Posts by Version 1.0 5411 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
Back in the 90's I was at a January conference in Washington, DC when my company boss told me that their installation engineer was sick and I needed to fly to Melbourne Australia to install a system that had just been delivered. Installation and training would take about a week - I said that I'd only bought a coat and a change of clothes to the conference, he said, "No problem just get what you need."
So I switched my tickets, flew down to the Australian summer and bought a new summer wardrobe - it was hot, so I picked up a couple of Akubra hats too - they have lasted so well. When I returned I submitted my expenses with a note that the instructions had come from the company director. No problems for me.
The real problem is that the larger the corporation gets, the easier it is to avoid paying taxes. It's endemic - remember that in the US corporations are people too - for many people in the US, taxes end up being voluntary unless you are poor, or middle-class - then you need to pay. Warren's proposal will piss off the people running both parties.
Just look at what's happened since the hack, big bonuses and retirement for the executives, they fired a few of the low paid techs and now it's business as usual - their share price is rising again.
No need to worry, it wasn't their data that was lost was it? These companies make money by selling information about third-party entities so security was always relatively insignificant - what they really worked hard at was making people pay to access the credit profiles.
While I may bitch about starting Firefox and Chrome and seeing nothing for a minute while they update, you are correct - automated patching is the only real defense. I wonder what other groups are getting hacked or monitored by this approach - we've got a lot of faff running around this month, could there be other fingers in the pie too?
Me? I've stopped reading the News, it's too depressing most of the time.
I see emails from various old friends names @yahoo.com all the time but when you look at the email headers they are all originating in Asia - but all that means is that some spammer found an open relay. Significantly most spam arrives during working hours which suggests to me that the majority is coming via hacked computers in the corporate world.
It's a good example of how you can use a sensor - sensors are everywhere. Suppose you don't like Google listening to your cellphone microphone ... and you disable it. Feel safe now? .... But the phone still has an accelerometer so it can still listen to you if you take the same approach as they are documenting here.
Uber is a corporation, in the US corporations are very rarely charged with causing deaths because corporations aren't people, "Corporations don't kill people, people kill people." There were no people involved, it was software/hardware that caused the homicide, the Uber driver just failed to stop it and that's an accident, not a crime in the corporate world.
If Uber get away with this then there's no reason for them to worry, they can disable the breaking systems completely and just speed through town like a corporate bowling ball delivering their passengers to their destination in minutes.
That's the "anti" view anyway - but the real issue here is that our society has stopped caring about the fate and well-being of everyone except the wealthy. Do you think we'd even be having these discussions if the Uber had T-boned a Bugatti and killed the driver?
The metadata collection has been going on for many years, all Snowden did was to get the media to wake up and look at it (shock, horror, zzzzzz). This reporting is accurate, it's just a move in a chess game to distract everyone from reality. Intelligence services have never killed off anything off the record ... Mandy Rice Davies applies.
Sure, this sort of risk is worth scientifically evaluating but the chances of it happening are extremely low unless the oort cloud gets disturbed - occasionally a decent size chunk of rock will amble along but the chances of even getting one large enough to make a small crater are vanishingly small. Personally I think the risks to the planet come far more from human stupidity (climate change, politicians and social media idiots) than the occasional alien throwing stones at us.
In this game you hide some things and leave others out in the sunlight - when the malware is discovered in the sunlight people often stop looking under the stones nearby.
For example, here's my guaranteed method of always hitting someone with a snowball. You make two snowballs and you throw one at them in a high curve, the target person will watch it as it comes down towards them to make sure it doesn't hit them - so you throw the second snowball straight at them and you'll hit them every time. It's never failed me.
It was just "the cloud" ... face it, the main function of cloud computing is to generate income to the "cloud providers" reliability is just a competitive feature that aids sales. If you move to the cloud then you're moving all support and reliability to the cloud ... and we all know what clouds do, don't we?
We've had years of them introducing new products and then dropping them - sure, you may think that you own a nice Surface laptop today but it will be gone in a few years, replaced by the next "new" thing. Windows 10 is hanging in there but it's still not reliable (except at slurping your data) and it's widely hated - most users would upgrade to Windows 7 if they had a chance, Visual Studio get an "upgrade" every 18 months but all it does is shuffle the deck, add a few cards and leave a few in the trash can.
When I bought tickets to see the Rolling Stones back in the 70's at Earls Court, you had to send them a cheque in the mail and then a week or so befoe the show you either got the cheque mailed back to you or tickets - I got six tickets and we all went down to see them with The Meters - a fantastic show!
The point is that delay between issuing the tickets and knowing that you had a seat made a big dent in the scalpers - you can'r resell a ticket that you don't have, and if everyone knows that the tickets have not been issued (or guaranteed to be provided) then any "tickets" on sale are fakes and you can track down the "resellers" and prosecute them.
Nothing is illegal unless you get caught - and then you just say sorry and walk away. Facebook will suffer no penalties for breaking the law - hardly anyone does these days, you just move on to the next project/victim. Unless of course you are poor - then you pay the price - poor people should know better, rich people/corporations just have to apologise for making innocent mistakes.
I don't always agree with Buffett's statements but when I look back at his actions over the years he's never been that wrong. If you don't understand an environment that you'd be just gambling to invest or work in it. Most modern "investment" companies act like legalized gambling companies, "Give us your money and we'll make you rich (unless of course - check the small print - we don't)."
For years people complained that UNIX system were much better than Windows for system administration because so much housekeeping can be automated with a small shell script - Microsoft listened to us and along came Power Shell ... and the hackers are demonstrating what a powerful shell script can do to the system.
"Live and Learn" used to be a phrase everybody used, but who learns from history these days?
Once upon a time, many many years ago, we used to make the kit ourselves - but then corporations figured out that they could make more money by moving production elsewhere - the UK used to have a solid electronics industry but it's just evaporated over the last 50 years. We've lost the ability to make the kit and there's no serious interest in building the infrastructure (and education system) to support UK production any longer - all the chums running the country see that it's more profitable to close down UK based companies and move the design, development, and production overseas.
This has been going on for a long time.
An 85-year-old man was requested by his doctor for a sperm count as part of his physical exam. The doctor gave the man a jar and said, "Take this jar home and bring back a semen sample tomorrow."
The next day the 85-year-old reappeared at the doctor's office and gave him the jar, which was as clean and empty as on the previous day. The doctor asked, what happened and the man explained. "Well, doc, it's like this--first I tried with my right hand, but nothing. Then I tried with my left hand, but still nothing. Then I asked my wife for help. She tried with her right hand, then with her left, still nothing. She tried with her mouth, first with the teeth in, then with her teeth out, still nothing. We even called up Arleen, the lady next door and she tried too, first with both hands, then an armpit, and she even tried squeezin' it between her knees, but still nothing."
The doctor was shocked! "You asked your neighbor?"
The old man replied, "Yep, none of us could get the jar open."
The Nest cameras have microphones and it's a useful feature, you can get an alert when the camera hears something - this is all in the product descriptions so it's not too surprising that their Home Guard product had a microphone. These things are designed by geeky engineers so why the big surprise if they added a microphone but thought that if they hadn't turned it on and written an code to access or use it then when the engineer talks to the sales folks it's not part of the product.
Would everyone be running around in circles screaming if the Nest designers had put an accelerometer in the device and not mentioned it? (clue - you have to be a hardware engineer to understand the question)
When the domain costs $1,000+ you see no spam domains but when you get down to the $17 level we'll all be getting spam and fishing expeditions on a regular basis. And when that happens I'll blacklist the entire TDL at the mail server. There's a silver lining to every "cloud" ...
This explains the massive quantity of water in our solar system (including the Oort cloud) and tells us that virtually every other planetary system with a main sequence star will be drenched in water and therefore life. So life is probably universal, intelligent life is probably very rare ... it may simply be a momentary blip (looking around me these days this seems to be the case).
Formby also pointed out that the info will likely reveal a person's political opinions, which makes it "special category" data that is entitled to increased protections under the law.
The entire issue could have been avoided by simply scrapping the MP's Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/LinkedIn profiles.
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