Posts by Xamol

Re: It is a fact that the UK was a net contributor to the EU.

Quite...

That would explain why those investments into research and nurses and everything else haven't been made yet. Not some nonsense about paying off EU debts.

Re: even if in Apple's case it's really just a fruit emblem

I think Apple have their own issues caused by lack of care in design or execution.

iPhone 4 that had to be held a certain way in order to obtain a signal? Bendy iPhone 6? Apple Maps?

Re: And the EU still can't understand why the UK left.

The EU is being slated for wanting to stop vaccines from being exported after finding out that the supply they signed up for will not be arriving according to the expected timeline. Are they at fault for wanting to prioritize EU citizens over UK citizens?

If you answer yes, then what's your position on the UK decision to insist on having priority over other countries for the AZ vaccine and having that written into the contract? Isn't that the same thing, only pre-meditated?

Like it or not, the UK and EU governments have a responsibility to their own citizens before other countries. If any country decides to donate vaccines (or anything else) to another country then it's done with one or two things in mind; party/personal politics and international diplomacy (in that order). If it were otherwise, every country would already be receiving an equal number of doses per capita.

Re: Resilience

The point I'm trying to make is that you should plan for outages. If your system is critical, then you have to plan accordingly and have redundancy. Whether that's active/active or active/passive you should be trying to remove SPOFs so your system should be in more than one cloud region. If your system isn't critical then you have to have a different BCP that suits your requirements. Either way, you shouldn't expect zero downtime from a cloud region just like you shouldn't expect zero downtime from a traditional DC.

If you take it to the extreme, you should probably be planning to have cross provider redundancy e.g. deploy into Azure and AWS, but that's going to come for nothing in terms of solution design and operational planning. You'd want to have a seriously critical system to warrant that effort.

Re: Que sera, sera

The thing about quantum computing is that it will both work and not work at the same time... until you look at it at which point it becomes a cat.

...or something like that.

"Corrupting the debate"

P.Lee, you make a fair point.

I see the corruption of the debate as something different from the addition of new ideas though. The corruption is from the hardening of already held beliefs through the creation of echo chambers. This means that rather than adding to the debate, they're drowning the other side out.

Re: I'm torn...

...and some have birds of prey so noisemakers and shotguns aren't really all my "measures in place".

Not my circus, Not my monkey

Like that one but also like, Not my bull, not my bullshit!

Sham medicine? Maybe.

But is it still sham medicine if the patient believes in it and benefits from the placebo effect?

@SMFSubtlety

"Try also building AI that learns to negotiate without copying human behaviour and then compare the results sets. Yes it will take longer, but do you end up with a better negotiated results for both parties?"

Isn't that more compromise than negotiation? Definately not the same thing...

This...

"The problem will mutate and move on,"

and this

"If this were to happen, we'd only be pushing these people further underground, presenting a greater challenge to security intelligence services."

Force the bad guys away from tools like WhatsApp etc and they will find other methods to communicate that will be even harder to monitor. At least with WhatsApp etc you have a known comms channel to target (digital) and if you get the required permissions from a court of law then you can monitor all of those comms by installing malware on the targets device(s).

Take WhatsApp etc away and the bad guys will no longer trust digital comms so they'll find other channels for comms. Good luck finding a tool like malware that will scoop up all of that intel...

Re: It is an improbable story

@Voyna "Though I believe that the CIO would have taken some action, it doesn't look like "Gordon" was at a level to know what it was."

In your story you were a student... Just sayin'

Re: Looking for password laziness on CCTV cams?

Security is an industry (IoT) wide problem and for me, goes hand in hand with privacy concerns. I take issue with devices that require a server component that gives a company access to information on what I'm doing, where and how etc. All of the information in the servers should be held within my domain, under my control. That means that either it's all encrypted so that only I can access it, or it's held locally on my devices (or both).

Maybe there's a business case for a new company called elgoog. A company that charges a fair price for the services it offers and guarantees (within the bounds of its control) that your data remains your own.

I accept that the IoT servers will always be required so long as residences don't have fixed IP addresses. If elgoog is serious though, it doesn't need much more information than IP address and basic information about the device.

At least I now know of one CCTV cam that has at least some basic security available.

Re: Ground rules - what is Parliament for?

@IWVC

"So either the allocation of MPs to population is badly wrong or we have MPs putting forward their personal views rather than those of their constituents"

MPs are elected based on a broad range of policy positions. The electorate has to decide which candidate best represents their own positions. In most cases, this will not be a 100% correlation and that has to be accepted. Obviously this gets complicated by additional factors such as toeing the party line but I would argue that this is a well understood modus operandi for non-independent MPs.

That aside, when they come to vote on this in parliament they will have to decide whether to vote in line with the referendum result in their constituency or vote in line with their own preference (if different). That's when things could get interesting...

Re: Is there a story here?

Would a competent human in the Lexus have seen the van jumping the red and been able to take action to avoid the collision?

I've lost count of the number of times I've looked at other vehicles and thought 'he's not going to stop', or something similar and acted accordingly to prevent an accident.

You can't rely on humans to obey the rules 100% of the time, if only for the fact that we get distracted. Good luck trying to make autonomous cars deal with that. I think we're a few years away from that...

Re: minimum weight

Surely it can't be a simple weight switch; what if the pilot is pulling +g?

Re: A legal work around?

It wouldn't break online banking because it's not a 'zero knowledge' system. i.e. the banks already hold the encryption keys so can already provide access to the unencrypted messages.

Re: And so it begins

"Yes, there's holding data on someone else's computers, for all you know outside the jurisdiction and a whole lot of legal complications as that mess matures."

Have you read about Enterprise Mobility? Please point me to the bit that says you have to store data offsite let alone, in a specified jurisdiction. You do get cloud based single sign-on but it looks like even that has a choice of multiple datacentres.

It might not be popular to defend Microsoft but some of the comments on here are pure FUD.

For $7 per month, you get and OS, Office 365 (like it or not this is the de facto standard for business), device management and enterprise security. If you're in the Microsoft ecosystem (happily or otherwise), it doesn't seem like too bad a deal.

Re: misleading journalism at its best

Sure... and we'll still have 349 million a week to spend on the NHS.

Re: (read 'dilution of national identity')

I second that. Very embarrassing.

I now live and work in Europe and the whole debate makes me cringe and slightly ashamed of a lot of the views expressed by fellow Brits. Small consolation that the Germans and Dutch I work with sympathise and tell me that there are plenty in their own countries that would express similar views. Overall I think that makes things worse...

I'm not EU law expert but my (possibly flawed) understanding is that Switzerland has applied immigration quotas to the free movement agreement but those quotas aren't part of the EFTA agreement both parties signed up to. Disagreement is right because I think the EU would say that the Swiss are still part of the free momevement agreement.

Re: @ Xamol If it were Microsoft

@Youngdog - There's the built in goodwill coming out.

I never said anything about numbers of bricked devices and your construction of an inequitable comparison in favour of Apple just proves my point. Why do you create a scenario where MS bricks a higher percentage of devices?

I would expect the level of vitriol levelled at MS to be higher even if MS bricked a smaller percentage of of devices than Apple. That's just my opinion, others will make up their own minds.

If Apple keeps on behaving as they are, surely they can't expect the good will to last forever. Bricked devices is just one example... Can you imagine if MS came out and simply stated that their devices are only expected to have a life of 3-4 years? There was almost no reaction when Apple did just that.