* Posts by Voland's right hand

5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011

Hole-y ship: ISS 'nauts take a wander to crack Soyuz driller whodunnit

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By the time the photos are published,

They were live streamed to both Houston and Star city. Very cute set-up using a McGuivered GoPro. The guys from GoPro should pay some sponsorship money to the Russians. In addition to that the area was under at least two of the external cameras. That was mostly live streamed too.

Sorry Putin, nobody believes you or your lackeys any more.

Daily mail overdose? There is one thing you need to remember every time dealing with him is that it is the minimisation of lies by him personally is what makes him exceptionally dangerous. You can count on the fingers of one hand times he himself has been caught red-handed in the last two decades. In fact, we lie more.

Example from last two weeks: His statement: "Kerch straights are closed due to inclement weather". Our statement: "Russia is blockading the Kerch straights". Let's check who is lying and who is telling the truth, shall we?

Step 1: Historical record of wind on accuweather for the duration of the blockade. Wind at 50knots, gust at 80knots.

Step 2: Check the wind at which the straights are closed. Choice of sailing almanac, Google or just ask someone who has worked in the area (I have done all 3): 15 m/s, namely 29 knots.

Step 3: Check the ship movement with a wind overlay on top on www.marinetraffic.com. Realtime is free, for historic unfortunately you will need to part with a couple of pounds. Wind goes up, traffic stops. Wind goes down traffic starts.You can also see the size of the queue, width of the channel and the fact that it is run to schedule strictly one direction at any time too. That is why everyone complies with what the dispatcher says - from a queue of 100+ ships on average on either side.

I am leaving you to make the calculation of how much money was spent and from what budget to promote the "blockade news". Suffice that AP, Reuters, Guardian and all major newspapers carried stories without doing as much as minimal verification versus current weather observations and forecast.

I have said it again and again and again. The reason why everyone who could get their mitts on a good MW or shortwave in USSR listened to the Beeb Russian service in those days and NOT TO RADIO FREE EUROPE was that the Beeb did not lie and did not need to lie - it was true news. While Free Europe did and got caught plenty of times. In the propaganda war, lies will win you the occasional battle. Only THE TRUTHwill win you the long term war and that is something we are failing to realise. Instead of that we are having our BIG GUNs lie like 10p per post Internet troll from Prigozhin's mob. That is bad for us in the long term. And good for him (it takes a big overdose of Daily Mail not to see that).

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Re: Bits of foil

Is that not a really bad thing?

Not really. Solar "pressure" will blow it out of the way in a couple of hours. Tops.

In any case, the samples should prove definitively if it is done in orbit or not. Even "space grade" materials oxidise, doubly so when they are being drilled. But not in vacuum. So the chemical composition of the "scrape" will give the answer.

Boffins build bugged bees bearing backpacks

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Never read it, is it any good ?

Passable. You have to keep in mind that some of the political aspects of the background to Greg Mandel's exploits were written in the days when it looked like the Bliarism will rule forever.

All in all it is not as good as the hell going quantum in Night's Dawn or the Primes, Humans and Post-Humans in the Commonwealth Saga + Void Trilogy. It is a good read though (keep in mind - the book mentioned is No 3).

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Perhaps one day the assassin wasp.

You need to pay copyright fees. The closing page of this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nano-Flower-Greg-Mandel-Book-ebook/dp/B003GK21AS

Supernovae may explain mass extinctions of marine animals 2.6 million years ago

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Re: Mass extinctions is what you get

Megalodon did not need any friggin lasers.

https://www.livescience.com/14255-shark-jaws-worlds-largest-auction.html

And a more scientific one:

https://mobile.twitter.com/SmithsonianArch/status/918520389281730561

Super Micro says audit found no trace of Chinese spy chips on its boards

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Re: I so believe this

or anyone but the Chinese, because if its China

China does not publish what it lifts for now. So from the perspective of demonstrating that there is little difference between a "special" hole in your pants and being pantless they are not particularly useful.

Waymo presents ChauffeurNet, a neural net designed to copy human driving

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California != the world

In other words, people generally don’t crash or veer off track enough for machines to learn from such mistakes. Neural networks are notoriously data hungry; it takes them millions of demonstrations in order to learn a specific task.

Depends who was your driving instructor and where did you learn to drive. If you learned to drive in Northern and Eastern Europe and in winter, there is a 50%+ chance that your instructor has demonstrated you both a spin and how to regain control. In fact, that is what people teach their kids to do in places in USA too. Just not in California.

Reading the article - it is a major step forward, but I still would not trust a Waymo car to be anywhere near me with as little of 2 inches of snow on the road.

Register Lecture: Right to strike when your boss sells AI to the military?

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In UK - No

Right to strike when your boss sells AI to the military?

Thatcher took care of it after the BAE strike to prevent Pinochet to get some toys. You are not allowed to say NAE PASARAN any more. Even if your employer takes a contract to supply Boer War style concentration camp equipment. For example something to implement the ordinance of the council of ministers of a particular government we support dated 8th on November for the "mandatory internment of national minorities from war zones for their own safety (*)". You cannot strike on that. You can quit, but you cannot strike.

Dunno about the rest of the world. France is definitely yes, Germany probably a yes too though they hardly need to go that far, the reps on the boards tend to take care of stuff like that. USA - probably depends on state quite a bit. As they say YMMV

(*)As this is one of the languages I can read, but do not have native fluency in, I will not translate it. I do understand the language well enough to guarantee the contents though - it is exactly that. A cut-n-paste from Stalin's "Chechen Management" programme improved by taking into account the similar efforts of Brits to manage Boers and Americans to manage the Japanese.

IBM is trying to throttle my age-discrimination lawsuit – axed ace cloud salesman

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Not quite

Discovery (known in the rest of the common law world as disclosure)

Discovery is quite different from disclosure.

Discovery is "gimme all your sh*te within a mile radius of X,Y, Z. I will do a fishing expedition through it". The only way to limit it is to somehow negotiate a 3rd party to do the fishing expedition.

Disclosure is "gimme items X, Y, Z which fit the following precise description".

As a result, civil lawsuits in USA which does discovery cost an astronomical amount - you pay by the hour to lawyers, experts, etc to narrow down what can be looked at and what is admissible. They look at relatively "raw" material and thus can charge a very substantial number of hours. The mere process can bankrupt (and does so) Joe Average citizen and is a constant feeding through for large corporation lawyers who get most of their timesheets by fighting off disclosure requests or fighting for disclosure requests. As a side effect a lot of "private" corporate information ends up temporarily living in other people's hands - something UK parliament leveraged to everyone's advantage only a week or so ago.

Compared to that the cost of a civil lawsuit in other countries is significantly lower and it is started only if the litigant is pretty confident that the opponent possess exhibits X, Y, Z requested in disclosure.

Privacy, security fears about ID cards? UK.gov's digital bod has one simple solution: 'Get over it'

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Re: How long before.....

After we (perhaps) get national ID cards, how long before there is a thriving underground traffic in fake IDs?

In this day and age - nope. The ID is simply a manifestation of a (need to know) fraction of your digital record in the national ID system and it can be queried at the roadside by any cop. At least that is how it works in Eu. In fact, some forces now have the relevant apps on the phones to read the biometric/rfid chips at the ID and do a 3 way check - what's printed, what's written on the chip and in the database.

A fake ID to pass that will need 3 letter resources and is pretty much outside whatever is available to fakers.

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Re: @ Voland's right hand: There is no advantage in universal ID

That is not the case here in Germany, where the recording of such data is very limited and compartmentalised.

It is also a requirement which Germany has enforced via the Shengen agreement on EVERY signatory to Shengen, every Shengen aspiring country and most countries which were seeking some form of visa free travel from Eu _AFTER_ the first Shengen went into force. Even Turkey had to put in access control and limit scope of access to its own National Identity register for their civil servants.

That is something which has earned them eternal gratitude of the rest of Eu (and not just Eu) and it is also the REAL reason why UK Home Office continuously insisted about "not wanting" to be part Shengen. It is also the real reason why certain political circles in the UK continue to beat the "No Papieren Bitte here". The current ID-less means and ways give them a nearly unfettered data access to the subject data which they hold today. Very few departments have any access controls on it (police has some and AFAIK that is about it). A national register done to current Eu requirements will instigate fine grained access control and logging of all requests and put an end to that. No Whitehall mandarin will allow that.

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Re: "...universally acclaimed digital ID system which nowhere in the world has yet,"

"...universally acclaimed digital ID system which nowhere in the world has yet,"

Bulgaria has had a complete national ID database and a complete national digital register indexing all the stuff state has on the individual since 1977. That includes even stuff like parking tickets.

Funnily enough - it was the LEAST OPPRESSIVE Eastern Block regime.

It kept every single bit of it after 1989 and it has improved it to comply with the Shengen standards (*). Did anyone, even one person in the whole country ask for this to be burned ceremonially on the Yellow Bricks in front of the Parliament as a symbol of totalitarian oppression? F*ck no. Nobody. Not a single person had that thought.

By the way, even today it is a significantly less of a privacy invasive one nation under CCTV than UK.

Estonia is a whipper snapper - its national ID dates from a late 90-es projects which the Scandinavians ran for themselves and donated some of the results to the Baltic states. Estonia just cranked the dial on the "hand-me-down" stuff a bit to pretend that it is very advanced on the subject.

(*)There are also nowdays digital certificate annexes to it and you can sign digitally anything and everything (that part is optional) - title deeds, contracts, tax returns, etc. I used to have one as far back as the early 2000s to deal with all the business I do there.

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There is no advantage in universal ID

There is no advantage in universal ID. ID by itself is not particularly useful.

There is an obvious advantage in using universal ID as an indexing mechanism to collate and organize the data the government has on you.

The question is simply - do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. There is a plethora of current databases using all kinds of data as an index. So the question is plain and simple: does a unified ID reduce the cost without any additional expense to privacy compared to the current HMRC, NI, NHS, Passport, DVLA etc data sources (I would be surprised if there is a single citizen left who is not any of them).

If not f*** off.

If it reduces privacy further than the current requirement to supply a number of "additional documents" some of which like bills are actually an invasion of privacy, then it is f*** off too. If not, well, there is no point to go into post-WW2 reminiscence mode about it. There are plenty of "database nations" out there where every single bit the government has on you (even your parking tickets) is organized in a central database and neatly indexed by your national ID. A lot of them are actually at least as free as UK and have better human rights/surveillance/etc situation. So clearly, a national ID is not an impediment to that.

In any case, it is quite likely that it will end up being a requirement for most version of Deal/No-Deal arrangement for visa-free travel with the Eu so there will be little choice on this matter. In that case it will be indeed: "Get over it".

The internet is going to hell and its creators want your help fixing it

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Re: The US, Europe and China.

Leave EU suddenly got expanded to leave ECHR also after all

I start thinking that this is the plan all along. Whatever level of stiffness the BrExit, if it has any form of formal agreement with the Eu ECHR has to stay. The only way to remove May's Pet Hate (tm), the jurisdiction of the ECHR is the complete lack of agreement. Call me a cynic, but it looks like she has been running down the clock to cause exactly that.

Doom: The FPS that wowed players, gummed up servers, and enraged admins

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One of the things Carmack will pay for at the perly gates

But as Carmack infamously said - “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not important.”

While being a step up in terms of graphics Doom and other Id Games took the game industry back in terms of game AI and held it there for decades. The success of a game where the "AI" is half a page of C prescribing random shuffling about made nearly everyone else skimp on it for more than a decade. It also decreased investment into other genres like flight simulators, strategy, etc with everyone going head over heals to do FPS.

As far as "the story in the porn movie", sure, tell that Peter Molyneux, Glenn Wichmann and a few others.

Bethesda blunders, IRS sounds the alarm, China ransomware, and more

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Re: Microsoft took the step of notifying thousands of individual recipients

How did they do that? By sending out letters using the postal system?

More interesting is how did they manage to figure out who the targets are. OK, I can grok how they know the ones which use Office365 and the like as the fishing mails hit Microsoft mail servers. That, however is likely to be only a fraction of the target audience if the target audience is big corporates.

So how do they know where to send the notifications? Did the Bear suddenly became "The One Birdie Told Me". That makes for a very shape-shifting Bear. Alternatively, someone just needs to continue pumping the narrative as it is a slow news day and there is nothing suitable on the news to howl about from branches.

Linux.org domain hacked, plastered with trolling, filth and anti-transgender vandalism

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Re: The real lesson is never use NetSol

Nope.

The real lesson is not to have a webmail or SP account which can have the password recovered or redirected on your DNS registration without 2FA on it. Here the idiot (yes I mean it) had a webmail account on a service which is renowned for people managing to reset the passwords and nick them and he had no 2FA on it.

If you value your domains use one of them to run mail infrastructure which is 100% your own and _YOU_ run the mail servers. Use that for authentication purposes. Overlay 2FA from the registrar if they provide it. Though frankly, just running your own mail infra for the "account" domain should be sufficient.

Bloodhound SSC reaches the end of the road for want of £25m

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Re: Someone

Or possibly the risk of failure and fatality

The previous record holder before Thrust SSC, the Blue Flame could break the speed of sound as a design, the driver wanted to break the speed of sound, but was not allowed to break the speed of sound by the sponsors.

Once a the land record was achieved, the Blue Flame was stopped from further racing and ended up travelling around the country as a marketing exhibit for the association of gas suppliers. For this exact reason - in UK or USA nobody wants a fatality to spoil such a wonderful marketing campaign.

So, yeah, not like we have not been there before with the land record.

In any case, the real issue here is that Thrust SSC was limited in its choice of sponsors. Due to the use of Rolls Royce and Ministry of Defence assets it could not ask any of the places where they could get that money in 15 minutes. 25M is a bag of peanuts for the usual "football team and Chelsea mansion" buying suspects. They also would not care about any casualties. The more the merrier - no publicity (except the one that gets you into a USA sanctions list) is a bad publicity.

Expired cert... Really? #O2down meltdown shows we should fear bungles and bugs more than hackers

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Re: Was this

Do not blame Ericsson here.

UK telco operations have a well established and entrenched fear of certificates for anything.

Once upon a time, before I went back to write software, I still did network architecture including security aspects. So while working in a major UK telco I proposed the idea of certificates everywhere for purposes of inventory, identification and security of provisioning. I was freshly out of a vendor where I did most of the design and implementation of a x509 retrofit into everything and they became the foundation of how the system fits together. So I was expecting some questions or a technical discussion.

I got none.

The faces around the table looked like they were a still frame from The Shining. They looked at the idea like I was serving a disemboweled body with maggots and suggesting they eat it. They were horrified at the idea despite having less than 60% accurate inventory and a long standing requirement to secure key aspects of the network management.

This fear has its roots in incidents like the one in O2. It is also the root cause of incidents like O2.

UK telcos (and most telcos in general) fail to understand the most basic principle of using X509 for infrastructure purposes.

It is: YOU RUN YOUR OWN CA. No vendor roots. The root is yours. And so are ALL certs.

Because they do not understand it and fear it, they either use vendor certs (which expire at the most unfortunate moment) or outsource it to an external CA which defeats the purpose of the exercise as you are no longer in control of your network. Either one of these results in an incident like O2 which in turn results in more fear, more vendor use and more outsourcing.

Ad naseum, rinse repeat.

Oh, and by the way, no lessons will be learned from this incident - O2 will NOT start running its own CA as it should.

Microsoft says it's time to get serious about facial recognition rules: 'Laws and regulations are indispensable'

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Re: Invest in hoodie production now

Will not help.

1. The primary use of B-R (for any value of biometric) is to trace a person across multiple locations and multiple cameras once that person has been recognized in one location.

2. There are plenty of ways to recognize a person besides face. For example the way you walk is as distinctive as a fingerprint and frankly easier to convert into a machine learn-able form than a face.

So if biometric person recognition takes hold, it does not matter how good the hoodie is. All it takes will be for one camera in the country to recognize you. After that the system will spit out your entire route for the duration of interest of whoever is authorized to query.

So if you want to invest into something invest into people building colony ships - to take those who do not want to stay somewhere else.

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Not quite

Given that there are hardly any laws in the US governing facial recognition, that last one should be easy.

While there is no federal law, existing biometrics laws in Illinois, Texas and Oregon apply. Something Facebook is learning the "nuclear wedgie" way at the moment.

You're legit and you know you are... Thanks to chanting racist footie fans, linking to dodgy stuff isn't necessarily illegal (well, in Europe)

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Interesting

It will be interesting to hear a qualified opinion on how this ruling relates to UK libel law.

Wow, what a lovely early Christmas present for Australians: A crypto-busting super-snoop law passes just in time

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Re: Puzzling

I can only guess that the Labor Party leadership was simply terrified that a terrorist attack might happen in Australia over the Christmas holidays.

It can happen anyway. With or without crypto-busting legislation.

While accepting Somali (and other) refugees more or less with no questions asked in the 70-es was right and moral, not mandating integration always gets you in the end.

It is the norm that in the absence of integration the second generation swerves widely to the right of Attila the Hun. Whatever the underlying reason, that is a well known fact.

People may cringe at what, for example, the Danish are doing, but as far long term social stability what they are doing is the right thing. We need more of that.

Funnily enough, China fuming, senator cheering after Huawei CFO cuffed by Canadian cops at Uncle Sam's request

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Re: Dangerous precedent

Imagine any western business individual being arrested in China for selling stuff to the US government?

More like - Imagine western individual being arrested in any of those countries which are presently on Chinese payroll. So much for that lovely holiday to the Maldives you know.

UK spies: You know how we said bulk device hacking would be used sparingly? Well, things have 'evolved'...

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Re: Well, Well

Who'da thought they'd want to overuse a handy tool they were given.

Happens to every tool like that. It is only a matter of time until intelligence assets are used against opposition too. At least in Banana republics. If you are not counting down, I am.

Huawei CFO poutine cuffs by Canadian cops after allegedly busting sanctions on Iran

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Re: China is not a democracy

As it is: China can't put me on a no-fly list,

Sure it can. However, first of all nobody besides them will read that and enforce that.

mess with my SWIFT transfers

It actually can. Do not underestimate the quality of their malware

or send me off to 'indefinite detention' with free water-treatment in some secret 3'rd world military base.

Third country - no. They do not need that because they do not need to comply with any legal rights in their country to start off with. So instead of outsourcing it to a third country they can put you in one of the re-education camps in the North-West border provinces. Nice, shiny, freshly built and no chance to leave until you are thoroughly re-educated.

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Re: China is not a democracy

The Chinese Capitalist Party has 90 million members most of which are dedicated to the hegemony of their 'party' and thsir personal interests.

As someone who has spent 20 years of his life in several countries where the local Communist Party had a "constitutional" role I can tell you that even in Eastern Europe it was 999:1. 999 as a career progression or career requirement. For example you could not even dream to sit at the controls of a passenger aircraft without being a member. And 1 village idiot. There is always a one in every village.

In China, due to local cultural specifics, it is not even 999:1. It is 99999:1. Or more.

Awkward... Revealed Facebook emails show plans for data slurping, selling access to addicts' info, crafty PR spinning

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Re: Yes, they really seized them

Rarely used parliamentary powers

Twice in the last 30 days. That's puts "rarely" in past tense IMO. Pity the targets surrender so we do not see anyone locked in Tower as a new addition to the museum exhibition of medieval torture.

GOPwned: Republicans fall victim to email hack

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Re: The Russians are Coming!!!

I wonder if the various incompetents in the US media will realize Ivan is an equal opportunity hacker

First of all, Ivan happens also to be quintessential Bulgarian, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and to a slightly lesser extent Serbian, Croatian and other Slavic nations name.

Second, Hassan, Pedro, John, Yin and Prasad are all equal opportunity hackers too. The biggest fake news operations in the USA elections of 2016 were run out of the Albanian speaking areas of Macedonia. This includes the infamous "paedo ring in a pizzeria" conspiracy theory. So that one was probably Besim, not Ivan.

Third, as I keep on saying, this is the way war is fought now. Very nice summary in the NY Times: "Meet the KGB spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads who tried — and are still trying — to fight it".

Cough... Cough... Sputter... If anyone holds priority rights on this invention that's Herr Goebels and Tovarish Stalin. Compared to some of Stalin fake news campaigns what we see today is a boy scout play.

As far as any difference between a "Truth Squad" run out of Tampa or an "Internet Research Agency" operation run out of St Petersburg or "Integrity Initiative" run from one well known building on the Thames, there is no difference. They are the same weapon, just held in the hands on the other side of the front line the way an AK47 is held by both sides in most worldwide conflicts. In all cases the first casualty in the gunfight is the actual truth. The real one. The one you see dying of blood loss in the ditch on the side of the information superhighway.

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Re: The Russians are Coming!!!

See also: hijacking of yellow vest movement in France,

Their opinion on the subject right out of their mouths: Translation: "What if Medvedev will start handing out food and Lavrov vodka to the protesters in Paris". Unfortunately they have a point - we did _EXACTLY_ _THAT_ in Ukraine. Namely Victoria Nuland who was the Assistant US Secretary of state did that.

As far as hijacking - you are 100% spot on. As someone who has had to run a protest once upon a time, the number of RT casualties (12 people from RT in need of medical attention) is possible only if they actively participated. There is no way in hell to achieve that number if you are just observing and reporting.

It is the way war is fought today. There is no "Wikileaks ideals" any more - any release is stage managed and all of the release vectors are owned by one of the sides. They are timed to particular news items so that everything is massaged, perverted and serves an associated campaign.

The fact that we do not see the GOP items today does not mean anything regarding who got them. What it means is that their allocated timeslot in the particular campaign has not come yet.

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Re: All we can do is wait

If it all comes out at once, that would suggest a probably-naive, idealistic user who just believes in the Wikileaks ideal of "no secrets".

Extinct species AFAIK.

If it's drip-fed week by week, that's someone trying to manipulate the news agenda.

That's the norm. We will know who this is when we know who leaks it if it is leaked at all. There is an elephant in the room (pun intended) here - the Chinese have not leaked a single piece they have pinched and they have lifted quite a shedload over the years. Much more than anyone else.

Former headteacher fined £700 after dumping old pupil data on server at new school

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Why would a headmaster - or any teacher - want pupil data from a previous school in his new position.

Exactly the reason stated - research.

The question is why he was engaging in a research activity without agreement from the subjects using his employer resources without an authorization for that.

The court and the ICO did not dig as deep as they should.

The fact that he was doing unauthorized research using data on his previous pupils raises an immediate question: "What about the current ones". That question was not asked

Oz opposition folds, agrees to give Australians coal in their stockings this Christmas

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Well, we have seen this already

Russians tried to suppress Telegram which refused to comply and got where? Nowhere.

They quietly stopped. The conflict also left enough arms lying around which can be picked up by people without the technical acumen and R&D budget of Telegram and use again.

So in the next country and place where this will happen the crypto side will not start from scratch.

Bootnote: It is not "Bouncy Crypto" by the way. It is "Guardians of the Bouncy Castle" and the actual packages go under "Bouncy Castle" name. They are the most common replacement for Sun's crypto libraries in Java. The install base is HUGE. So as far as implementing crypto the guy knows what he is talking about.

I usually get a massive toothache the moment I see it. The reason is that it has implemented every single crypto algo under sun and then some including things that have like only one paper ever published in some obscure magazine.

That gives developers interesting "ideas" like for example using a totally unproven stream cypher which has never been evaluated for the production of pseudorandom values as a random number generator (Hello Apache, recognize that java ssh implementation of yours?).

Space policy boffin: Blighty can't just ctrl-C, ctrl-V plans for Galileo into its Brexit satellite

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Re: Strangely in the last week or so....

"minority vote to leave"

Is this some kind of new math from either the EU

That is what the current polls say.

The reason is that Wales from 52.5% Leave in the referendum is now down to 40% Leave or there-abouts with nearly 60% Remain. That is not surprising - as a recipient of Eu funds they are on par with Eastern Europe and May has been anything but fore-coming to match it. Plaid has been extremely vocal explaining that and these are the results.

While the change in other areas in England is not particularly significant (most of hardcore leave is still hardcore leave and most hardcore remain is still hardcore remain), this change alone swings the national poll to the Remain favour by a few %.

You are right that it is Eu math. It is the math of Eu money and to be more exact the abject lack of it post-BrExit.

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Re: Genuine question...

How does the EU expect the UK to take part in NATO exercises (or indeed real battles) if the secret bit of Galileo is denied to us?

You need to do your homework on both NATO as it is at present and the evolution of American strategic thinking. Allies never had a lot of say where and what they do in the past. They have NONE today. At some point during Bush's time Americans rewrote their strategy to rely on total informational awareness of all of their potential major adversaries. They now have the Russians, the Chinese and a couple of other lower priority potential adversaries catalogued and assigned as targets down to sub-battalion level. Not quite down to individual tanks, but not far off. This is maintained 24x7 and if you are gulping at the thought of how much this costs so am I. This is also the explanation for some rank raving lunacies NATO does sometimes, like the continuous exercise of "right to innocent passage" rewritten as "right of intentional pissing" around Crimea and Kaliningrad this summer. When you are addicted to data and you are missing a puzzle piece you will do some rank raving lunacies to obtain it.

So on the place of Allies in this picture. "Allies" (quotes needed) have NO ACCESS to the complete data set. They are given stuff to do, provided coordinates by the USA and that is the end of it. They are the cogs in the machine. The whole Atlantic council, etc which never had a lot of decision power is now practically just a facade for the American military planning system and their actual expressions like the F35 "logistics and mission planning cloud". If anyone wondered why and how did NATO country procurement swallowed the F35 peculiar "cloud backend" - here is your answer. Take it or leave it.

So going back to your question - NATO will never use Galileo as the planning system which is totally controlled by the Americans will always rely on GPS and its availability. The only time Galileo military functionality will become of use will be if the Eu army stops being a vanity project. That, however, means at the very least partial dissolution of NATO.

So actually, the way the power is laid out on the continent at present, the question of military use of Galileo is in the realm of "who gives a f*ck".

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Re: Strangely in the last week or so....

* We would retain everything we had before (veto, rebate, etc)

Not rebate. Cameron forfeited that. Remember?

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Re: Spexit!

Ignoring the political shenanigans for a moment.

You should not. And you should not ignore geography.

Galileo as a military asset is geared for a conflict with EU latitudes. It sucks royally very far up North and far down South. The satellites are in relatively low inclinations and end up very low over the horizon so even a minimal Aurora Borealis (or Australis) knocks the signal out. +/- some help from any of the suspects operating at that latitude.

With the Arctic melting to a point where the French can sail with flying colours from Brest to Tokio (as one of their Navy ships did this summer without asking for Russian permission), having a 11Bn asset that cannot cover that region is in the realm of lunacy (OK, I know, so is everything BrExit related anyway). That is what is needed to be designed and it is not likely to end up being GPS, Gallileo or GLONASS compatible.

As far as the rest of the world, let's face it - if the situation is such that ALL OF GPS, Gallileo, GLONASS and BeiDou are not available, the likelihood of "your own" system being alive is very slim.

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Re: Strangely in the last week or so....

Probably the root cause is the ineptitude of everyone else.

When Gordon Brown seems like a titan of thought, you know things are going very very very wrong

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"with the final system likely over budget and behind schedule."

Same as all others. Neither GPS, nor GLONASS have kept to their projected schedules very well. It is after all - rocket science.

ICO to probe facial recog amid concerns UK cops can't shake their love for unregulated creepy tech

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but that simply kicked the can down the road, offering a vague pledge to update codes of practice on AFR "before it is widely adopted".

That depends UK adoption or worldwide adoption. Worldwide, it already covers population sets several times the size of the UK including different demographic/racial profiles. Granted it is the usual "democratic suspects" like China, Russia, North Korea, etc.

It is already clear what it does and what are the actual risks.

While Chinese are not disclosing the stats off their AFR, the Moscow mayor has been parading the results from covering the subway and the public transport to all and sundry as a part of trying to get funds for full coverage. In fact it was used extensively during the World cup and it is one of the reasons why that event did not see the usual Subway rate of pickpocketing and petty crime.

So it is not necessary to await representative UK coverage - we can already see exactly how it is being used including the repressive side of it (if you wonder how they manage to round up "trouble" after various demonstrations, that's the answer).

Shall we have AI judging UK court cases? Top beak ponders the future

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Do not think so

There are existing trials in several other countries for software assistants to prepare the drafts for the court decisions and opinions. Several Eu countries(*) and Russia are all testing systems, some of them are at least few years old. These are the ones I know of, I would not be surprised if similar initiatives exist in the Far East.

The common denominator there is that they all practice Napoleonic law so you can have the laws expressed in a easily digestible form for an algorithm to chew on. In fact, the process can be mostly algorithmic with AI handling only the corner cases.

British law is the mother of all tests for AI. It is precedent based and some precedents are dating back to the 16th century. It starts as the mother of all problems in language processing - it is not just English (much more difficult to work with compared to languages with hard grammars), it is English dating back 5 centuries. Then there is the legal aspect of it. Then there is the "sanity" check. Expecting AI to do well where humans with 40 years of qualifications is overly optimistic.

As good example is this year in Parliament. With the government comfortably sleeping on whatever legal opinion it was provided that it does not need to release anything the Parliament pulled out a 17th century law to force it to spill the beans. I do not see an AI being capable of doing that.

(*)I personally know some of the people who write the software for them, they also do work for the UK Parliament by the way

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Re: Henry VI, Part 2!

Conveyancing is another area ripe for automation - all those crappy, expensive, painfully slow manual land searches and the turgid sale bureaucracy for housing is utterly unnecessary in this day and age

It is significantly more automated at present than you think. The entire land register has been electronic for a few years now.

It was if memory serves me right a EU requirement and it was done across all countries. As I actually own my house (not the bank owning it), I got the notice that all paperwork is destroyed and converted to electronic form. Can't remember when this was, but it was a while back in the UK. For the properties I own outside the UK it was 4+ years ago. I suspect that as you most likely do not have your title deeds (the bank has them) you never got it.

The planning register is now also fully electronic and publicly accessible (at least where I live).

There is in fact very little of the old bureaucracy left in both and searching is indeed done in minutes.

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Re: Anything that eliminates lawyers is a good thing in my book

I beg to differ. That will leave just court and prosecution.

1. Nobody qualified to check if the evidence has been collected legally and is indeed representing what it is supposed to represent. The temptation to "adjust the evidence" to get a conviction is HUGE. Just look at USA with their psychological torture and arm twisting to get "plea deals" or Russia where the same process is very physical "Magnitski style".

2. Nobody qualified to check if there are multiple conflicting laws or there is a priority ladder (law, constitution, international treaties)

3. Nobody qualified to check if the accused has been allowed to have access to all of the evidence.

Lawyers are a necessary evil I am afraid and so far we have not learned how to live without them. In fact all experiments on living without them have ended with large groups of people being walked down a corridor painted in institutional green finishing with a wall with a lot of pockmarks in it. As someone who has had 95% of his relatives (up to 3 degrees distant) on the mother's side end up in front of such wall at some point in history I have to disagree with you.

YouTube fight gets dirty: Kids urged to pester parents over Article 13

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The favourite weapon of the 21st century

The favourite weapon of the 21st century - the social network driven mob. Feed them some convenient "partial truth" and they will not leave a stone unturned supporting your cause.

It is one game where the corporations have a HUGE head start too.

STIBP, collaborate and listen: Linus floats Linux kernel that 'fixes' Intel CPUs' Spectre slowdown

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He missed much more

After some debate, Sakkinen acknowledged that, as a Finn

Most of that swearing including that particular comment in the Sun source is by DaveM and it has a twist added to it. No matter how much you scrub the data, the METADATA in the kernel mailing list headers, git history, etc remains. If you can read/speak any of the major slavic languages (*) the email addresses, hosts, etc from which the code originated make for a very interesting reading. But he probably can't grok that. Bless him.

It is an interesting question: "Why DaveM and several other major Linux developers have the habit of naming some of their machines using words which are not used in polite company in Eastern Europe?" No idea what's the answer. Something which El Reg can ask one day perhaps.

All Slavic except Bulgarian and Macedonian use the same C word and that word is present quite prominently on the metadata side of the Linux kernel history.

Tesla autopilot saves driver after he fell asleep at wheel on the freeway

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Re: Pretty soon....

...the authorities will want a software based back-door kill-switch.

They may want that LITERALLY you know...

Google internal revolt grows as search-engine Spartacuses prepare strike over China

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Re: Hmm

I also don't remember Germany blocking Google because it didn't censor,

Germany threatened to take Google to court and it was first. Can't be arsed to look it up, it was more than 10 years ago. Google quietly conceded at the time and has been compliant there ever since.

As far as Poland it is only a matter of time until the new Polish "edit history so we look innocent" law is applied and Google has no choice but to comply. In Ukraine it is an SBU enforcement order yet, not law. Law is in the making (using the Polish one as a template). Once law is in, same stuff applies. I can continue the list ad naseum: Turkey, Azerbaidjan, Georgia, etc. There are lots of skeletons in the closet of other countries too. Rattle the Latvian skeletons from the end of the WW1 and their role in the Russian civil war and they will be following the Poles head over heels.

Do not even get me started about Britain, D-orders, super-injunctions and the existing (mostly DNS) blacklists.

So, like it or not, the requirement for a "compromised" search engine is there. It is a fact. It, in fact, constitutes a bigger market than the market for an "unadulterated" one.

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Re: Google Image Search in China

Yep, but as I have said before it is the other Winnie and for a reason.

The other winnie (1969 version):

Leader Xi:

So if you really want the door to come down with a bang do not type in Winnie the Pooh, but Винни Пух. The reason by the way is not just visual. The 1969 version is a typical 3-4 layer humour lampooning the Great Party same as a lot of kids stuff from those days in USSR. There Winnie continuously produces drivel which will not look out of place on a Communist Party poster making adults laugh as much as kids.

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Re: Hmm

It is not just China. Negotiations with Roskomnadzor in Russia were this week. There are similar talks going on in pretty much any other major market as well.

F.E the Register had an article on Australians asking for pretty much the same on "piracy" grounds.

Once you open this can of worms there is no way to close it.

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Re: Hmm

A) Do not start a search engine in China, because China will use it to abuse human rights,

China builds its own with appropriate API interface and resells it to every single country which has an insistence of anti-piracy, prohibited material, anti-paedo or any other "special requirement". That is actually 99% of the world. Even most of Western Europe. For example, you cannot serve a lot of Nazi related material in Germany, any material mentioning the role of Polish mobs pogrom-ing jews in WW2 to assist them being loaded on the train to Aushwitz in Poland or any material discussing how good of a job Bandera troops did as machine gunners on the concentration camp towers in Ukraine. So the product requirement is there

B. Blah, blah

Same as above

C. use Google's power and large megaphon...

As the Russian fable about the cat who stole the ham from the cook goes "А Васька слушает да ест". The cat will eat the ham regardless of how much it is being verbally chastised. Or as our Turkish friends say: "it ürür kervan yürür". The dogs bark, but the caravan goes on.

Google will never allow case A and B because this will force someone to build a competitor which is not just viable, but which has the biggest possible competitive advantage - regulatory compliance. So watch how it will play ball and when Xi says "sit" it will do exactly that.