Posts by Trevor_Pott

"at least one man argued that a lot of the internet is just plain wrong - obscene, fraudulent, seditious..., and it should be stopped."

I believe religion is just plain wrong. I'll give up the internet if we all outlaw religion. I think living in a world where religion is a crime but we don't have the internet is probably going to result in more peace than a world in which the internet is monitored but you can do fucking anything in the name of Jesus.

Oh, what's that? Religion is somehow "good", and the internet is "bad"? Who the fuck said you get to judge? My opinion's as valid as yours, or "that one man".

Put up or shut up, eh?

Re: Someday

"Someday we will no longer have hateful bigots using slurs like "homophobe" but today is not that day."

Personally, I prefer to call homophobes "self-hating twatdangles who waste their lives dreaming sweet dreams of gargling an unlimited line of enormous sweaty cocks but who are too cowardly to unbridle their lust". Sadly, it's just that little bit too long for casual conversation.

Re: Love and Hate

Hi. Individuals of all persuasions have the same rights as any other, from marriage to health care, from freedom of speech to the right to a fair trial. At least, here in Canada. It's in our constitution.

You can even be as much of a conservative fuckbag as you want...you just can't use you personal belief in a sky fairy, fear of things going into your arse or general douchebaggery to infringe upon the rights of others. Your rights end where they infringe upon the rights of others.

Also in our constitution.

Canada has it's problems, eh? But treading gays like unpeople isn't one of them.

Re: Trolls

systemd was sent from a hell specially created to consume the last remnants of logic, rationality and long term software viability to make all of humanity suffer and weep in endless torment.

I mean, what were we talking about?

Re: This thread is being pre-modded.

"Is it a fact that El Reg note a significant number of abusively homophobic postings when this kind of story is published?"

Yes. Or at least, so the subeds have told me. There are days, sir, when their depression and despair for the path of humanity leaps across instant messenger and takes form.

Re: Who cares?

"I couldn't give a damn if someone is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Hetrosexual, white, black, coloured, male, female, disabled, non-disabled or what ever label people feel the need to apply to someone as long as they are not a complete ars*h0le and they do their job to a minimum standard"

Two items:

1) Disabilities cost more to accommodate. They may limit what a person can do or increase the costs of them being able to do so. Employer and employee need to be aware of these limits and costs. Surprises lead to anger, and that's bad for everyone.

2) Transgender individuals can cause a bit of a fracas around "what bathroom they use". This could be due to transphobia of other staff, union/muni/province/federal laws or simply an out-of-date corporate bylaw system. It is best to do the research to ensure both employer and employee know the rules and have in place a means of dealing with complaints.

So some care has to be given to the individual's differentiation from others. We are not interchangeable blocks.

Re: There are no words...

"I am so disenfranchised I could not overcome my desire to post about my disenfranchisement with this news" would seem to convey the sentiment adequately.

Re: Seems to have been an 'open scret'

"now he's officially out you may find use of the term 'Fruity Firm' comes with unfortunate implications"

...why? Is "fruity" actually considered perjorative? I thought it was one of those terms that the gay community had "owned". At least, the few gay friends I have make "fruit" jokes all the time, refer to company that cater to gays as "fruity" and love riffing on Apple as the "fruit" factory on about 12 different levels of meta.

I never can keep up with what terms are supposed to be offensive these days. It seems as soon as we collectively settle on either a slang term or an official term for a given group someone cries "that's offensive" and we have to go make up a new term.

The latest one to bite me being that apparently we can't refer to "people descended from those individuals who violently came across the land bridge in the {at least second} migration, murdered most of the peoples from the first migration (excepting the Innu) and populated the Americas" as "Natives" or "Native Canadians". It must be "First Nations", otherwise it's offensive. And then someone else spoke up and said "no! First Nations is offensive, we should be..."

I didn't hear the rest, it all devolved into shouting.

Does anyone know of an official list of current politically correct terms for various demographics, preferably with a per-country, or even per-administrative-region breakdown so that we can keep track of this all?

*sigh*

Re: Good for him!

"I'm delighted he's free to do what he wants, but equally I have no wish to know about it."

I want even less to know what you want, and I care only enough to dislike you.

Re: Good for him

Your religion offends me, sir.

I ask that you not practice it in front of me.

Re: Cache

DRAM cache is never the solution to a disk array. Fucking. Never. Oh, life's good until you run out of bloody cache, then you're not going from DRAM to NAND, you're going from DRAM to crushing up flowers and smearing the walls with the results.

Disks are slow and horrible. They are a last resort, nothing more. Every time you have to read or write directly to disk you have failed. And if the only think between your application and those disks is DRAM, you are setting yourself up for failure at the moment of highest demand...right when you need it to just work more than you've ever needed it to do so before.

Re: Someone beat me to markham.

"you and I might not accept the TPP without a fight, but it sure as shit looks like Stephen Harper is buying it, lock, stock, barrel *and* ball gag."

Harper's time is up.

"In the US, internet piracy is a criminal matter. Has been since the NET act. Don't know about Canada."

Civil matter in Canda. With the maximum combined fine an individual can pay for copyright infringement being $5000.

It's the proper balance. If you are caught committing copyright infringement you get a fine that hurts - and hurts a lot, for the poor - but not so much that it ruins your life.

But there is no "$150k per infringement" crap. And you don't pile infringement upon infringement to achieve millions of dollars worth of monies due. You cough up $5k, the artists at least get something out of the deal and the life of the copyright infringer isn't ruined.

And the content MAFIAA hate this. Thus the TPP demands.

They're just bitter we have a sane and rational made in Canada copyright solution and won't bend over and take the US's TPP copyright demands with a smile and a thank you.

...why did you do the math on that? I mean, just...you have too much time on your hands.

No, my position is slightly more nuanced.

What Microsoft have built is good, provided it is very carefully marketed and positioned and what it can and can't do spelled out clearly at multiple points so that nobody is given false hope, intentionally or not. I'd go so far as to say that the word "prevention" probably shouldn't be used here. Maybe "data leak/loss resistance." Think "fire proof" versus "fire resistant".

This will mean lost sales as people who might have been bamboozled don't buy. It will also mean some others will buy anyways, and combine solutions.

None of that takes away from the solid technical work done. The problem to hand is a hard problem to solve. And, quite frankly, I honestly believe that Microsoft have done the hardest part of this in the creation of their existing technologies.

What remains is more political than technological. Zero-knowledge encryption of Azure + Office 365 can be implemented without too much fuss. They choose not to, nor to even discuss why. And if their government did turn around and tell them "you can't do that", then yes, I would say they should serious consider packing up and leaving.

I don't have a problem with the technology Microsoft is offering. I think it is good technology. But I absolutely have a problem with how it is generally marketed, how the PRs present it to journos, and how every bit of training information focuses on "look at all these features, wow!" but spend little (if any) time being clear about what it can't and won't do.

The issue here is highly political. The tech is a good start, but it is resistance-class, not prevention class. Overselling is likely to do way more harm than good.

And ultimately, it is half assed. The endgame solution required involves making some tough choices to stick up for the customer in the face of massive political pressure to do otherwise. Microsoft is out there putting hundreds of millions into trying to convince us that they're "the good guy", and that technologies like DLP "demonstrate their commitment to privacy and security".

If people start to believe that tripe - and judging by the commenters in this forum, more than a few do - then that is dangerous. And that's where the half-assedness of this whole thing absolutely becomes a real concern.

The code can be respect-worthy while the corporate positioning of the product - and for that matter, the company's overall stance across a line of products - is dangerous. And thus we have a very typical Microsoft situation in which the technology is praiseworthy but the solution (notably, how it is ultimately presented in virtually all official content on the subject) is half-assed.

I don't see any of the above as "steam rising". If anything, it fills me with a sens of...I don't know...defeat. Tired acceptance. Depression. A loss of faith in humanity, even. The sort of feeling of abject impotence and helplessness one feels when they learn that another umpteen billion dollars was squandered by politicians.

I don't have the zeal to be passionate about anything any more, sir. I have the outrage fatigue, and it's largely why I confine my thoughts on the matter to forums nobody cares about and nobody reads.

Donning the armour, saddling Rocinante and making another pass at the damned windmill just isn't in me anymore. I report what I see. I vent my thoughts into the feckless void of El Reg's forums where noone of consequence will see. That's all there is.

Crusades and causes are a game for the young.

Whereas I think that trying to do this piecemeal is worse than not doing it at all. Address the whole of the issue or don't bother. Make people go elsewhere to other vendors that will address the whole of the issue.

But Microsoft's half-assed approach gives a false sense of security, especially when combined with aggressive marketing that is making their DLP seem like it far more than it is. If you have a half-assed solution, be up front about it. But they aren't, really. Not unless you're an uber-nerd and prepared to pour over every least bloody stitch of information on the topic.

So I accuse Microsoft - and others - of shoddy half measures, whilst trying to market as being adequate. It's not. Not by a long shot. And, like shitty antivirus vendors (oh, wait, Microsoft again!) that do things half-assedly, they do far more harm than good by giving a false sense of security.

Shit or get off the pot. But I'm sick of gigacorps half-assing this. It's too important to let them get away with it.

No, I'm talking about DLP as it is being talked to me. DLP in conjunction with tagging at the OS level, mobile security, endpoint security etc. Whatever the term may have been used for, it is being expanded by Microsoft's own marketing droids to cover a more generic "who can access your data, and how".

This seems to be including new proposed offerings like "only allowing certain forms of content to be viewed inside DRMed, tracked online applications" etc. The thing is, if you are going to from "tagging and alerting things as they leave exchange" to "access monitoring and control across the entire data life cycle" (which is absolutely what I am being told is what this term is supposed to now encompass) then I don't think that you can simple "wish away" the threat of malicious actors MITMing (or PATRIOT acting) your data whilst on it's way to, or stored in, the cloud.

So: DLP is either very narrowly "transport rules in exchange" or it is "data lifecycle management" in it's totality. You don't get to pick an choose which aspects of data security and access control you cover just because some of them make you uncomfortable, or you find them inconvenient.

Since Microsoft seem to pushing "DLP" as "more than just exchange transport rules" then I say they've failed until they've addressed all aspects of data lifecycle management.