Posts by Joe Harrison

So where to next?

Wosign was the only place I could find for a free email (S/MIME) certificate. Don't want to get involved in whether or not they should be black-holed but it does leave me without a paddle when my cert expires.

Uninspiring choice of name for the ship

I'd have gone for Shooty McShootface

Mail readers

I doubt yer average Reg reader actually has any specific knowledge in depth about the years-long Assange story. I certainly don't. Of course as a handy substitute the media has provided a full-on Corbyn-style character assassination and it's frightening to hear otherwise intelligent people regurgitating that wholesale. Think for yourselves!

"The capabilities that were once indicative of a nation-state actor are now an affordable commodity for the private sector," reports Cybereason.<p?

This tries to say that the state and the private sector are competing equally for talent. Which can never be true because the state can pay in a coin unavailable to the private sector - the state has the power to make any awkward criminal charges just go away.

A decision at tax tribunal

www.thompsonstradeunionlaw.co.uk/information-and-resources/lelr/weekly-510.htm#checklist_approach

HMRC must avoid a "checklist approach" and look at the whole picture. Doesn't bode well for their checklist site then!

Who me? I'm just a regular tech guy

We spoke to Affinity's manager, Bill Collins, who checked out the page and pronounced himself baffled. They're a small computer repair shop, he said, with no links to the CIA.

He would say that, wouldn't he.

Meanwhile back in May 2000...

http://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-is-here-to-stay/

"Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" - Bob Young, founder of Red Hat.

He thought he was making a ludicrous analogy but it turned out he was making a prophecy.

When are we going to stop

When are we going to stop calling video surveillance "CCTV"?

I'm guessing the term "Closed Circuit Television" comes from the 1950s so that people would not get it mixed up with Proper Television you know with the Test Card and Watch With Mother.

They miss-sold their product to me

I bought a Lucky Dip but it wasn't lucky at all

Don't see the point

The cops in the warzone don't much care about finding out what's on your photos - they already know what's on them, they're photos of a warzone why else would you be there with a pro camera? OK they would still look at them for intelligence if they could but their real concern is not letting the atrocity photos out of the warzone so will confiscate your camera encrypted or not.

What these journos really need is an invisible camera or one that looks exactly like a camping stove.

I like em

I have one of their "kimsufi" dedicated servers, tiny thing and "only" 100Mb connection but 500GB storage, it's in France somewhere. 38 quid/year very happy with it.

Fear the Russian airstrike

Vladimir Putin sounds confusingly similar to Victorian Plumbing. He won't mess about with no court order.

Translation

"Certain other agencies from certain other countries have had a quiet word with me and told me to weaken our data protection standards"

Complexity is the enemy

The review implies that the app's internals with its mutating keys and so on are just too hard to understand. This doesn't sound good to me because effective crypto is already (as far as we know) a solved problem even using relatively simple algorithms and key material. Somebody understands how this app works and what's to stop them putting in their own unfindable backdoor.

Bloke was lucky

Anyone who has ever used a bow will know which is the "dangerous end" of an arrow - it's the one with a plastic notch to fit the bowstring. Eye injuries from this end are quite frequent. The other end is called the "lethal end" with good reason. It's simple to kill someone with an arrow and if this guy had shuffled off the burglar I doubt if "but he bent my car" would have kept him out of jail.

It's still free

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/accessibility/windows10upgrade

Always been like this

I have TOTP PayPal authentication switched on but it has always been useless because the login screen has a link saying "Don't have a key handy? Try another way" and then lets you login without the TOTP. Sounds like the guy messing with the URL has just found a different way to do that.

Our expensive PCs

People get used to consumer grade PCs with cheapo power supplies where you just plug in the mains cable and off you go. Our expensive "enterprise grade" boxes though have a not-very-visible rocker switch that you also have to turn on. Gets 'em every time.

I have to say I have given up being snarky with un-knowledgeable users. I used to get all frustrated about them "wasting my time" but what is the point.

Might be bigger pain than looks at first

On my work machine I regularly trip up on sites which Chrome tells me has failed to prove its identity and is insecure. What it really means is that I don't have a root certificate installed from WhateverCA Inc. I then click "OK go ahead anyway". Sometimes however Chrome refuses to let you continue to that site at all, which I think is called certificate pinning.

I certainly could not cope with an increase in this kind of behaviour, which would be the logical consequence if all sites used SSL.

It said I needed to have eight characters for my password

So I chose Snow White and the seven dwarves

why now?

When I was a kid people used to fly RC model aeroplanes all the time. They had 5cc petrol engines and I'm pretty sure they were bigger and heavier than modern drones. So why is it only a problem now?

double bluff?

If this guy thinks he can detect fake grammarisms then it would logically have been equally possible for the originator to be able to generate credible fakes to put people off the trail?

When I worked for an international company with its HQ outside the UK we were quite good at mimicking other regions' use of English when responding to the many "employee surveys"

The clever way...

The pop-up reads "Important security information - click here to read it (NSFW)"

Everyone would click that, maybe even bookmark it for when they got home.

Their control freakery drives you mad

Just spent part of the weekend helping a friend who had an iphone 4 with smashed screen but it still just about worked. Friend got a replacement iphone 4 from somewhere but wanted to copy 200+ phone numbers from the old one.

What a nightmare. Every normal phone from about the 1990s has allowed you to do this by copying your contacts onto the SIM then swap the SIM to the new phone. But no, this is not good enough for Apple. Instead had to do some complicated messing about with "itunes" and a laptop.

Did recover the contact records in the end but what are Apple thinking, that people will forever keep paying a substantial premium for their products "just because"?

wtf

Surely from the point of view of the government this must be one of their top five crucially intergalactically important computer systems. I mean it's where all their money comes from. Why are they even thinking of hoping to save a few quid by messing with it?

Simple to turn off tracking

By default the total surveillance tracking mode will be on, for your security and convenience.

No privacy problem though because all end users will have the choice to turn it off via a simple method of reflash with new ROM (instructions freely available in Chinese) then sideload a tty app to open a console window and enter a few 64-hex-digit codes plus one or two simple unix commands.