Posts by Roland6 10727 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
Problem is it's the US. Security is all talk and posture and no action and has been like this for decades.
You only need to look at previous 'hacking' cases involving teenagers to see that they hacked supposedly security US military systems, which weren't actually secure; teenagers prosecuted, no change to system security, so systems ready for the next bunch of teenage hackers - its almost like the US's idea of security is to use their production systems as honeypots...
You'll only start to see change when another western leader publicly laughs at the US and dismisses these types of cases. However, can't see the current UK government having the balls to do anything other than meekly comply.
>sophisticated financial fraud...
I think it depends on your definition of "sophisticated", given we are talking about people who get their news from Twitter, the bar is very low.
There is nothing I've seen from the article to suggest the financial fraud was anything other than basic scamming.
>And my HP laptop from 2008 is running Windows 10 and still getting updates.
Hope you still have the original media and drivers disks...
Upgraded a bunch of HP business desktops from circa 2012. Those that had a fully uptodate W7 install upgraded without problem to W10 1909 and continue to run. However, a small batch I tried doing a clean install of W10 1909, all went well until it couldn't connect to the LAN, then I discovered that 1909 didn't include drivers for certain USB and LAN chipsets that were widely used back then...
>And my HP laptop from 2008 is running Windows 10
Hope you still have a drivers disk (CD recommended).
Encountered a problem with a bunch HP business desktops from circa 2012, they run W10 1909 just fine if they were upgraded from W7. However, on a few I did a clean install of W10 1909 and discovered that W10 1909 didn't include drivers for some USB and LAN chipsets widely used back then...
But all phone manufacturers do sell phones with support, just that the support is for product defects not software updates.
Which? clearly have failed to understand the problem, namely the need to update the sales of goods act to include software updates (along with a consumer friendly method of checking for updates and installing.
And all the stories about the dozens of apps in the Play store that are known to contain malware/spyware etc. that are still used by millions of users (who wants to wade through a list a few hundred long to find out if you've installed any - assuming that is you happened upon an article containing the list), when Google could (but doesn't) auto block/uninstall...
The Allies are always painted as meek and cowards for allowing Germany to break laws and treaties
Remember before there was "the Allies" there was the UK and France; the US were too busy doing business with Germany (to help them break laws and treaties) to care about what was actually happening in Europe - it took Churchill a lot of effort to see that actually taking sides and along with the Russians, joining "the Allies" was actually in their best interests.
>I've been wondering to myself why this isn't already a thing for ages
Cell size and switching speed.
GSM, as originally spec'd, if you were travelling faster than 60mph you would be switching cells faster than the network could keep up...
There was an ElReg piece some years back on mobile coverage for railways, basically, the masts needed to be some distance from the tracks to get a balance of connectivity and coverage.
It does currently, but sometime in the future the government expects to replace mainline services to "the north" ie. Birmingham and beyond - by HS2, allowing the existing WCML to be downgraded to a much slower commuter only service, giving the "increased capacity" they keep talking about, however don't expect the much needed investment so those trains will be stopping more often, not necessarily at stations... So it is going to be useful to be able to have better mobile connectivity just so that you can be amused by watching ancient football matches...
@doublelayer - Interestingly, the one point your Charity director didn't raise was funding. In my experience, many charities can not only get really cheap products from companies such as MS and Cisco (see https://www.charitydigitalexchange.org/ ) but also many donors are happy to fund capex as it is 'tangible', opex on the otherhand...
The other objection I've had is the perception (not totally invalid) that they have reduced support options available, whereas with MS for example, there are plenty of businesses with relevant experience, so if their IT consultant falls under a bus or succumbs to CoViD19...
As for your other points, I think whilst much has progressed since XP went EoL, the free software alternatives still have some way to go before they really are enterprise ready. However, the world isn't standing still and so business is in general signing up to the product sets that are familiar to them...
@AC - Don't disagree with your experience, particularly given how entrenched products from MS, Oracle et al are..
>I too had no idea money sent to TDF wasn't actually used for development.
Further enquiries are required here (ElReg?) as the TDF website is very unambiguous:
1)
Its objective, as defined in the statutes, is the promotion and development of office software available for use by anyone free of charge.
2)
"Donate
LibreOffice is made possible by the efforts of thousands of volunteers around the globe, and by the generosity of donors. Please support our efforts: your donation helps us to deliver a better product!
If TDF cannot legally pay developers to help it achieve its charitable objectives then it needs, as a matter of urgency, to reword its donation text and revise its charitable objectives.
If charity rules don't allow them to hire developers...
I think Thorsten Behrens (and TDF) needs to get some expert advice. From the information given there is no reason why TDF can't be a UK registered charity and hire developers etc. However, under UK charity rules, they would be well advised to have a commercial (Ltd) arm that handles all the commercial (ie. for profit activities) and drop feeds profits back to the charity (thus get around the various financial constraints that hinder charities from accumulating profits). I wonder whether German charitable status is different.
>a "free" product
Ready to install open source doesn't have to be free as in £0. It is just been the generally accepted pricing model.
TDF could charge the same price for LibreOffice as MS do for MS Office and still comply with the Free Software Definition ie. you are paying a licencing fee which grants you the defined freedoms and provides binaries for your chosen OS.
However, the unconditional freedom to redistribute undermines any charging model for the code itself...
So in answer to your question: "why would a commercial organization pay for support on a "free" product"
By using a free(dom) product, you are avoiding all the unnecessary licencing restrictions and overheads that companies like MS andOracle put on their products. Plus your support costs should be more reflective of your actual needs.
>if you lump Teams with Office for free you kill off Slack and any other kind of collaborative IM tool.
Have we forgotten IE already?
Just another effect of the walled garden.
However, yes, it probably is time for the EU to investigate whether MS, are abusing their market dominate positions in the business office desktop (local/cloud) applications space.
A commentard here coupla years ago recounted how he had personally audited some Huawei routers etc onsite in their factory, a few years previously.
He said they were all entirely running stolen Dell or Cisco code.
Would have been even more interesting if they had taken the case off the routers and looked at the boards etc.
>Vodafone is trying to make the point that the whole physical 5G radio spectrum for the UK could be operated as a virtual spectrum which is allocated on the fly to various operators, even down to regional variances between operators, and priced accordingly.
and the kit that best handles this scenario is, reportedly.... Huawei
>They can't do that, once committed patents cannot be withdrawn from a pool.
Well... What is a FRAND Patent?
I suggest Huawei's patents can be argued to be "IP products and services" which would seem to make them fall under the generic "goods and services" covered by the US government's trade restriction regulatons...
Their usage (to build products as opposed to contribution to Standards development) certainly does not fall under the exception "work with China’s Huawei to develop standards for 5G and other cutting-edge technologies". So looks like another exception is going to have to be put in place - like yesterday - otherwise Huawei can contribute patents to a FRAND pool, but US companies will be left jerking around in the wind when it comes to using them...
>Having made the tax rules...
Trouble is that we were told that Apple got a sweetheart deal that wasn't in the published tax rules and thus available to others, or is the court suggesting that it is open to any company to ask for and negotiate their own sweetheart deal Ie. just because it is an unwritten and generally not spoken about rule, doesn't mean it isn't legal if there is no rule prohibiting the use of unwritten rules...
Now are Ireland contesting the revised contribution to the EU that these additional monies flowing through the country represent.
The data centres aren't the problem here... The problem was how long it has taken UK government to wake up to the benefits of centralised procurement of widely used IT platforms.
The trouble however with such centralised procurement is the tendency to block change. So they buy MS, Oracle, Dell, Cisco etc. and make it much harder to both sell into government and for individual branches of government to select other products, such as those based on Open Source...
Rereading the article and also reading the indictment, the fingerprints of the NSA are all over the evidence. The smoking gun is revealed by the statement:
The FBI in response said that it had tracked Nikulin down to his Moscow apartment by following the hacker’s IP addresses and then confirmed it was him by observing his communications with others.
Remember Moscow is in Russia and I would assume Nikulin's Interent connection doesn't use a static IP address, so his ISP's systems would need to have been accessed...
Interestingly, no information is given about the identities of the three Co-conspirators - either online or physical.
>The FBI managed to track him down without a backdoor (or facial recognition).
Wouldn't be so sure about that, suspect somewhere in all the 'evidence' you'll find some "anonymous tip off" that resulted in the FBI just so happening to discover his IP address, location of his servers etc. etc.
Remember the prosecution only release the 'evidence' after they have constructed the evidence trial, not before. Expect also that they had numerous other negative accusations that weren't evidenced but were only there to help them portray the guy as a bad one for the benefit of the jury...
As you say, the stitch-up is just good old fashioned police work...
>and my latest concern is how to get a regular supply of face masks.
need to get out more, an entire cottage industry that has sprung up making these - as people confined to home rediscover their sewing machines...
Remember unless you're a hospital you don't need the medical grade of mask and even then you probably only need it if you're working on the CoViD19 wards.
So US big tech companies are going to incur increased recruitment costs...
Naturally they could avoid those costs by enhancing their overseas operations, which in turn, give increased opportunities for internal transfers and to pay even less US taxes than they do today...
>Given that GCHQ has spent at least half a decade pouring over the source code and hasn't found anything...
Forgetting your Edward Snowden; the issue isn't that the Huawei software is or might be compromised, the fact is that today US government agencies (aided by allies) have fully compromised global electronic communications.
Clearly, the issue with Huawei kit is that it is much harder to compromise because its manufacture is outside of the NSA's sphere of influence and thus the NSA (and its friends) stand to lose their data sources if the mobile networks adopt it to any great extent. Hence all the lobbying and spread of disinformation about Huawei...
The fact that our mobile networks have become potentially over-dependent upon equipment from China is a different problem.
>The waters are being muddied deliberately by telcos.
And the waters are being deliberately muddled by politicians with vested interests throwing FUD around: Just what aspect of US sanctions actually impact the “reliability” of Huawei equipment? Remember Huawei use ARM processors that are “UK-origin technologies”...
Also I would not be surprised if the ARM-Huawei licence agreements have been rewritten to show that all ARM is supplying Huawei going forward is "support" from ARM China...
What people are saying is that it is a totally pointless, feel-good bit of nonsense that will cause lots of problems while fixing none.
Whilst I agree with the pointless stupidity of the whole thing... there is one potential benefit...
To actually expurge all 'offensive' references, Linus's slaves/apprentices/minions/acolytes etc. will actually have to read (and to some extent understand) the code! Good luck finding all those abbreviated references where for example Master/Slave have been abbreviated to simply xyz_M and xyz_S - which should not be confused with abc_M(ono) and abc_(S)tereo...
>The online account with TomTom is online
She added that when Rose sold his Mazda, he did not delete his online account with TomTom and remains registered in its customer database to this day.
Well this comment raises a question about the relationship between the online account and the vehicle.
It would be sensible for TomTom to have users sign up with a personal account to which vehicles are attached. What isn't clear here is whether the online account was automatically set up for the vehicle but with a named user and thus needs to be separately cleared down when the vehicle is disposed of.
What is going to be interesting are all those vehicles that get written off ie. scraped without the owner being able to do a reset...
>This industry was built for growth, and that growth is all but gone...leaving even fewer choices for buyers.
The writing was on the wall years back - remember PC shipments have been in steady decline since 2011. Which suggests if your business (in 2020) is still predicated on market growth...
However, in such a market where the pressures on the very high volume system builders are increasing, there will be opportunities for efficient low volume builders. So yes the choice in the majors (think PC World) will be reduced, but the choice in the market is likely to be better albeit at a slightly higher price.
True, however, from the quotes in the article, it would seem that Digicert have all the data, just that their audit reports were deficient (ie. they didn't actually do the job they were intended to do). Hence they could resolve the problem by simply running corrected audit reports on the data...
Interesting, my daughter's school is also wedded to Team's, however, now after nearly 4 months her tutors are voting with their feet and are increasingly using Zoom for the ad-hoc tutor group stuff.
Also, they don't use Teams for consultations with Parents.
Not had any privacy issues with Zoom myself, but then we've set up people's profiles to always use the waiting room functionality.
>So I might just be missing something.
You are!
At one time I worked for a MS Gold partner and those in the MS tech support team were in so deep they didn't really have capacity/time to play with other products, so just didn't understand my issues with using Windows without third-party utilities on laptops for doing £work on multiple sites in different organisations (this was 1998~2007 and things aren't really any better today in W10) - their idea of mobile working was to rock up and connect their laptop to the OHP, spout a load of techno-marketing speel and leave.
Saw the same with Cisco kit (going back a long way here), to really get on top of it you need to be dedicated, so having mastered the command-line etc. it is easy to miss the fact that the competition have implemented a better management interface...
>The key is the 'set of rules' which are usually negotiated (tacitly) between participants early in the lifetime of a group within institutional norms...
I remember a two-part course where on the first day people sat wherever they wanted in the room, the tutor took a picture, the tutor took similar picture on each of the following days...
Three months later we had the second part, exactly the same setup, tutor took pictures, on the last day the tutor got the group to compare the sequence - it was only maverick's such as myself and those that we had obviously displaced that had changed seats...
It's just a 'team' wallpaper/backdrop.
So instead of individual's choosing their own backdrop for their stream (as available in Zoom), the recipient can select their own common backdrop for all streams in a call. Although it isn't clear whether each participant can set their own "Together" wallpaper or if it is imposed on all recipients on a call by the 'Teams' meeting convener.
Naturally, this begs the question as to where the video stream image manipulation processing is going on.
Given the video, I suspect it starts to fall apart if things get a little too dynamic, ie. people aren't behaving like 'perfect' talking heads.
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