Posts by John Smith 19

"Agree, TCS is the cut rate provider among cut rate providers. "

Sounds like they have a bright future joining the "Usual suspects" in HMG IT contracts.

Bright for them. Not so bright for the British taxpayer.

"And it is grossly inefficient. Right up to the point when you need it."

Not necessarily.

If the backup system is under the companies control (not a specific DR company) it can serve to train new sysadmins, test out OS patches and application upgrades and various other tasks, provided the procedures (and staff) exist to roll it back to the identical configuration of the live system in the event of the live system going down.

The real issue BA should be thinking about is this.

How many people in this situation will be thinking "F**k BA. Can't be trusted. Never using them again."

"Politician give nuanced speech and explains reasons for situation are complex" shock horror.

Page 2 Journo's cannot cope with large number of whole sentences. "He ran us into the ground."

page 3 Speech could not be summarised in 1 sentence."We were baffled."

"Does she really believe radicalisation starts online?"

That and those violent video games.

BTW small point.

May is a PPE graduate.

'Nuff said.

"But no, you don't get white terrorism over there."

I think there are a 168 families around Oklahoma City that might disagree.

"Couldn't happen to a more deserving douchebag."

That's President douchebag to you.

"almost every media piece.. to tell the voters..how bad it would be under the PR system proposed."

With PR the devil has always been in the details. I suspect there are several PhDs to be written on the them of what would be a "fair" PR system.

At the very least it should give any MP elected a much cleared mandate. I think it would be great for an MP to know that more than 50% of the active voters (IE those who voted) find them acceptable, even if they were not those voters first choice.

"last three decades trying to vote for the lesser evil"

Now that has an easy answer.

Vote Cthulhu

Why choose the lesser evil?

"LibDems are a wasted vote in this election. "

Except in the 63 constituencies where they were 2nd place. here

"Broadens the debate, eh?"

No it doesn't.

UK anti-terror laws can absolutely proactively detain someone under house arrest.

"Once it is leaked, and it will leak, everybody will have to change their encryption."

Leak? Leak?

You don't think knowing there is a guaranteed back door into every encrypted data stream in the UK might be a bit of an incentive for, IDK every Black hat hacking crew on the whole f**king planet?

"Pick your poison: the police state or anarchy."

A classic rhetorical method.

It's BS. IRL there is a trade off between freedom and risk. Raod accidents kill about 3 000 subjects in the UK every year, but no one in their right mind is talking about banning private cars.

It was estimated that in 2014 smoking caused 78 000 deaths in the UK. Yet no one is talking about an outright ban, because it makes too much money and would be as stupid as Prohibition was in the US.

This particular "cunning plan" trades off the slight risk IE 22 deaths in 12 years Vs the guaranteed hole put in everybodies personal data security.

"Nobody is proposing no encryption. "

What they are proposing is worse.

A fake "walled garden" where encryption seems to work but is actually over rideable on demand.

Most people will barely consider that "on demand" part.

But any foreign business thinking about buying UK software will be thinking "WTF should I buy something I know will insert a big f**king hole in my security?"

Until one of the army of bad guys (actual bad guys, not the roughly 1 in 4333 UK subjects who MI5 said was a terrorist "suspect") reverse engineers this BS (you can smell the whiff of "security by obscurity" already) and does for real what a character in a William Gibson short story (burning Chrome?) is described to have done and guts a whole (African ?) countries economy.

"No quorom, No defined second choice.. grrrr."

Quite true.

And hence the perfect plan for a Brexit referendum as well.

Indeed this system ensures someone gets elected even if only one voter turns up (and if it's the right borough and the voter is "Mr E. Blackadder" they may also be the only voter).

"the way the FPTP system operates then a hung Parliament is not unthinkable."

Which worked quite well but this time round it's unlikely the LibDems will be in any position to put a brake on them.

Britain. The only country in Europe with a FPTP system.

Apparently its believed to be the only system simple enough for the British electorate to understand.

And when asked the British electorate agreed. "We are too lazy and ignorant to understand anything more complex, except for local authority elections, which we can understand."

"The UK..go it alone from Europe,..last thing it needs is more companies jumping abroad"

True.

But that's what's going to happen because the 52% (of those who bothered to vote) say so.

IRL the UK makes a shedload of its cash from the City of London. You can bet every big banker will be working their political contacts hard to negotiate "special access" to the single European Finance market.

Because if whoever wins on June 8th fails to do so you can bet that sometime between June 2020 and June 2022 there's going to be a shed load of office space going cheap in the E1, WC and EC post code areas.

" I suspect that any legislation will be along the lines of:"

The legislation already exists. It's called RIPA. However it needs a "Technical Capability Notice" to be approved by Parliament. As described here The text of the draft is here

IOW a form of "Statutory Instrument," much beloved tool of the Dark Lord Mandelscum.

Note. Both house of Parliament have to approve it. Since it requires critical thinking skills (not something you see a lot of in politicians) to realize what errant BS.

Should be

A backdoor for one is a backdoor for all.

FTFY.

"I know how I am voting now, and it is not those two."

Did you vote on the referendum for proportional representation? If you did how did you vote?

If you didn't vote, or voted for BAU, these are your options.

If you're happy with your MP, vote for them, to block others replacing them.

If not vote for the first runner up party from last time. Doesn't matter who they are. They have the best shot of getting rid of your sitting tenant.

Those are your options in a first-past-the-post system. A system the UK shares with all these fine nations. fine nations. although not with any part of Europe.

"Let me get this straight,

Let me get this straight, someone known to the secret services blows himself up in my home town and this scumbag government is trying to use it to get laws through even though they would not have prevented or made any difference to what happened."

Correct.

Just as the Madrid bombings were used when the UK had the chair of the EU to push through the EU Data Retention Directive, despite Spain (and several other countries) having zero interest in doing so. It has taken years for other countries to dial back this BS.

To the data fetishist cabal within the Home Office any terrorist event is another "opportunity" to tell Parliament how they would have been stopped (despite all evidence to the contrary) with yet more surveillance.

This has FA to do with "keeping people safe."

Mass surveillance is now cheap enough and easy enough (because of how much most people do on line) that (to a certain kind of senior civil "servant") it's just cheaper to do so.

"Give me 6 lines from an honest man, and I'll find something with which to hang him" as the Cardinal put it.

"Microsoft, back in the days (1990 - 2000), relied on Unix (Sendmail) "

IIRC they also used to run an AS400 for their warehouse management, back when they were still monopolizing shelves with (mostly) empty boxes.

Of course now they've had 17 years to integrate the 2 software packages that make up MS Dynamics I'm sure it's up to the job

Probably.

""feel the biglyness"

I stand corrected.