I doubt if cash was involved. Too easy to trace. More likely backscratching.
Posts by veti
4489 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
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Among those pardoned by Trump this week: Software maker ex-CEO who admitted hacking into rivals' systems
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a flying solar panel: BAE Systems' satellite alternative makes maiden flight in Oz
Re: Why, oh why...
Civil wars are about who gets to govern the land. Which, ultimately, boils down to who gets to work it and who gets to live in the big houses. The imperial projects that led to World Wars 1 and 2 were about finding places for the restless young people of Europe to move to. In the 19th century Britain and France had exported their restless youth to (mostly) Africa, and Germans and Italians wanted the same options.
Even smaller wars that are ostensibly about "status" of one warlord versus another - ultimately, the question is "who's more important here, who's in charge?" And the reason why anyone cares about that - the reason why people align themselves to one side or another - is that the person in charge ultimately gets to say who's a part of "their" community, and who isn't. Life can be made very difficult for outsiders (read: those who failed to support the warlord in their effort).
Killing farmers and other ways of razing land (like Rome did to Carthage, or the Greeks to Troy) is a way of ensuring that it will be a long time before any challenge to you and your people arises from this area again. If you don't think you can exploit the land, the next best thing is to make sure nobody else can either. That means fewer rivals (who might, one day, grow to challenge you for dominance over your land).
It's always about land.
Good news: Neural network says 11 asteroids thought to be harmless may hit Earth. Bad news: They are not due to arrive for hundreds of years
Oracle staff say Larry Ellison's fundraiser for Trump is against 'company ethics' – Oracle, ethics... what dimension have we fallen into?
Re: Company Vs Personal
Clearly these employees need retraining, because - as well as losing the distinction between professional and private lives - they seem to be unfamiliar with Oracle's code of ethics.
It lists "core values", and they don't include either "diversity" or "inclusiveness". The word "diversity" appears only in the context of non-discrimination in employment, and even then it's not at the level of a "core value". "Inclusiveness" doesn't appear at all.
Not a Genius move after all: Apple must cough up $$$ in back pay for store staff forced to wait for bag searches
Jeff Bezos: I will depose King Trump
Re: To be honest ...
If there is any evidence that Biden did the things you attribute to him, then Trump could have directed the Department of Justice to investigate him. He could have appointed anyone he liked to head that investigation. (I keep hearing that Rudy Giuliani is a great corruption prosecutor.) That's what he would do, if he were serious about investigating corruption.
But Trump didn't do that. Instead, he called the president of a foreign country -, a country that was at that moment particularly vulnerable and dependent on US aid that had already been duly voted through by a bipartisan consensus in Congress - and made it clear that they wouldn't be getting this aid unless they made a public statement that appeared to incriminate the Bidens.
(Whether or not there was any actual investigation, or whatever the outcome of that investigation may be, was completely immaterial to him. All he wanted was the announcement.)
Re: To be honest ...
I'm not sure what's cause and what's effect, there.
The Democrats never expected there to be a primary in 2020. After the 2016 fiasco, there was no-one (serious) in the party who was remotely ready to step up and start their campaign - because they'd all assumed that Hillary, having won 2016, would coast to an automatic renomination in 2020.
The present contenders are a bunch of has-beens who feel it's now or never, and a couple of opportunists who are mostly interested in making names for themselves - putting down markers for 2024 or beyond, rather than seriously contesting this nomination. All of them, I think, are assuming they'll lose.
But then, so was Trump in 2016. Politics is a tricky business, elections even more so.
Dual screens, fast updates, no registry cruft and security in mind: Microsoft gives devs the lowdown on Windows 10X
Ever had a script you just can't scratch? Excel on the web now has just the thing
Google's second stab at preserving both privacy and ad revenue draws fire
Re: Squaring the circle
So, your policy is not to let doctors see you naked? Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, there really is a very significant difference between Google and Facebook. Google takes your private information, with or without your consent, and keeps it to itself. There has never been a credible report of their bulk data being leaked or sold to a third party.
(There's a good reason for that. Their business model involves managing the flow of information between me and their customers. If their customers could get hold of the information Google has about me, they wouldn't need Google any more, they could contact me directly.)
Facebook, on the other hand...
And that's why I personally am OK with sharing many things with Google.
Re: Squaring the circle
Only if you see privacy as an absolute, all-or-nothing quality.
I don't generally walk about naked in public, but there are people who I'm OK with seeing me that way. (E.g. my family, or any doctor I happen to be consulting.) "Privacy" includes the option to reveal private things to select people, on the understanding that they won't be more widely shared.
If Google can insinuate itself onto that list of "select people" - if not for you, then at least for a significant number of its users - then it can totally square that circle.
HPE's orders to expert accountant in Autonomy trial revealed
Re: Extradition. Lynch:0 Sacoolas:1
Diplomatic immunity is a thing. There's no getting around that, and it was never likely that the Trump administration would voluntarily waive it just to placate some foreigners (read: non-voters).
Please don't conflate the Sacoolas case with the legal system, that was a purely political decision. Things are quite bad enough without getting them mixed up like that.
Re: Why is it moot?
The US case would be decided under the law of the US, or whichever state is applicable. The UK case is decided under UK law.
Of course it's not impossible, or even unlikely, for those two bodies of law to say different things and be interpreted by different authorities, and thus lead to different outcomes. Even if the UK (civil) court says that no civil remedy should be applied, US (criminal) law may see the matter differently.
Windows 7 will not go gentle into that good night: Ageing OS refuses to shut down
Operating systems, like all other software, absolutely do rot and break. Not by themselves, admittedly, but the whole point is they're not "by themselves".
Even after the OS has stopped getting updates, other software on it (e.g. Adobe crap) will keep getting updated. Or users or admins will change settings. Or someone will plug in a new mouse, and a new driver will be downloaded. Or whatever.
There is no realistic way of putting a freeze on the whole system, so if a single part of it is frozen, it will gradually, but inevitably, grow more and more unfit for purpose as it gets left behind.
'Windows Vista' spotted doing a whoopsie over EE's signage
Re: AC cos I'm ashamed of saying something nice about Vista
Yeah, I used a Vista laptop with 1Gb of RAM for a while, and I often got the feeling I'd have got quicker results using a stone circle. Probably a shorter boot time, too.
The thing that made the security annoying was that every UAC prompt had to be clicked through twice. I never knew why this was, but it was never fixed in Vista. It was fixed in Windows 7, and coincidentally the moaning about UAC pretty much vanished when 7 came out.
BOFH: Darn Windows 7. It's totally why we need a £1k graphics card for a business computer
That's what makes you hackable: Please, baby. Stop using 'onedirection' as a password
That's OK until you get to the first site that makes you change your password from time to time. Then you realise you're going to need not just one such phrase, but a potentially unlimited supply of them.
And of course it doesn't allow for sites that don't allow passwords to contain spaces, or start with numerals, or whatever other lame and usually undocumented rules they choose to apply.
Re: Don't underestimate
Yep, this is the point that seems to keep being forgotten: 90% of the sites that demand passwords are completely trivial. Who cares if someone can impersonate me on El Reg? How is that going to let them take over my life or empty my bank account?
Sure, they could troll. They could post defamatory or otherwise illegal material and I'd, presumably, get the blame, at least initially. But I'm having a hard time seeing the percentage in that. A certain level of pure spite, maybe. But profit? where?
Colombia accused of rigging .co contract for dot-org provider Afilias – is this document a smoking gun?
Re: Shared registries?
What happens if two companies each grant the domain "myname.co"? What's going to happen when someone tries to use that in an address?
Someone has to make sure that every domain name is unique. That's the role we're talking about here. Hard to see how to make it competitive.
ICANN't approve the sale of .org to private equity – because California's Attorney General has... concerns
Nope. There's a whole sliding scale, from "unlawful" to "criminal", via "illegal" and "illicit".
Leaving your car in a parking space ten minutes after the meter has run out - unlawful. Not putting any money in the meter in the first place - illegal. Parking on the hard shoulder of a motorway - illicit. Parking in the centre lane of a motorway - criminal.
To make that work, everyone would have to agree on the domain to move to, and everyone would have to move more or less together. And the new TLD would need to have its hands meticulously tied to prevent it from pulling the same thing in future.
The alternative - several TLDs competing for the non-profit market segment - would lead to confusion, factionalism and loss of trust in the whole idea. In other words, mission accomplished - for the big-money interests that want to drive such tawdry "non-profit" nonsense to the fringes of the web and allow a clearer run for the good, healthy pursuit of $$$.
Elon Musk shows world that he is truly awful at something
Tech outfits sue Uncle Sam over 'unlawful' H-1B admission charges totaling $350m over six years
Re: Avoiding Fees?
That would be one interpretation of the story, yes.
Another possibility is that people entered the country independently, as (say) students, and were only employed by the companies much later.
I don't see anything in the story to support either of these interpretations over the other.
Canadian insurer paid for ransomware decryptor. Now it's hunting the scum down
Re: Danegeld
Tax collectors predate Danegeld by some thousands of years.
cf. 1 Samuel 8:11-17:
And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; [...] And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.
We've always known this. And yet, every civilisation in history has chosen to pay taxes anyway.
Contrast with Danegeld, of which Thomas Jefferson said: "[We] prefer war in all cases to tribute under any form and to any people whatever".
UN didn't patch SharePoint, got mega-hacked, covered it up, kept most staff in the dark, finally forced to admit it
Petition asking Microsoft to open-source Windows 7 sails past 7,777-signature goal
Re: This is about as deluded..
And how exactly do you propose to isolate them from "human intervention", with 7.5 billion people on the planet? How about those species (including nearly all currently living land mammals - ob XKCD) that wouldn't even exist in their present form without human intervention?
Re: Uh!
Unfortunately, when someone releases a patch, you wouldn't get to see the colour of their hat before installing it.
So there's nothing for it but for every company still using the software to apply some sort of trusted reviewing service, to decide what hacks - sorry, patches - to apply, and what not. If you were really, really stupid you might try to do that in-house, but I suspect 99% of companies would prefer to subscribe to some trusted third party for that service.
So... there they are, paying a subscription for extended support. How is that an improvement on the present situation, again? Oh sure, more hackers (of both kinds) reviewing the code, but the flip side is a markedly increased chance of a deliberate exploit being inserted (and mistakenly passed by the reviewing authority).
IoT security? We've heard of it, says UK.gov waving new regs
Re: One big mistake
To handle that - let us reset the password once we have plugged something in to a USB port on the IoThing itself. If we have local, physical access, assume we're authorised (to wipe all data on it).
Would be more meaningful, I think, to restrict the data that vendors are allowed to collect, and what they're allowed to use it for.
Microsoft: 14 January patch was the last for Windows 7. Also Microsoft: Actually...
Rockstar dev debate reopens: Hero programmers do exist, do all the work, do chat a lot – and do need love and attention from project leaders
Re: We have "hero" CEOs, executives, marketdroids, sport players, singers, etc.
Not true. Oh sure, the real megastars get stupid money, but the vast hordes of merely mid-ranking entertainers are often much less well off than you think. Even those who've been household names across four continents for a couple of years - are not necessarily financially secure.
The biggest money in entertainment goes to publishers. Just like software.
Stiff upper lip time, Brits: After bullying France to drop its digital tax on Silicon Valley, Trump's coming for you next
Re: "because it can deliver quicker, cheaper and easier"
Contrary to popular belief, laws are not (in general) made to benefit the rich and powerful.
It's the other way round: people and companies become rich and powerful by successfully exploiting the laws. The legitimate loopholes (or "economies", as we used to call them) exploited by Amazon are available to anyone. Amazon merely figured out a cost-effective way to do it.
It's important to understand this, because it gives you a valuable predictive insight: if you change the rules, you will not prevent companies or people from becoming rich and powerful by exploiting them. If not Amazon, someone else will do it.
I'm not saying the rules can't be improved on. I'm sure they can. What I am saying is that any attempt to change the rules that's inspired by, basically, spite against Amazon - or anyone else, for that matter - is unlikely to be an improvement.
Re: He's threatening Italy as well
No, the rules were published beforehand, but it was also conveyed that those rules would never be applied. (If they had been, then Italy could never have joined, and the whole thing would have been pointless.) The actual rules were, and still are, either a closely guarded secret, or being made up as they go along.
One-time Brexit Secretary David Davis demands Mike Lynch's extradition to US be halted
Beer necessities: US chap registers bevvy as emotional support animal so he can booze on public transport
If you never thought you'd hear a Microsoftie tell you to stop using Internet Explorer, lap it up: 'I beg you, let it retire to great bitbucket in the sky'
Help! I'm trapped on Schrodinger's runaway train! Or am I..?
Re: Enquiries
Well, I do see such a reason. Email is a terrible tool for communicating with a school. Even worse than with a bank.
For one thing, if I want to let the school know my child will be absent, it's nice to know that I'm communicating over a secure channel. (Of course someone may have nicked my phone, but if that's true then I'm likely to know about it.) With email, anyone could fake my address well enough to fool an average school secretary.
For another thing, I have all my communications with the school in one place. No filtering required, no filling up my mailbox with PDFs I don't want to keep. No having to hunt through a stack of correspondence to find stuff like term dates, appointments, special events, or old newsletters - I know exactly where to find all those things.
And last but not least, I'm reasonably sure that if I contact the school through the app, they'll actually receive my communication, and vice versa. With email that's by no means a sure thing any longer, such is the enthusiasm of current spam filtering.
tl;dr: email sucks.