Posts by Jaymax

Reputations...

Torbjörn Hartman: a senior research engineer at a nuclear particle physics lab http://www.tsl.uu.se/

Roland Pettersson: Chemist, senior lecturer http://katalog.uu.se/empInfo/?languageId=1&id=XX1360

Bo Höistad: Professor, nuclear physics http://katalog.uu.se/empInfo/?languageId=1&id=XX1060

Lars Tegnér: Professor, electrical engineering http://katalog.uu.se/empInfo/?languageId=1&id=N9-1431

...

And basically Uppsala University as an institution, if it turns out Rossi managed to dupe the four of them.

the Other Side of the Story

Why is the CyberBunker website running about as successfully as if it were the target of an enormous DDoS, and Spamhaus's website loading almost instantly? Weird. I'd've thunk at least el Reg would do a quick check before pushing out the same PR everyone else is publishing so excitedly.

Meanwhile, black helicopters en-route to www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417142,00.asp

Also, background:

webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:3mqT64NVF2AJ:cyberbunker.com/web/spamhaus.php%2B%26cd%3D1%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk

Freudian insides

>> “I've worked for companies that spend a lot of time and money trying to run down dodgy internet bitch sites, and also heard from marketing teams that are looking for ways to collect the criticism to help approve the effectiveness of their communications"

Once upon a time, in the good old days, when I was your age &c, companies would/might be interested in criticism to help IMprove the quality of their PRODUCT.

Just sayin'

Same old same old

"Have we got compensation from the IT company?" morphs into acceptance for just the company being named...

Atos became Accentures partner in crime at the Rural Payments Agency (the partnership being useless non-oversight that allowed both companies to keep supping at the fountain of taxmoney, while delivering shit with just enough solid bits in it to reassure with words like 'contingency' and "immediate full team mobilisation" to appease the idiots who gave them the keys to the garden of government contracting in the first place.

The question needs to get back to "Have we got compensation from the IT company?"; followed by "why not" and "how to you expect to keep you senior civil service position unless you can demonstrate exactly why you haven't sued them already.

Register deoing puff peices now?

Nice shot of W8 on a tablet there vultures, back in the real world, how about a photo of some dude (not necessarily balding or penified) sitting at a desk with a keyboard, couple of monitors, METRO nonsense, and a very frustrated/perplexed-with-a-side-order-of-angry expression as ?he pushes mouse towards non-existent programs menu, &c.

Six tenths of a kilometre?

at that point, it was more like nine sixteenths of a kilometer downrange.

-tsk-

Meh, firmware might be the wrong place to be looking for the scariest stuff

Is it just me who wonders about the high-end, quality, closed-source freebie suites of Android software that come out of China (or anywhere for that matter)

By the time you've installed a 3rd-party launcher, locker, messaging app, and keyboard app from some crowd with apparently large resources, and seemingly zero monetisation from their efforts, it's entirely possible you've compromised yourself to an extraordinary extent.

I've decided I'm not going to GO there with certain apps since upgrading to Aurora-ICS.

Not that I'd make an interesting target, but I wonder how many of the worlds top politicians are running a nice 'safe' reputable phone handset, on a local network where at least any taps are from one's own spooks, rather than the competitions; while meanwhile the cool 'core' apps they've installed (and probably themed in 'patriotic' colours) are piping off all sorts of potentially interesting content to spooks of a different stripe.

A backdoor in plaintext in a firmware system file on a cheap device isn't nearly as scary as one well hidden in relatively awesome and popular closed-source freeware. You might trust your lovely Samsung Nexus or US Govt approved Dell, but who paid for the development of that cool launcher app you show off to your iPhone using friends?

Meh. Essential Context.

Oreskes, Naiomi: "Merchant of Doubt", ISBN:978-1-59691-610-4

At least...

... UK Gov didn't keep purchasing increasingly expensive equine defibrillators, RPA/Accenture style. About time these private consultancies paid for a bit of the stuff they siphon off the tax system.

Bit surprised that CSC went this way however, given their role as a placer of intelligence gatherers into foreign parts and all - I'm sure the actually important stuff they do for the UK Govt won't be affected by a bit of f#(&ing up the health service...

May I provide linkage?

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/hccb/about.aspx

If I want to find a vertical search engine

I imagine I'll google for 'vertical search engine'

The last thing I want is one search engine pointing me to results on another search engine. If Google is pushing such nonsense down the results list, that's just good customer service.

If a vertical search engine wants hits, maybe it should find channels to advertise itself directly to folks operating in that vertical - I suggest Google adwords, I hear it can be pretty effective at targetting, and you get your results showing right alongside ... ...

Precisely.

Wanting your competitor to give you free advertising is just dumb.

---

PS: Note to the big G: Can you feel the Googlelove? Well, kindly trot over to my prior post and taste some Googlehate+

"countries with oppressive attitudes to their citizens or their citizens’ communications"

Thing is, Mr Schmidt, that includes the US and the UK.

If you don't believe it, take off your tinted glasses and spend some time on YouTube - you own that now, right? So you could even get one of your lackeys to put a watchlist together for you.

Sure, it's relative. No one is saying 'The West' is as bad as (for example) Iran.

And if you don't think it's scary that one company should have access not only to all our habits and interests, in extraordinary detail, but also to our assured legal identities and our social networks, then you are a tool, in multiple senses. I've resigned myself to it now, with G+. I given up that particular fight. That makes me sad - in particular it makes me sad that it should be Google, about the only major tech company I had any respect left for (thank Twitter for keeping the flag of decency aloft), that forced me into defeat.

But I will still try and keep to the moral high ground; I will still strive to fight for and/or support that which is RIGHT; and so I will still be a thorn in the side of oppression; you're just making it a hell of a lot easier for those with power, an agenda, and perverted morals to monitor, and oppress where 'necessary' voices of dissent.

I don't know if there's a dedicated fibre running from the Googleplex to the NSA* - maybe there is, maybe there isn't. Is there? Do you know? Are you sure? Can you really be sure?

Cos I'm sure as damn that there are folks in the intelligence world who would like one.

El Reg FAIL!

http://www.imax.com/spacestation/html/ss_010710_3.html

Only a decade late to the party.

El Reg, I am dissapoint. Your Special Projects Division should probably get veto on your space stories.

"When the IMAX 3D cameras return to Earth, they will have spent more than two years filming in Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers, on seven U.S. Shuttle missions, and inside and outside the International Space Station."

And before anyone mutters about IMAX being FILM not VIDEO, check the headline.

0° ice to 0° water conversion - A boring, serious, post and question

I -know- this is a dumb question, I'm -sure- it's impossible that the models fully consider and include this energy-sink, but I've yet to see comment on it anywhere.

We all know that floating ice, like all around Santa's place, doesn't raise sea levels as it melts, right. But as anyone who took physics in high-school knows, it still takes a lot of energy to turn the solid ice into liquid water, even though there's no actual change in temperature.

Have a look at this chart ...

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2.png?%3C?php%20echo%20time%28%29%20?

... especially the last decade, and the change in trend a decade ago.

ie: the initiation of an estimated loss of 10^12 m^3 of ice

Making some poor assumptions to keep things easy:

- 1 m^3 ice = 1^3 kg (of course, ice is a bit lighter that liquid water, but whatever)

- the ambient temperature is a constant 0° (meh)

Q=mL => Q=10^15 kg * 334 kJ-kgm−1 = 3.34^18 kJ 'sunk' into the biosphere with no net temperature increase. Of course, this 'warming safety valve' only works while there's a floating polar cap to melt...

hum... I'm thinking I should maybe ctrl-c this and go ask somewhere other than the reg...

Why transported to England

Dear Reg (unless anyone who knows the answer),

Can you ask some legal type up north what the rules are around what crimes are required to be alleged or whatever to get some accused crim rendered to the south for interrogation?

It does seem a slightly interesting matter - can the Met just decide for themselves to go nab someone from a significantly devolved bit of blighty?

When I was an independant contractor at the Rural Payments Agency:

I bemoaned load and often that Accenture had basically fitted little more than a faucet into the government coffers to be turned on and off at will.

Unsurprisingly, I wasn't overly popular with senior RPA management - they did keep renewing my contract though, I assume because I (like most of the other independent IT contractors) was actually delivering value.

I have to add that there were a small number of Accenture staff who managed to both give a damn and be competent - but this was utterly not representative.

I will never forget being told by a senior RPA manager that I had to realise that the 'solution' was only one part of the 'contract'; and the 'contract' was the authoritative bit. That's how incompetent they were - this civil servant manager - who kept getting promoted - could not comprehend that her precious contract ONLY existed to facilitate the implementation of a functioning, workable solution.

I can kind of excuse the incompetence of RPA's management - to an extent - it wasn't malicious, just tragic (AFAIK - one Accenture guy once told me [+ one other independant consultant] he was very uncomfortable with something he had learnt about the way the programme was being controlled at the Accenture end, but wouldn't be specific).

But Accenture could not have not known what they were doing - it often seemed they were determined to put in systems and components that seemed virtually designed to guarantee future complex change requests, when it would take LESS time and LESS development to support the necessary options from the start.

As final proof - I offer that they resisted, HARD, ever utilising or delivering a data dictionary of any sort, for a long long time - and when they finally did, it was a useless, incomplete, retrospective document - that they charged a fortune for.

Sad :-(

The above are solely my opinions and impressions, informed from being engaged by the RPA for several years of mind numbing frustration. I used to think that if the chance ever appeared to see Accenture dragged into court and sued by HM Govt for what they did, I'd document as much as I could to help see them pay for what they did. These days, I can barely be arsed writing these posts every once in a while when the topic cycles through the news again.

Oh, and please, there are a lot of hard-working civil-servants at the RPA, who don't deserved to be knocked as being 'jobsworthies' or the like - they are just powerless against the culture.

Abandonment?

"What I can promise you is that we will not just abandon Symbian users or developers," Kochikar says.

Which I'd say is 100% true. Long before the time Nokia could come up with a coherent strategy for abandoning it's devs (or a strategy for not abandoning them) users and dev's will have long since abandoned Nokia.

However, having observed the race between Novell NDS and MS Dir Svcs (ie: in the beginning a really capable network directory product vs a myth followed by a pile of shite, eventually followed by a decent system, but still (I think, been out of it for about 3 yrs) lacking some of the best aspects of NDS), who's to really say what the future holds...

Nokia: asphixiated in a cloud of MS FUD.