Posts by Peter2

Re: Probably fine

That said... GDPR? That's tricky, GDPR honestly makes a lot of normal computer activities a legal grey area.

Honestly, no it doesn't.

You can do anything legal that you have specific informed consent to do. Doing a port scan is legal, assuming that you have informed consent from somebody to do it, so if you had a website that offers a port scan (eg. shields up run by Steve Gibson which has been running for something like 30 years) then if somebody chooses to visit it and run a port scan then that is entirely legal.

It'd only cease to be legal if he then did something like sell the data that he collected without the end user having specifically consented to that.

The issue comes when somebody then takes the same technology and runs it on somebody who has not specifically been informed and who has not consented. You can't just put a line in page 9000 of your terms and conditions saying that by visiting the site they have accepted this.

So the issue comes down to "did eBay have specific informed consent to run a port scan". As nobody knew they were doing it then by definition they didn't have informed consent to do so. As it wasn't authorised they are breaking the law.

It's not difficult.

Re: TaskManager...Meh...

But note that process monitor from Sysinternals (while an invaluable tool) only became necessary after this chap finished with Task Manager and somebody else fucked it up.

At least I assume that's why if I kill a process in SysInternals's Process Explorer then it dies with no questions asked but doesn't in Task Manager.

ICRC argues that the world has agreed to spare healthcare facilities from attack

I think that people are expecting that an awful lot of "rouge" hackers are in fact under defacto government control, which truthfully is probably not too far off of the truth given that it's reasonably well established that both China & Russia do this.

Applying the geneva conventions to these people is perfectly reasonable, as if you've been trained equipped and armed people to form a militia then your responsible for ensuring that they follow the laws of civilsed warfare. Asking states to exert similar influence they have over people they may well have trained equipped and armed with digital tools instead of firearms is not too much of an ask. I doubt it'll work, but asking doesn't hurt or cost anything.

Re: Market +30% = wages -30%

I think it also depends on the nature of the work and the employee.

Some people are living with their parents until up to their mid 30's due to house prices having exploded out of control way beyond the ability of most people to pay for them and that makes it difficult for them. A work from home setup is easily possible if your well off and have a full scale house between two adults and maybe a couple of children, but if your living in a one bedroom flat with your partner or house sharing between 4 people? It doesn't work well due to a lack of dedicated working space.

Even for the people that can do it, for it to be a long term arrangement changes need to happen. I've arranged for some home users to get proper desks, chairs, hardware and network equipment to make a proper home office. Yep, those people are going to be perfectly happy at home forever. But for every one person that's like that i'd personally say there's another one person who really desperately wants to be back at the office and another 2 who would probably prefer to be, who would laugh uproariously at the idea that everybody could work from home full time.

I mean, theoretically everybody doing an office job should be able to work from home. But theoretically there is no difference between theory and practice. And yet in practice there is.

For instance, in your case you've got 3+ hours travel time and significant travel costs. We're not in London so we don't have the travel times or costs. Most of our staff live within 20 minutes of the office and might maybe spend a hundred quid tops in travel a month so our staff probably wouldn't be so willing to work an extra 4+ hours rather than drive 20 minutes to get in. Heck, some of our staff walk into the office in 5 minutes. As soon as you shift a few variables around it changes everything.

I don't massively have a single point other than that some people are being a bit to unrealistic and utopian. Not everybody is having a positive experience for reasons that go way beyond middle management empire building. It's tempting to blame an easy target, but it's intellectually lazy and gives wrong answers.

Re: New PC

FWIW if you're ever having difficulty finding PC cases that don't look like a disco ball covered in neon lights, I can strongly recommend Fractal Design. They have a whole range that all look like solid black monoliths from 2001.

I'm sure they are nice boxes, but I just want the most painfully bland beige box going.

My first boxes a few years back had to be that way of course when black and white boxes were only really available to the likes of Compaq and Dell, and all that was available to us mere mortals in the enthusiast world was the Beige Box. These days I take a particularly perverse delight in having put all of my money into good components and having a really quite absurd amount of computing power in a painfully nondescript beige box.

My friends kids found it particularly hilarious as they were gifted my old gaming box. It is in a wonderfully bland old scratched and dented beige box complete with missing blanking plates from where a blu ray writer used to sit before they got it (which was a second hand thing picked up from CEX for £20 as they couldn't figure out why it wasn't working properly; ie old firmware...) and they set it up to play against the box that one of their friends had, which was a really, really expensive alienware box that looked lovely with transparent bits showing flashing rgb lights on the memory modules, motherboard etc.

I am told that my ancient Phenom box destroyed it on load time and performance in a way that was apparently quite embarrassing for the kid with the bright flashy Alienware box, which probably cost his dad something like twice what my Phenom box cost me over it's ~13 year life including the incremental life extensions (new drives, ssd for a boot drive, random mid range graphics cards every few years instead of absurdly expensive graphics cards once)

But then i'm an old fashioned gamer who used to buy stuff at a good point on the price/performance chart, configure it to get the last erg of performance and then run it into the ground until newer games wouldn't run on the minimum resolution/graphics settings anymore. ;)

Re: So...

There is some anecdotal linkage between measles causing gut perforation and some types of ASD

This still doesn't even touch what Wakefield was saying; which was that the MMR vaccine was the problem. And he was saying that because the companies that were making three separate vaccines didn't want a combined vaccine so they did a smear campaign.

As somebody who is not neurologically typical and who therefore generally keeps up with the latest in neurology just "because", my personal view is that neurologists take too fine a view of their area of expertise and stop paying attention to anything below the neck.

Which I think is a mistake because people who have allergies tend to miss out on entire food types. This means that they tend to be deficient in certain things and these pass through long and only dimly understood chemical chains to create things for the brain.

There is a very good set of studies that will eventually be done that is likely to prove a lot of issues are related to gut bacteria or the lack thereof of particular types of it. However, this isn't really neurology so neurologists aren't interested because they are looking about 6 steps down the line and seemingly aren't interested in the precursors.

So yeah, it's almost certain that particular types of gut damage will result in neurological abnormalities, but as you say the area of study is verboten probably for the next century or two. Unfortunately.

Re: Does it phone home

The British army used WhatsApp to tell somebody potentially infected with a certain virus everybody is familiar with to stay put at home, and not to come in and spread it around a base.

An advisory was then given to troops that if an officer directly gives you an order and does it via WhatsApp then it is still as binding as if he gives it to you directly in person.

The British military has a long history of using anything that works to pass messages down to carrier pigeons to carry messages, and employing birds of prey to interfere with the opposition doing the same.

The military will have equipment produced by BAE or similar, however the forces have their own names for such suppliers, such as "Billions Above Estimate". Buying a suitable hardened device off the shelf that does something that troops need is possibly a better option to field a device today than getting a defence company like BAE to develop a mobile phone which will arrive in ten years time with a hundredth of the functionality of an off the shelf device at twice the price and about five times the weight.

I suppose they do have caffeine and sugar in them, so I could possibly have gotten away with a tenuous link to energy drinks replacing tea and coffee for unfortunate and uneducated heathens who need to be civilised and converted to the cup of tea.

Re: Well there's the problem

The thing is though, about that "profitable business" thing. Personally, I just ignore Google's profitability and look at Google's parent company Alphabet where all of the money actually ends up. Alphabet makes ten billion profit a quarter. That's forty billion profit a year. Numerically, 0.1% of that profit would be forty million.

In the UK you could hire people for 15k to do a simple job of "is this objectionable" quite easily since a lot of people get paid less than this to do far more unpleasant jobs.

At 1.5x the cost which is the rough ballpark used to account for tax, pensions, office space, equipment etc that'd cost 22.5k p/a per employee so for 40 million you'd get ~1,777 people doing the job for around 0.1% of the companies yearly profit so it's not really even a case of the business model not being profitable.

Re: Pilots carrying comprising material

Not absurdly dangerous though either, to be fair.

Basically, the Exocet radar was designed to fly at the centre of a radar return. The boffins came up with the idea of hovering a helicopter say 30 metres off the side of a ship. When the missile comes in, it sees the ship and the helicopter as a single radar return and flies directly at the centre of the resulting radar return; by the time it's close enough to realise it's taken an average of both and flown between the helicopter and the side of the ship missing both.

These days ships have decoy launchers that toss an inflatable decoy over one side to do the same job.

Re: WTF ?!!

Hanging from the belt of the chap that's about to take the photo with his mobile.

Apple is helped by being one of the most powerful multinational companies since the East India Company with more money and lawyers than most governments, and afaik not having any data in a UK jurisdiction.

I think that your looking at the average plod/judge and not a crowd of IT Professionals. As far as plod/courts is concerned i'd be quite concerned that they'd consider "the data is on your server" to be reasonable grounds for giving you an order to produce the keys. Ok, so you say the data belongs to "Tardigrade". They say "well, we don't have the key either".

I suppose it depends on how confident you are that the courts are going to say "oh, never mind then" to that response rather than jailing you because you haven't provided it? I think that you are a lot more confident in how tech savvy and reasonable the courts are than I am.

I'd say there is something like a 50% chance that they'd jail me. I think you think it's what, a 20% chance?

I see things in this light:-

Possible risk:

1) Getting jailed for 2-5 years by tech phobic police and judges.

2) Losing your job since employers aren't obliged to continue employing me if i'm in prison, and after a replacement is in place for 2-5 years would my current employer be willing to fire the replacement to give me my old job back that i'd no longer know how to do because in 2-5 years significant changes will have occurred that I won't understand?

3) Getting a criminal record that will show when any employer does a criminal records check running the risk of making you unemployable.

Possible reward:

~£5 a month

Now would you personally be willing to assume that risk for that reward? Personally, I don't think it's rationally worthwhile in the UK. Your view of course may differ and i'm happy to agree to disagree. :)

... As long as you don't mind it not meeting the required specification.

And meanwhile UK companies that can build N95 masks at a rate of a million a month still haven't got orders 2 months down the line because they aren't government approved suppliers, but the ones in turkey and the far east that build equipment not to the required spec are approved suppliers, so they get the orders.

The civil service at it's finest.

Re: Balkanization

IME there is a lot of truth to this. Unfortunately I'm afraid the corollary hasn't yet shown up, i.e. that bad, unfocused management are let go or otherwise redeployed.

The Emperor Napoleon once said that there are no bad regiments, only bad commanding officers. This bit of wisdom has been revised by modern management practices to read that there are no bad managers, only bad employees.

The employees will be fired, and the manglement responsible for the problems will be promoted. It's how things work these days.

The National Cyber Security Centre run by GCHQ gets given copies of the code, so i'd be surprised if the NSA hasn't got copies already.

The National Cyber Security Centre has reportedly found that the code quality is "sloppy" so it's probably not really worth stealing. They haven't found any backdoors though, and one imagines that with the source code and ten years they'd have found any backdoors if they were any.

Re: tldr

I think he means the ATM. By filling it to the brim rather than keeping it stocked at 10% and then filling it every day or something, which I don't think anybody has ever done.

Re: And this is why the Aussies are on top of it

My dear Anonymous Coward,

Did you actually read beyond the second paragraph where I insulted [all of] our glorious leaders? If so, you'd note that in the third paragraph I said:-

A more rational belief is that pretty much all modern politicians are voted in on the basis of looking good on camera and when it comes to actually managing anything are equally as bloody hopeless.

And in the last paragraph I pointed out that Britains world beating civil service who is actually running the show at every level beyond the top dozen people is actually being shown up to be rather crap. But do go on blaming political parties who are largely impotent. It doesn't matter which party was in power when this hit, either was going to do badly and i'm sure the civil service will be quite happy with the blame going no further than politicians.

My "side" is pointing out that the existing political point scoring is bollocks and we need a major rethink on how the country is governed that goes way beyond changing the politicians. The "not fit for purpose" parts of the Civil Service needs some radical reforming to be "fit for purpose" at the minimum. Or are you actually disagreeing with this?

Re: In other news....

The trouble with "correcthorsebatterystaple" is, it doesn't scale. If we all start using "three or four common words strung together", then attackers will start guessing passwords in that format.”

Sure, straight forward dictionary attack. But lets consider a moderate amount of salting:-

correct!1horse@2battery3>staple456

So you now need to do a dictionary attack of every combination of 4 words, plus a special character and a number between every word, plus a few random numbers at the end and the number of possible combinations for just the added entropy are probably greater than most passwords to start with.

Re: Meanwhile (according to the BBC)...

That appears to be a less succinct way of expressing "bankrupting the competition to then shove prices up afterwards".

Of course, if you described it such then i'd be predatory pricing and therefore anti-competitive, and therefore illegal which would mean that the competition people were asleep on the job.

Re: Who are the downvoters, in this comment thread

To be fair while DDT is not nice stuff for humans it practically eliminated typus and there was an extermination program running to kill mosquitoes via DDT practically everywhere but southern Africa that appears to have succeeded wildly as the areas that didn't run extermination programs for mozzies are pretty much the only places to still have a malaria problem.

The number of lives saved through DDT use is going to be hugely in favour of DDT compared to the relative handful of people who are killed by it. We got shot of DDT because we had something better and the cost differential got to the point that the risks of DDT use weren't worth the price difference between DDT and a more expensive pesticide.

The same is true of everything, things with huge benefits and relatively small disadvantages get displaced when something better comes along, not because people shout loudly about the relatively small disadvantages.

Which doesn't excuse Amazon not providing a safe environment for their staff one jot.

Re: Look out the window?

Just for reference, mach 1 is ~ 760 mph.

Two planes approaching each other head on at mach 0.9 is quite rare (flight paths prevent this, plus the fact that this speed is in the "this is going to tear your wings off" overspeed zone for most civil aircraft) and the old rule of the sky of "both aircraft turn to your right" would likely prevent accidents in any case.

Yes, it's going to be compromised to some degree for some purposes.

However, a list of who has what devices, where they live, who they live with and how often they come into contact with their partner and where they shop does have some obvious value.