Posts by Voland's right hand 5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011
Not quite.
By the way, 95% of the cheap Chinese IoT tat is in clear violation of data protection regs as it ships data including your surveillance video to Chinese servers. However, the lame toothless dogs known as the DPA and Trading Standards are not bothered to enforce this one. At all.
This is exactly the point they should not be allowed to use the Internet, period. They either talk to a local gateway or they stay in their jurisdiction wherever they are manufactured.
I would prefer the gateway to MINE and this is the only way they will be allowed in my household. That is unrealistic for Joe Average consumer - there the gateway and the isolation will have to be provided by the SP. The latter can and should be regulated and legislated.
By the way, most SPs can run isolation for IoT today already - the support for that is in the CPEs and the management systems for them.
In either case it is a matter of restricting the SERVICE DESIGN, not the hardware interfacing to the service. Unfortunately, this is something neither the regulators, nor the SPs have groked at this point.
OTOH, it has been observed the FDA is so bureaucratic
The underlying problem is the "sue you vs do not get sued mentality". This makes both the EPA and the FDA considerably cautious than their Eu counterparts, because the governing legislation does NOT fully absolve them from legal responsibility (everywhere else in the world that is the case). So it is a constant sue you, sue me with the current appointee being one of the most prolific filers.
The golfocracy appointments do little or nothing to change this particular aspect of the problem. They simply ensure that people who live in a dedicated clear air zone in the Capitol next to a Dear Leader Golf Course have clean water and air.
The ones living in the Districts - not so much.
He is not biased actually.
Having chosen a climate-change denier.
The climate change issue is THE LEAST of the problems with the candidate EPA head. He denies and wants to remove controls on arsenic, mercury and heavy metal water and air contamination.
While the rest of Trump appointments was bog standard golfocracy - draining the swampy bog on the golf course into the cabinet this one is a straight Darwin Award for all those agricultural regions which elected him. I want to see exactly how they will sell and export arsenic contaminated wheat and corn. It is also literal Darwin Award for the industrial regions which elected him too. Poor? Not enough money to live in a dedicated clean area away from the plants. DIE. NOW. How does that sound for free market democracy. It sounds lovely to me.
An electronic version of "creating and possessing material usable for terrorist purposes". Copying from the UK I see. That, my dear friends is Crown Copyright. You should pay to the inventors. Royalties are due.
We take royalties in gas and oil nowdays so should not be an issue.
BC's 2008 "The Last Enemy" which had Cumberbatch
That movie resulted in an interesting dialogue in our family.
SWMBO, horrfied: "Just how real is this..."
Me: Much more real than you think. It was prophetic (as it came out before latest revelations), we found out it to be not far from a documentary.
SWMBO: "I take back every single instance of calling you paranoid".
It will be interesting to give her this one to watch...
It is strategy and management.
Going color, etc was a flop in the making - the tech was not ready. The failure to plan for that and the detachment from reality was 100% of Pebble's management own making. There was _ONE_ VC seat on the board. Not all of them.
Pebble which started very down to earth using tech which was known to work and could deliver ended up living in a typical Valley Reality Distortion field. Unfortunately the field was not big enough to distort the world as well so it failed.
Kids don't buy toys, adults buy toys.
Correct, however, it is part of parenting to discuss with your children why exactly Dad is against buying a hideous stick insect blond bimbo with DDD size weapons of mass distraction of sufficient weight to cause a ruptured disk. All of the toys my kids have had since the age of 3 have been chosen by them. The end result is a weird assortment of fluffy stuff enough to fill a room, an occasional doll, half a crate of cars and a gigantic crate of lego bits as well as assorted weapons (the more realistic the better). Not a single one of them electronic or electrified except the gun laser sights.
Electronic stuff I have bought without asking them first like remote controlled boats, planes, wooden train, etc was used a couple of times and then abandoned (made me learn my lesson - at least one of them is choosing now).
If you as a parent give your child the choice between this and something HUGE AND FLUFFY, I can tell you in advance what your child will chose (I know what mine chose every time).
Hint: Miyazaki in Totoro had a point. The bigger, the fluffier, the better. +/- acorns.
Hell lot of money I am afraid.
I suggest you do a search for Clemenceau class aircraft carriers which are roughly from the same age (either the whole affair on dismantling the Clemenceau or the insanities the Brazilians had to do to upgrade the Sao Paulo). Or the story of rebuilding the Admiral Gorshkov for the Indians. An aircraft carrier from those days is a gigantic floating pile of hazmat by modern day standards.
I am surprised someone found a shipyard to dismantle it.
I would love to see what a 1907 aircraft carrier or even a 1913 aircraft
1915 actually: http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/carriers/images/russia/orlitsa.jpg
This is a sea-plane launcher, fought in the battle of the Riga bay, the battle of the Moonzund straights and various other engagements in the Baltic. I think the Italians, Japanese had several similar ships as well.
In fact, the second (ww1) Ark Royal was a seaplane carrier too.
Times change.
The days described by Sat-Okh in his biographical books are long gone. Most mounties are not riding horses. They are no longer persecuting Indians for a living either.
They still, however, operate in conditions which a lot of USA police never sees. 30C+ in summer in Saskatchewan to -30C in winter. Very few mass produced body cameras are reliable in these conditions.
"thought leader" - think of it phonetically. Fart leader.
While not a perfect homophone it is close enough and it is semantically the correct fit for 99.999% of those LinkedIn labels "thought leader".
That is also expected - do you think an HR droid outfit will recognize a real thought leader even if you hit it with him? Do not think so.
Linked in will do then, what it does now.
It is a forum (ab)used by hr droids and salesdroids nowdays. There has to be a place where retards applaud the blond bimbo from Theranos proudly proclaiming that she does not have plan B . There has to be a place where c*nt comiserate with a village idiot who tried to sell cloud (in a rather obnoxious way too) to the Amazon CTO. The spammer got what he deserved, but the fellow unsolicited marketing c*nts are in uproar on LinkedIn. And so on.
Your defence lawyer stands up, does his thing and references the act in which you're being brought to court over and highlights the fact that it allows the prosecution to doctor evidence
1. The lawyer needs to be brave enough to do it.
2. He needs to provide at least some ground for the doubt that the evidence is doctored.
Otherwise it will fall on deaf ears.
As I said earlier - presently the sole safeguard here is the HRA and ECHR Article 6 "Right to Fair Trial". You can immediately refer any case with the smallest suspicion that the evidence is doctored up and get UK deep-sixed on that (off-topic, funny, how the numbers coincide). The chance of UK winning any case on this is nil - all other 46 signatories have in one form or the other "Fruit of the Poison Tree" doctrine on their statutes, the idea that it does not constitute a key part of "fair trial" will be considered preposterous.
That, unfortunately will not last as May withdraws from the ECHR EXACTLY BECAUSE OF THIS SAFEGUARD.
Not really.
The doctrine of a "fruit of a poison tree" exists in one form or another in EVERY developed country in the world. Bar one. Britain.
So while I can sympathize with the article author, his line of reasoning is a bit off. There is no constitutional or legal issue with obtaining evidence through illegal means and/or failing to disclose the means by which the evidence has been obtained in the UK. UK law allows for this.
The ONLY partial safeguard on this has been the Human Rights act and the Human Rights convention and the various clauses about rights to privacy and fair trial in it. Not for long though - Teresa May will find a way to tear it and join Lukashenko (she should stop shaving her mustache and trim it to the correct shape - it suits her).
Paraphrasing Arnaud Almaric: Firewall eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius
Rule no 1 of the IoT subnet: What happens on the IoT subnet, stays on the IoT subnet. Any IoT gear that wants to go outside the house without going ACROSS MY GATEWAY under MY FULL CONTROL (emphasis on MY) needs to be attached to a chainsaw and that chainsaw used to gently bugger the vendor. Repeatedly. Starting with Google/Nest who initiated this idiotic architecture.
Oops... Wrong thought in this case :)
Dunno what the right thought should be: Do not give an unlocked phone to a stranger out of your sight? Shopping for Pri(ck|us) ran into a Pri(ck|us)?
Actually I know it: "If you make a picture which you would not like to get outside the house, sync it off the device as soon as possible and keep it in the house. No phone, no mobile devices, no cloud".
In any case, it does look like the days of paper documents are definitely not over.
On one side, as you noted this is one place where it may be useful.
On another side it will be facing a navy which has 36 guided missile destroyers (8+ anti-ship missiles each), 50+ guided missile frigates (4-8 missiles), 30+ corvettes (also armed with 2+ anti-ship missiles), 83 next gen missile boats (8 missiles each) and various odds and sods all of which carry at least a couple of 801, 802, 803 or an occasional Russian made Sunburn. This is if we ignore the fact that most of the South China Sea is within range of their coastal missile batteries.
I am somehow not convinced about how wise is showing up with a pocket knife to what is a gun party (even as a part of the USA merry gang). If China decides to take anything around there we can only sit and watch. Even USA cannot stop it without using The Family Atomics. Thankfully, China is content with simply buying it by facilitating Chinese investment by the billions into the region. At the end it will simply own all of the "objectors" so they will stop objecting anyway.
If you cannot stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Looking at their recent measures to ensure that Internet is critical infrastructure and their portion functions regardless of what happens I think they are not hoisted on any petard yet. In fact, I am not clear who got hoisted on what yet.
There is definitely a case of both sides rapidly escalating the conflict though. We went from attempts to influence the elections both ways (first the Panama release timed to Russian elections, then the Wikileaks one timed for USA ones) to open economic warfare. At this rate they will be nuking each other (hopefully purely in the Internet sense of this word) off the map in ~ 6 months time.
their business plan of how quickly they plan on hitting profit on their original investment:
Thanks for reminding me, this one is actually quite important.
Anyone who thinks that this metric has not changed as a result of BrExit needs to have their brain examined. In fact, the ROI periods used in calculation have shrunk and their cost contribution has gone up. This drives the overall price of goods and services which rely on capital investment (in this case - servers, datacenters, datacenter equipment).
This is not for any other reason, but because of uncertainty. From this point of view the economy and the prices for services and goods relying on long term investment would have been BETTER off if there was a cliff nasty cutoff with a given date. It is something you can plan for. Exit on date X with tariffs Y and restrictions Z - fine. That is something you can stick into a forecast and plan BEYOND that date.
The current woolly grandstanding by the 3 blind mice - not a chance. Any financial planning more than 2 years out are in the realm of non-scientific fiction. So whoever in Microsoft turned the ROI knob up a notch simply did their job.
So are the British being punished for exercising their political choice, and choosing to leave the European Union?
No. What you are missing is that at such sizes and scales prices (as they are set long term in volume contracts) reflect not only current supply, demand and cost. They also reflect what the seller sees as the supply, demand and cost across the median future of the pricing agreements.
On the positive side, Microsoft forecasters see the demand and supply remaining relatively healthy. On the negative side they see the pound undergoing further tanking. Is this forecast correct or not? Nobody knows. If the forecast is wrong Microsoft will lose money because people will move to other cloud suppliers (if they can). After all the customers who buy A LOT often have good forecasters of their own as well.
IMHO the forecast is probably better than a lot of forecasting by our politicos and civil service droids. End of the day, Diskworld comes to mind. It is the difference between "doctors" and Doughnut Jimmy. While Sat Nad is not known to break chairs, it is still probably not good career guidance for the forecast people to make him "very upset" (in the Mr Chrysoprase sense).
Can you let everyone know the Linux equivalent of Lync.
That would have been fine if lync actually worked. Ever since it was renamed Skype for Business its "success rate" is about 30%. That drops to sub<10% if there are people on Mac, VPNs, etc.
You can get the Skype For Business functionality on Linux using google talk and google apps (if you surrender to the idea of google knowing each and every step you make). It also works properly on a mobile (something Lync stopped doing once it became Skype for Business). IM works. Video works significantly better than Lync, Presence works, whiteboarding and other conference facilities also work and so does calendaring. It has only one massive downside - it pretty much requires VOIP and you need decent data connectivity. Not usable out in the sticks. The upside is that it is significantly more reliable than Skype For Business.
Alternatively - you get that easily using webex + a decent xmpp server of your choice. It is a bit more hassle and you need to cobble it together for a team. It has the advantage that it works pretty much anywhere and the bandwidth requirements are ~ NIL unless you have an idiot PHB in the team which insists on his mug always being displayed to his subordinates.
In both cases you also can integrate into that 3rd party systems and apps. Something which you can forget about as far as lync is concerned.
I have to use all 3 of these on a weekly basis and I would overall rate them: Webex, Hangouts and Skype for Business as a very remote unreliable third.
These providers are not cloud services - they are VPS. It is a different niche.
They have "sysadmin" uses - small web systems, mail hosting, mail relay, ticketing systems, vpn concentrator, etc - all the stuff you would run on an SMB server.
You can get every single one of the elements somewhere else, often for free, but you cannot get the integration. For example - I can find a few places which will host a ticketing system for me, but none of them will integrate it correctly with my mail flow and other stuff. Also, the baseline prices for an instance will be several times higher than the cost of a small VPS.
Running these applications on a VPS requires permanently attached static IP address. With their dynamic IP address attachment via API and pricing of IP per hour Amazon totally missed the what are these VMs used for.
You missed memset - 20$ per month and 40GB SSD for the 2G two core instance. The one core is 10$ - this is for the newer high IOPS SSD instances. With 12 month discount it goes down to ~ 15$ month or 7.50 per month respectively.
Amazon missed the point. Completely. The reason why people host with all of these providers is exactly that - flat pricing, no price shocks and permanently attached static IPs. So, no, no and no thanks. They take their overpriced (light)sail fold it and get themselves towed back to port.
I will stay with what I have at memset for yet another year (11th year and counting).
If you are Bob The Builder and you have done it 1 years ago getting out of that entanglement may be non-trivial. I know people who still keep their aol addresses for this purpose. Too many people have them in their address books, they are on various paper, etc (so there are costs associated with switching away). When they started using email having your own domain hosted was not really an option. Email for them is a tool so all they want is for it to work and they get pretty badly pissed off when it does not.
Not the case. It applies to a CSP - communication service provider. While this is an expanded definition (most prior regs applied only if you paid for your telecoms service provider license), it does not yet apply to software developers.
The assumption (and rather incorrect one) by the government when pushing for Putin/Bush laws in the UK is that what and how is encrypted is determined by the communications service provider as a matter of configuration. So if a communications service provider procures a piece of software + hardware it WILL have lawful intercept and they solely have to configure it so it works and make sure that the product definition does not allow for a configuration where it does not.
What exactly does all of this mean is unclear until the government has tried to enforce the law and prevent a CSP from deploying an encryption product which has no lawful intercept and or has tried to enforce the law and implement lawful intercept on something that requires significant extra effort from the CSP - f.e. intercepting traffic on a VPN concentrator run in the cloud.
This is made "doubly interesting" by the fact that while a telecommunication service provider business in the UK has some level of licensing, the definition of CSP is so loose - it can apply to anyone. There is no licensing either. Even Joe Average Sysadmin Bloke who has spun up a VPN concentrator in his home to run a VPN between his house and the (grand)parents can be considered a CSP - he provides service.
Left hand, let me introduce you to the right hand. You are apparently attached to the same body, but you never met before and you have no clue what the other one is doing.
A case similar to Schrems brought in front of Eu court of justice will render any agreement Britain tries to concoct with Europe obsolete in 15 minutes.
In any case, we live in the post-agreement age. This is one of the fallouts from Snowden. The fact that everyone is violating basic data privacy required by these has come out in the open and cannot be ignored now. So the future is (like it or not) of locating data in the jurisdiction of your customers. From that perspective, does Britain implement GDPR or not is irrelevant - once article 50 procedure is complete it will not be processing any data any time soon.
There will be no Revolution here.
A per-requisite for a revolution is the ability of likely-minded individuals to organize, prepare and serve as the catalyst for the masses to rise.
Let's see:
1. Organize. Let's face it - the current surveilance and anti-encryption laws guarantee that this does not happen. The government was taken by surprise 15 years ago by the fuel blockade protests and it has been ensuring that it never happens again. No organization for the proles. Ever.
2. Prepare. Right, British law is pretty adamant on the "prepare" bit - any preparation falls under possessing materials "useful for terrorists", so this was taken care of by the previous Evil Witch.
3. Masses to rise. Masses which are glued to the 42 inch TV set watching "I am a celebrity, get me out of here" buried under a pile of Hello, OK and Sun on Sunday are not rising any time soon. The most they will rise will be for a new bag of crisps. The masses may riot, but they will NOT rise.
So the answer to "Dad, what did you do in the Revolution" will be "Nothing as there was not one".
All we have left is to watch the new Great Chancellor(ess) rise and pray for the coming of Edmon Dantes (He was my father, he was my mother, he was my brother).
It doesn't have waterproofing or a stylus, but neither does the Huawei
After watching how a less than 6 months old phone goes in the bin, the former is a mandatory feature in this household. There is an inevitable moment when the phone goes into the hands of junior or his sister. That means that it is guaranteed to end together with junior and his pants in a rock pool on the next holiday. Junior's antics aside I have learned to appreciate waterproof phones too. No rain, no shine, no spilled coffee or soup will prevent an Xperia M series or higher from working (one of the reasons I no longer buy E).
So no waterproofing? Sorry - no sale.
Initially, it was part of the plan to pretend the incident is significantly less than what the western media has been (quite rightfully) howling about. Later on it became a matter of a pragmatic decision - getting rid of the reactor cores which have not finished "burning" their fuel would have been more dangerous. So they let the process complete properly so it can be decommissioned safely.
These are crippled-by-doctrine from inception. They have no anti-ship and no land attack capability.
The current equivalent market offering by German, French, Italian, Dutch, Chinese and Russian shipbuilders (did I count everyone who is selling? probably I missed someone) are significantly more "multipurpose".
1. They possess equivalent or slightly worse AA
2. They possess equivalent or slightly worse anti-subwarfare capabilities
So far so good - up to this point BAE offering is competitive.
3. They possess significant anti-ship and anti-land target capabilities. The BAE boats have none.
That should and would end up any attempt to sell them - they will fail any normal procurement and can and will be sold only on a "buy one dead turkey, get one free" basis.
Connoisseurs my a***. At least in Eastern Europe, ex-Soviet Union and large portions of the 3rd world.
Once upon a time whiskey there was imported rarity unavailable via normal retail channels. It was given as a "lubricant" to sweeten a deal, had special place on the wedding table and till this day is essential part of the a special variety of Connoisseurs' diet. The FAT NECK Connoisseur. The one that comes to you to collect the debts you are behind on. None of this lot can distinguish a single malt from blend and for them mass production like Johnnie Walker is The Whiskey.
Does Scotland like to admit it or not the majority of its production ends up down the throat of such "Connoisseurs". They have the buying power today and they buy most of the annual production. Compared to that the real "Connoisseur's choices" are a microscopic quantity. As far as ridiculous arguments for a court decision this probably takes the prize of the year for maximum ridiculousness.
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