Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius 1535 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2010
Give credit to the Torygraph commentards: they had demolished Foges long before El Reg picked up the case.
And yes, Rik Myslevsky, they really are right wing, as opposed to Reg commentards who seem to be mainly left.
[My tech comments generally get upvoted, but my political ones go down.]
The article talks about data "at rest" as opposed to dats "in transit". Data in transit is protected by session keys, generated by Diffie-Hellman or otherwise and largely secure.
Data "at rest" will be protected by fingerprint or pass phrase. In the UK, if you don't give up thst key on official request you will go to jail. People have indeed been jailed for that.
Since the objective is to send people to jail, why make all this fuss about crypto backdoors?
@Rik
"a somewhat right-leaning bunch" ??
Not at all! More like saying that Lenin was right wing compared with Trotsky. Certainly not the kind of people you would meet in the British Conservative Party, which is somewhere between the US Democrats and the US Republicans.
@TheVogon
The sea has risen by 200 feet or more since the peak of the last ice age about 20,000 years ago. Our remote ancestors could walk from France to Britain and Ireland with no more than a few river crossings, though perhaps they moved along coastline by boat. All that evidence is now deep under the sea, of course.
There have been four ice ages in the last two million years. The first three came and went long before we were burning coal and oil on an industrial scale.
How do the climate warmers explain that? They don't, of course, and they deserve to be utterly discredited.
@TheVogon
I stand by my hypothesis.
An active volcano can spew out a thousand tons of lava per second. Over a year this amounts to thirty thousand million tons of material. Imagine that there are many volcanoes, and that the lava contains an appreciable fraction of CO2. Then the increase in oceanic CO2 is accounted for.
@Thought...
For quantitative reasons. There has indeed been an increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere since the nineteenth century. Burning coal and oil might account for that, except that for every ton of atmospheric CO2 there are a thousand tons dissolved in the ocean.
So most of the CO2 from coal and oil would have dissolved in the ocean. Where, then, did the measured increase come from? Volcanoes, is my answer.
When that Iceland volcano erupted a few years ago, disrupting air traffic, it was probably pumping out as much CO2 as the whole of Britain's fuel consumption.
Most of the CO2 put into the atmosphere is natural, from volcanoes which are mostly under the ocean, so the green campaigners do not see them.
To solve this problem we need to conduct away all the heat from the Earth's core - easily done as the core is metallic. That just leaves the Earth's mantle, but the mantle heat will then be flowing back to the cold core rather than to volcanoes at the surface.
Simples.
Although there is still a problem with that other greenhouse gas, water vapour, produced when the sun shines on the oceans. Perhaps we should drain the oceans, into the new cool core.
@Stuart Longland
You are correct thet UK consumer law requires sold goods to be fit for purpose. But that does not necessarily cover purchass between businesses.
So you end up with contract clauses like: "The equipment shall be fit for purpose, including but not limited to being free from viruses...". It is impossible to explicitly mention everything.
I was standing for election to my Borough Council in England. The count began on the morning after polling day.
By about midday we had a result, although the number of votes did seem rather low. Then a very embarrassed official turned up. "Sorry, chaps, we've just found this extra ballot box."
All the officials were red-faced, that they had goofed. We candidates, however, were feeling, "Oh sh*t, we were just about to go home for lunch."
The count resumed after lunch. It did not change the result, but it did make the voting numbers look more respectable.
You raise a good question: what is it that makes us uniquely human? And is that important?
1. We are talking bipeds.
2. Many of us can do arithmetic. Note that arithmetic is not the same as recognising that a bunch of items has five of them. It is knowing that 4+1 = 3+2.
Is that important? Item 2 certainly is; it is evidence of an ability to go beyond immediate facts.
@Dropbear: If you play darts, someone has to keep score. Good arthmetic test, that, even if afer a while you will 'know' the result from experience.
'Education' is indeed bad if it makes classics graduates think they can pontificate on statistical questions using their 'generalist, rounded, people-handling abilities'.
Boris Johnson is a rare exception among classicists: I have read articles by him that actually do understand statistics. That is a rarity in any policial party.
I cannot imagine that lay people, i.e. politicians and journalists, will ever understand the difference between aggregated data and anonymous data.
Aggregated data would say, for example, the average blood pressure in postal area GU99 is P with standard deviation (*) Q. 'Anonymised' data says that Mr Z of GU99 9ZZ has blood pressure P. When the marketing droids also establish that Mr Z drives a red car and owns five computers, it all becomes uncomfortable.
It would be nice if database queries were restricted to aggregate data, but I don't see that as practical.
(*) Another term I have yet to see any journalist or poitician understand.
The article, at least as reproduced in El Reg, explains how microbes might survive. But the two most recent episodes of snowball earth were at 700 my ago and 600 my ago. By then life had evolved to algae and to animals with no shells or bones.
These relatively evolved life forms would probably need something like the volcanic havens suggested in a previous comment.
I get to the latest comment in the list and find you have beaten me to this suggestion.
Yes, encrypted zip and the password sent by snail mail.I have seen the US Department of Defense ask for contract bids to be submitted in that fashion, so that the bid is confidential until after the deadline for sending it in.
Other languages have similar arguments. A German was telling me once of the awful things the Austrians do to the German language. But as far as we 'auslaender' (foreigners) are concerned it is all German.
Then there was the Brazil tour guide telling us about the Portugueses of Brazil and Portugal. It felt very like the differences between Englishes across the Atlantic.
Then there are the 57 varieties of Spanish, and of Arabic: but to outsiders they are single languages.
Diffie-Hellman, as described in the article, does not guarantee who it is at the other end of the line. For a fixed landline circuit that is fine, but not on the packet-switched Internet.There, for something approaching a guarantee, you need public/private keys.
Then Able sends Baker a proposed key in Baker's public key. Baker returns that key using Able's public key. So each has confirmed the identity of the other.
Or have I misunderstood?
@sysconfig
As one who witnessed on site the shambles that was the Dungeness B construction,I would answer your question, "Can't we do it ourselves?" as "No, we can't".
An engineer there told me how he had been diverted to South Korea. In two years they turned a green field into a working power station. Then he got back to Dungeness. The only difference he saw was that there was more dust on various half built bits.
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