking at solar sails going in close to the sun behind an asteroid then accelerating hard.
The best I've seen with known physics IE not fusion, is the fission fragment rocket. That's a pulsed nuclear reactor whose fuel is made in layers < 10 micrometres thick. At that level fission fragments made when a U235 atom fissions can leave the surface of the fuel and using a magnetic field be pointed out the back.
The fragments are moving at between 3 and 5% of the speed of light versus something like the 0.001% of the speed of light of ion thruster streams.
16 km/sec --> fastest object to leave Earth.
That's roughly 0.000053 c
Getting to the next star system at that speed is going to take a long time. :(
Looks like the only serious chance is with the fission fragment rocket.
On an IT note. Look at how much practice and planning is done before the event.
Should be SOP for all major 1 shot events (system cut overs of various kinds mostly).
But is it?
No doubt they do not see things that way.
It would take a pretty strong stomach to live with yourself if you did.
But that's what they are and that's what they do.
If you want to live like that you're infosec had better be airtight.Always.
Otherwise sooner or later you will discover that Karma is a bitch.
Unlike Congress.
Who've consistently starved Commercial Cargo & Crew of requested funds.
Their top priority seems to be ensuring that Commercial Crew will not fly a 'naut until their fat a**sed cuckoo little precious SLS flies a meatsack.
They write spyware but don't have the balls to sell it illegally
They write spyware not in house to their government because of some perceived "national security" threat like NSA or GCHQ. You may not like the PoV but you accept it is one.
Spyware writing X government con-tractor X Sell to any government as long as it is a government --> zero sympathy when you get hit and lots of ROFLMA comments.
You live like a b**ch you die like a dog.
I say "Man in the Middle Attack."
Buyer. "buy X shares of Y" (from Seller)
300 microseconds later...
"Hello Mr Buyer, I'm the HF Trader who bought those shares 200 microseconds ago. Pay me instead".
It's no surprised trading volume doubles when HFT's turn up.
There are now 2 transactions going on for every real trade in the market.
"Right at the very start the Minister said he wanted the "pathways" checked before any code was cut."
If true that would seem like a very good idea.
In fact it would seem like a very good idea for all upgrade/re-engineering projects with a substantial chunk of data housed in one or more existing databases (pretty much all UK govt projects).
So why isn't it SOP and why would a Minister have to request it?
Once the first ICO does some serious time the rest of them will start paying attention.
After all it's not the UK has any problem putting people in jail with, IIRC, proportionately the highest number of people in prison of any country in (at least) Western Europe.
Except the last attempt to get this activated (I believe it's in the relevant legislation) failed because, once again, the Home Secretary was clueless ar***ole irresolute.
Unlike the claim Edward Snowden (while working for the NSA) managed to get hold of the MI6 list of officers and assets not working at British Embassies.
Difference is this one is probably true, given the UK governments "friends" in The War On Terror (TM).