Posts by Cynic_999

Re: So does this also invalidate all facial recognition installed everywhere?

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No warrant needed AND not even under arrest.

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Rubbish. The police must first get permission to issue you with a written notice detailing what they require you to disclose & a reasonable time limit. If you do not then disclose you could be charged with an offense, at which point it will go to trial and a court will decide whether you are guilty and if so what sentence to impose.

Police will often lie and *say* that you must disclose as soon as a police officer asks, but that is a load of cobblers.

Re: Others to Be Found

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Have the Liberian authorities brought those in Cellcom who decided to hire him for this purpose to justice?

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No, they unfortunately suffered completely unconnected accidents or fatal attacks from muggers before they had a chance to bribe the police.

Re: What it is...

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... does it mean they should be able, by defence in law, to do the same today?

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I believe that everyone should have the right not to be forever painted in a bad light because of something foolish they did when a lot younger. If not, where does it stop? Should everyone be able to look up the smallest thing you did wrong as a child? Thank goodness that there was no social media when I was in my teens and early 20's.

People do change.

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This is not about morality, this is IMHO about the psychological impact on forming and susceptible minds by being exposed to this stuff.

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Do you have a credible study that supports that conclusion, or is it merely something you have decided is the case without any evidence whatsoever?

Re: @Waseem - Unauthorized use of an IT asset

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Irrespective of the law, the (only) civilized way to do it is to communicate with the owner and describe him your findings.

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What would you suggest is the best way to communicate with an unknown person in an unknown location the fact that he has an unsecured printer that anyone can send a print to? Or an insecure video display device?

Re: Mythbusters

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2. Modern planes are so well shielded this is not a problem.

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Except that the effectiveness of the shielding is not something that is tested in pre-flight checks (or even in most maintenance checks). With modern fly-by-wire aircraft the interference could do more than just affect the navigation system.

So while you may be happy to bet your life on the fact that there are no missing bonding wires or shielding panels, I prefer to be incommunicado for the 15 minutes or so where the aircraft is close enough to the ground that the flight crew may not be able to deal with an RFI induced problem.

Re: How To Do Encryption IN THE REAL WORLD

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Normal people won't cope with asymmetric ciphers.

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Normal people would not be able to cope with SMTP headers or MIME encoding/decoding either.

Fortunately the mail applications make such things completely transparent so the user does not need to have the slightest idea of how they work (or even that they exist at all).

Just as could be done with asymmetric encryption such as PGP. OTOH on the occasions I've needed to do so, I've found that a "normal" (i.e. non-technical) person was able to cope with the likes of Kleopatra perfectly fine. Even lawyers were able to use PGP after a little coaxing (e.g. "I'll be hiring someone else if you are unwilling to encrypt our communications.") ...

Re: security ?

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how about enabling DNSSEC ?

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Why? What scenario are you thinking of that would cause you any harm whatsoever due to insecure DNS on this particular site?

Going to a lot of trouble to secure your wallet when you go swimming makes sense. Securing your towel, not so much.

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Remember, these machines can be buried or remote, meaning physical switches are not an option since that will mean expensive physical trips.

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You can install relays instead of physical switches that are controlled by a separate hardware box that can be operated remotely. I once installed a remote landline operated mains switch on a server that was prone to crashing that allowed me to do a remote "switch off and back on" just by dialling a number and sending a sequence of characters to the remote modem.

Re: Criminal liability

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Are there any potential murder investigations ongoing?

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Unless you are suggesting that the malfunctions were deliberately engineered in order to cause GBH or death, then there is no question that it could possibly be classed as a murder.

"Corporate manslaughter" is the most that the company could be charged with.

Re: Human Error, eh ??

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And why a known defective model was available for replacements?

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Erm ... I think that was the "human error" being referred to.

Re: 'Murica never ceases...

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/me notes that if EVERYONE has a firearm, criminals will be a LOT more afraid to use them to commit crimes...

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Exactly, which is why the USA has far fewer gun-related murders than countries that ban firearms.

Oh - wait ...

Re: CCTV

I have used this analogy before ...

Imagine that all the CCTV cameras were to be replaced with large watchtowers. (Which would put at least one on almost every street corner in the average town). Atop each tower is a man in a black uniform and red armband, scanning the streets through a large pair of binoculars and writing his observations in a notebook, a telephone by his hand.

How would that make you feel? Safer?

CCTV is of course *exactly* the same as that scenario - except less obvious so you stop noticing them.

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A nuclear power station is really just an enormously complex steam engine ... with much more dangerous waste products.

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Wrong. The waste products of nuclear power stations are a darn sight safer and more easily managed than the waste products of coal-fired power stations.

Re: @ toilet duk

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My suggestion: if you're required to obtain one, do so and simply leave it at home in your drawer unless you're required by law to carry one at all times or unless life is deliberately made so difficult that carrying an ID card makes things incredibly easier.

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It will be the latter. If everyone is required to have an ID card, then inevitably more and more services will require you to present it ("To improve your user experience"). Pretty quickly it will be needed to enter a train station, to buy prescription medicines, phones, booze or other age-restricted items. Slowly the requirement to present your ID card will widen, until so many everyday activities will require it to be presented that you will be forced to carry it. That's assuming that it does not become an offence to not have it to hand when the nice police officer demands to see it.

Re: Alternatively...

I know that you believe that you understand the words that you think you heard me say, but what you fail to realise is that the words I used were applicable only to the thoughts that I was having at the time I used them and may not apply to the processes that your brain was considering at the time you were hearing them. You will therefore need to re-assess your conclusions as to the knowledge I was imparting using an alternate frame of reference.

Re: actually driving a teenager to threaten suicide?

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So yeah Google going with the SAME flow as their politics, stirring up 'the children' through some kind of manipulative tactic,

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And? Two wrongs do not make a right. If Google's propaganda was *countering* political propaganda in some way then I may decide it was providing some sort of balance and so a good thing.

But it isn't - it is making propaganda to further its commercial interests and so we are being bombarded with (at least) two different streams of alternate reality.

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Rehabilitation for sex offenders, unlikely, they have one of the highest percentages for recidivism across all the offender groups,

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Complete misinformation. Sex offenders in fact have the *lowest* rates for re-offending (look up the statistics). Unfortunately people start believing the lies if they are told them often enough.

Re: @eDog - why should the taxpayers be on the hook?

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IMHO police officers should be required to carry liability insurance, for when they do something like shooting an unarmed black man whose family sues for a few million dollars.

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No - that would end up costing the taxpayer even more. The insurance companies will obviously set the premiums so that they still make a profit (across the whole country), and so the taxpayer will be paying not only for the pay-outs of the lawsuits but for the yachts and private jets of the directors of the insurance company as well.

Insurance for an individual makes sense (risk is distributed across all the policy holders). But insurance makes no sense whatsoever if you are a very large national entity because it is bound to cost more.

Re: There is no real option to turn off Location History once it has been enabled;

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If you are some paranoid nutter that cares about this sort of thing, then don't turn it on

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Paranoid? I may well want to use it for some things, but if you leave it on all the time it means that potentially anyone could get hold of your location history since you started carrying a Google device around with you. Maybe you think that's harmless - but what happens when your insurance goes up because they see that you regularly drive on statistically more dangerous roads, or visit places that are deemed a "lifestyle risk"? Or your employer can look to see where you went on that day you said you were sick (but really went to a job interview), or your nutty ex uses it to follow you around, or a burglar uses it to ensure that all household members a far away?

The correct way would be to leave it off unless I start using an application where I specifically want it to know my location.

Re: Not a good idea, Ohio

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But certainly no government entity should accept currency other than that of the government they're part of, in this case the U.S..

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Most "government entities" accept foreign currency in at least some transactions. You will find that the UK government accepts visa fees and airport taxes in foreign currencies for example.

Re: OK, but why ....

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Even the meter reading cost argument is ridiculous. Pay by capacity, not by usage. Far cheaper to administrate - you just rent a sealed fuse of a specific size.

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I can't see that is at all practical or fair. It would be pretty easy to have a high-power battery powered invertor to allow large peak loads even if on a low current supply. A 5 amp supply will allow you to use nearly 30kWh per day, and few households us that much 'lekky (unless they own an electric car).

Re: WTF?

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Why is it okay for Google and Yahoo, but not Microsoft?

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Because you don't pay to use Google and Yahoo. Micro$oft charge for their main products.

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So basically people are complaining that traffic destined for Google may be stored, analysed and used for nefarious purposes by someone other than Google?

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Ignorant people may be complaining about that, but that was not what happened. The only significant traffic that was mis-routed would have been SYN (connect) attempts, which went unanswered. Whatever request or data the person trying to contact Google may have intended to send would thus have not been sent. To anywhere. So the only data that would have been obtained was the fact that a connection request was made to Google from a particular IP address at a particular time for an unknown purpose - hardly something that is likely to be of any concern.

Possibly there was a bit of UDP data that got through (UDP does not require a connection be established before sending the payload - often used for live streaming video or audio for example), but in almost all cases there would be some sort of 2-way handshake before streaming the data over a UDP connection, so really no risk that Internet calls were being intercepted.