Posts by Velv 2756 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jan 2010
And I'm not knocking it, WhatsApp is good for a free app.
But if you want secure communications you need to buy secure communications. There are plenty of companies out there that will sell you something to do the job (assuming you pass the government scrutiny of your case for secure communications).
@horsham_sparky
You pay corporation tax (20%) on the profits AFTER expenses (e.g salary), so if you were taking a full salary you wouldn't pay the corporation tax (but you would probably be giving the government 40%+ instead of the 20%). You choose - 20% or 40%
You're right that the gross turnover is NOT the take home money, but "Please get your facts straight before posting stuff like that" !
My proven skills in version X are not diminished by the release of version Y - its simply that the demand in the market for X are greatly diminished. Taking one exam from a selection every two years doesn't prove your knowledge is current - it simply states you've paid your (bi)-annual fee. To make "recertification" valid there should be a specific exam that covers a broad range of products and technologies considered current - an "upgrade" exam if you like.
While in theory Certifications open the doors to interviews, I've always found its more about who I know rather than the bits of paper I've got.
Curious one this, since the delivered device isn't usually "built" to a operating state - normally you've got some setup questions to answer for it to configure itself.
So unless Dell are setting the user up, the Firefox isn't really being installed, but merely being added to the image for the user to install. And then Microsoft's Browser Choice kicks in (its a £ charge so this must be a UK order that falls under the EU browser rules agreed with MS an the EU). With Browser Choice offering to install Firefox for free.
While possibly nothing technically illegal in Dell charging a fee to install Firefox, its extremely exploitative at best.
It's ironic that its the Enterprise type services that typically use Digital Certificates that will be more vulnerable than the standard home users who "just have a username and password".
But then if the certificate was backed by a username and password you'd have a multi-layered security model that isn't as weak as it's weakest link.
@Richard 12 - Yes it's widely banded around that "they can't stop us using Sterling even if we have no currency union". Sounds great to the pro-yes supporters in rallying support.
Well, in theory at least. In practical terms using any foreign currency without a currency union would be fraught with difficulties.
On a day to day basis the pound in the pocket would continue without any problems. However all major currencies have controls in place on larger transaction to limit fraud and money laundering (£10,000 in the UK) and this then places controls in the hands of the UK treasury for the legitimate routing of the (electronic) transaction. These are enforced through SWIFT in Europe, so you can't escape the electronic controls. Transactions would therefore require routing through an rUK regulated bank, which would introduce international transaction charges, could introduce delays through international AML controls and might even lead to tax liabilities in foreign jurisdictions if the laws aren't amenable.
Cash does potentially avoid the problem, so perhaps a black economy in laundered Sterling notes is what the Scottish government would like to see...
No, not for the prevention of crime but to simple gain legitimacy.
So I'll correct the headline - any digital currency that really wants to become global and secure is going to need to find a way to prove its stability and security. That only happens in two ways:
1. through worldwide agreed regulation; or
2. through a historic (i.e. decades) proof of security and stability. So the quick way to be acceptable to the general population is through regulation.
The recent failures of exchanges and thefts don't help the public trust of digital currency. Nobody (sensible) is going to convert large sums of legitimate savings into a form that's got no guarantees.
So if you want Bitcoin to become widely accepted - an everyday currency - find some way to have it properly trusted and secured. Have it regulated.
OK, so it's not entirely impossible that the LHC, or VLHC, or any of a number of these experiments will trigger so apocalyptic chain reaction.
In fact the LHC is more likely to blow up the earth before somebody finds proof that God exists.
It's just highly improbable.
Maybe the VLHC just needs a really really hot cup of tea.
It's not turd polishing, you get what you pay for.
If you want to host your own service in house that's fine. You buy the hardware and storage, software licenses, backup capacity, resilience, support, etc. If you add up what that costs to provide anywhere near the same level of availability then cloud starts to make sense.
Agreed there are potential security issues - nobody wants the NSA et al to be reading their data. There are ways to encrypt it in the cloud, but really, does anything you are storing need that level of security (you're not planning on blowing up a plane, are you?) And if you do need to maintain high security (FCA, DPA, etc), then you've probably already justified the cost of the hardware, storage, software licenses, backup capacity, resilience, support, etc.
"Joint and severally liable" - where two or more persons are liable in respect of the same liability.
The full rent for the property was due by all the occupants. Unless they had separate agreements with the landlord then all occupants were equally liable for the full rental and anyone not paying was an internal disagreement between the occupants and had nothing to do with the landlord. Until they didn't pay in full, at which point he would have an option for eviction.
There are lots of things that are "illegal".
Driving a motor vehicle above the posted speed limit in the UK has been one of them for many years, yet our emergency services (until the recent addition of explicit exemptions) have "broken the law" many time a day.
It is for a court to decide if the illegal activity is justified, and it is for the Crown Prosecution Service to decide if prosecution is in the public interest.
So to say that GCHQ are "acting with impunity" is wrong. It's about whether someone can find sufficient evidence to prove guilt, and whether a prosecution is in the public interest.
Somehow I suspect the vast majority of the public will consider it "just" for hackers to be targeted by the authorities.
@Pascal. No, what it means is that the XP machines have not been placed into a situation where they are exploitable.
If you're on a decently secured network behind well maintained firewalls and you leverage good proxies and good security controls then you minimise the risk of being attacked.
"not having security problems" is about having multiple layers of security in place - lots of thinner layers are much more secure than one big thick layer, so using a partially protected XP behind well maintained firewalls is safer than a fully patched Linux desktop directly connected to the Internet.
"Despite having no access to the web, frustrated users still managed to tweet about how annoyed they were to be kicked offline:"
Err, Twitter is available from more than just phones. Like a good old fashioned PC or Mac connected to a wire.
Or by SMS if you've set it up, and SMS was still working.
NatWest also offer reminders and alerts by SMS, so even if you haven't had the email or postal statement it acts as a trigger to check your account. Resilience is a great thing when leveraged properly.
NatWest appear to have made a mistake, but as had been said people really need to take some responsibility for themselves (and in fairness to the victim in this case he appears to have accepted his part in the mistake and "The real annoyance was NatWest's refusal to deal with the problem.")
Never mind Banking, clearly you know nothing at all about IT.
Yes, they have and use failovers. But it depends on the nature of the fault before you can invoke a failover.
Hardware generally yes, no problem, automatic failover can be almost instant, even geographically dispersed.
Software, middleware, transaction processing - maybe not - it just depends what has failed and if its possible to move the multiple transaction threads or if you need to stall the processing and move it in a controlled manual manner.
At least this time they've acknowledged that there might be a problem.
Despite several hundred forum pages about the 3GS crashing in the middle of calls there was never any official recognition that the problem existed. Strange that the problem disappeared when iOS4 was released. I guess Apple is starting to emerge from its Banana Republic Dictatorship roots into an open, free and inclusive society.
(downvote in 3,2,1...)
O2 saw this coming and that's why they now do a two part contract, a part for airtime and a credit agreement to buy the phone in instalments.
If you sign up for 24 months of airtime and the Telco or shop gives you a free phone, the phone is and always will be free. It's only the airtime you've signed up for.
Make sure you choose your next contract very carefully ;)
"As The Register noted at the time, the regulatory meddling means that from February 2014 we'll all have to pay a little more for our mobile and broadband contracts as the fixed prices offered by providers will need to tally with their operational costs."
I'd suggest Kelly Fiveash spends too much time in the company of Telco Execs - this is just the type of scaremongering hype the Telcos want you to believe.
The truth is that the <3% increase (it wasn't allowed to go above RPI) on a small number of contracts over a part of the term was in fact a very small part of the income to the Telco, and since its still a competitive market the current round prices aren't going to change (unless there's a cartel running that we're not aware of).
Doesn't help Enterprise much. Well, no, it doesn't directly. But it doesn't inspire confidence in Seagate as a manufacturer since problems appear across the range of consumer disks.
And as both enterprise and consumer, I know what to look for when I buy disks for home.
Showing my age, but I miss Maxtor :(
So they were lax in storing it on client devices - that's amateurish, schoolboy coding.
The BIG question is what have they done at the server end - just how insecure is the network, the OS, the database. Multi-layered security - probably not. If they can get the client so wrong, what confidence level do we conclude about their core infrastructure.
This law worries me.
In the past I've had to wipe a USB stick because I couldn't remember the password I'd set. All content gone.
I don't believe I have anything to hide from the authorities, however I bet if you were to take every USB stick out my house there'd be at least one old hardly used one that I couldn't get back into. I keep backups in multiple places so I wouldn't lose anything by not being able to access an old stick, but I couldn't prove there was nothing else on it.
From my outside view of the situation, if conditions in Amazon were so bad then the staff would have been voting to unionise. The union picked the workers to ballot and you would hope they picked a set they thought they could win.
Now, you can conspiracy theory all you like, but if you gave those workers the chance to vote for the union, and the company put pressure on them to reject, you'd expect them to vote for the union who would then be in a position to protect them from the company.
History has shown that Unions have their place - without them rampant exploitation of the worker takes place. But give them too much power and stifle the business - just look at the thriving UK car industry. It's a balance.
@LDS
"Can't really understand why people want the last mobe but they're fine with a twelve years old OS"
The person buying the mobe for themselves probably has the latest OS, and latest Mac or Ultrabook. But their wife and kids end up with the hand-me-downs.
Then translate that to the business world - the CEO etc have all the latest toys, but the proletariat get left with whatever works for the least amount of money especially until there's a compelling incentive to improve it.
I'm curious why Winkypop has been down voted. Suing employers will not be career enhancing.
Most companies carry out pre-employment screening and court cases immediately raise red flags irrespective of the merits of the case. This is especially true of the "senior" staff who would have been affected by the underhand agreement.
I'm not for one second suggesting the companies and individuals should get away with it, but Winkypop is right, suing is Martyring ones future employment prospects.
I absolutely understand your sentiment but without the rules and protections many legitimate businesses would not start up and could not survive.
Protections for the individual were brought in for a reason, therefore removing them carries wider implications.
We should seek ways to kill the Patent Trolls without removing the legitimate protections (to me its ironic that Texas is the home of so many trolls and so many handguns, but that's an entirely different solution to the problem and I wouldn't care to suggest it was actually a good idea otherwise I'd be sued for something somewhere, ironically probably Texas)
"Payment Card Industry standards call for salt..."
Which assumes you've implemented according to PCI-DSS standards and that the QSA who conducts the audit hasen't proven otherwise.
If you choose not to implement entirely to standard there is nothing stopping you - too many projects belive they can cut corners to make the design and build quicker and cheaper and simply take the risk you'll never be found out.
Because really, what auditor is going to check the salt exists in reality and not just in the paper design. (sarcasm)
"Neither the HMRC – collector for the nation’s purse – nor NHS Scotland will pay for protection, according to our FOIA requests"
Correct - neither will PAY for additional support. But I think you'll find MS will provide friendly government organisations with access to all fixes that the real paying customers have paid to be produced.
MS is not stupid, they know who not to piss off.
Are you being satirical or naive???
It is only a matter of time before the next failing, and it could be your local shop and you. Our banks tend to be the most secure and history has shown they regularly get it wrong, so what chance of the lower orders got.
Seriously, Retailers aren't interested in security, so they do the bare minimum to APPEAR to "protect" the customer and the business. But tills, payments systems, etc don't sit on separate secured networks so to compromise them is usually trivial.
Anyone reading this thinking "we do it well" and "we do it safe" is in for a big fall (especially retailers). I've never come across a business yet that has implemented multi-layered security that is impregnable. I shop very carefully.
Fully agree on the parental support issue. As an aside and not maybe directly at the browser makers but the site makers...
Adverts SUCK! OK, so I know we live in a world of advertising and they pay to keep the website free. But as an industry you need to make it clearer and cleaner which elements are part of your important site content and which bits are advertising (and trust me, as a relatively intelligent IT literate person it isn't always obvious, so what chance of the general population got).
IE has for a long time had GPO integration. Chrome now has some, and there's a third party add-on to do it in Firefox. But realistically none of the browsers have good Enterprise Management capabilities.
Browsers are no longer just for accessing the Internet - many client/server business applications are going down the browser access route and that means the browser becomes even more critical on the desktop. And you don't really want users having the access to install any old shit into your business critical "application" and breaking it (or worse, leaking data).
It's also becoming necessary to have more than one browser on every client since not all applications are changing at the same rate and they're not backward compatible, so it would be nice if there was an industry standard set of controls on browsers. e.g. if I lock the OS to a certain proxy, browsers should allow me to lock that once in the OS and not require me to lock it in every browser.
95% of clients are Windows, but the other OSs should be considering proper Enterprise Management if they want to be taken seriously as business tools.
Almost every technology in existence has been shit at the start. It takes time and effort to make them cheap and reliable.
You can argue all you like about how much "renewables" is costing, but the pure and simple fact is that fossil fuels have a finite volume remaining on earth and we need to develop alternatives (i.e. something that we use to generate power without using it up - that's what makes it renewable). It might not affect your lifetime, but it will affect your children. And don't for one minute think nuclear is cheap - the TCO is about five times wind once you secure it against terrorists and clean it up once its used (and guess what, it isn't renewable either).
And before you start, I'm not some long haired tree hugging environmentalist - I love my V8 Merc and exotic jet holidays! But I am honest enough to admit we can't carry on the cheap way forever.
Why doesn't the City council just approach the big tech companies and ask them to fund all the local bus services - what a coup for the tech giants - "Your local bus provided by google - we're giving back to the community". For the tech's it would cost peanuts - not much more than the buses they're already running.
OK, so you don't want to go all the way and pay for them all. But form a partnership with the City to provide a subsidy for all the public transport and let the public use the company buses for a standard fare. Employees can continue to use the company bus for free, but pay standard fare on normal buses.
But no. The politicians want to win votes by stopping an employee benefit.
That would be true if the ads were coming from a legitimate source.
However, since the malware is being used by criminals, it's fairly safe to assume they didn't use their real ID when they bought the advertising space (and I'm willing to bet most agencies don't vet their customers - given even Banks have failed to fully "know your customer", what chance have lowly ad agencies got) .
Or alternatively they could have compromised the upload of legitimate Ads.
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