Posts by Cynic_999 2855 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Aug 2013
For those blaming age - the driver was 59, which I certainly do not consider to be particularly "old" these days. But if you believe that a 59 year old is too old to operate a car safely, then surely they are also incapable of doing many other tasks adequately, and we should set the mandatory retirement (and pension) age accordingly?
If that's the case, at what age would you suggest we revoke a person's driving licence and put them out to pasture?
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You are saying it's easier to steal email content from a specific email account hosted at Google than from the average, halfass-configured corpo mail server that is most likely something installed 10 years ago and left unimproved?
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If the private email server is only accessible from within a corporate LAN, then yes.
SMS is easily spoofed, but that is not a problem when using it for 2FA. In that case the attack vector would be to *intercept* an SMS message. This can be done (by transferring the target cellphone number to a different SIM), but not easily, quickly or undetectably. The same is true of emails - easy to spoof, but far more difficult to intercept (especially if using a private/company email address & server rather than a web-based public server).
You are behaving like a boiling frog, unable to see how the UK is slowly but inexorably following exactly the same path. When all our election choices amount to choosing the least bad government rather than a government we really want, there is no democracy. Thousands of new and far-reaching laws have been passed in the past decade, most being deliberately vague, which can and have been used to criminalise behaviour that is far from the reason the law was promoted to prevent. Of course, all the laws and infrastructure being used to control the population are promoted as being necessary to keep us "safe".
Safe from threats that are either grossly exaggerated, and/or are ones that our own government created.
The UK has made many laws that cover such wide and vague areas of activity that it amounts to making many things illegal unless explicitly permitted. Does anyone remember the teen who took a short-cut through unused land when cycling to and from work? Normally that would not be illegal (at most it would be a civil case of trespass). But it turned out that the land was owned by the MOD and she was arrested under the Terrorism Act.
It is a serious crime to be in possession of anything that may be of use to a terrorist. Think about that for a while.
Almost certainly an ATC cock-up. It is extremely unlikely that after waiting at the entry hold to a runway, a pilot would enter the runway without receiving explicit instructions to do so from the tower. OTOH the pilot should also have done a visual check of the approach path before moving ...
Forcibly removing malware from Microsoft Exchange servers does not address the danger from PCs that are not running Microsoft Exchange but may nevertheless be infected with malware (e.g. making it a "zombie" PC in a "botnet"). So if the government gives permission for LEA to infiltrate a exchange servers, the logical next step is to allow LEA to infiltrate ANY PC that is connected to the Internet to check for undesirable code and make whatever changes it considers necessary. Obviously the OS would have to have a suitable backdoor access, but I'm sure that Microsoft will comply and include it in its next update. After all, it will be for our own good. Think of the children!
And while sniffing around for whatever might be considered undesirable, they might as well have a nose around for anything else that might be of interest.
Bitcoin is a distributed, non-centralised system. No government has control of the currency. Its value is determined by the market, and as the rate at which it can be made is limited, a government cannot make itself money at the expense of devaluing it for everyone else by "quantative easing."
But if the BoE were to create a cryptocurrency, you can bet that it will not have a distributed ledger, and the BoE (and therefore the government) will control how much exists and therefore its value, just as it does with the £.
Talking to someone (either in person or on the phone) entails interrupting what they are doing, and then giving them information that they may well forget or mis-remember. Emails do not interrupt what the receiptient is currently doing, and may be referred to whenever required rather than relying on memory.
Warrant hearings are before magistrates with only the applicant being present (so nobody to argue against issuing the warrant). The applications frequently misrepresent the facts, exaggerate and are very selective in the information provided.
For those companies that have found that WFH is perfectly viable, there are many savings involved for the company - no expensive office space, no utility costs etc. etc. It is just a short step for management to realise that employees no longer need to be within commuting distance from the office. And while it makes zero difference to productivity no matter where the employee has their home, an employee in Romania or India will demand a far lower salary than an employee in Milton Keynes.
Facial recognition algorithms do not (yet) do what they are supposed to do for a variety of reasons. They are reasonbly good at matching facial images that are taken in a similar way - e.g. a passport photo and a frontal face image taken when the person deliberately looks into a fixed camera (e.g. at an e-gate in an airport), although false negatives are quite frequent even then (false positives in that situation would be undetected), so it's best used to alert a human (e.g. immigration officer) to do a double-check. And this is the simplest case of matching a single face to a single image, not trying to find a match within a database of thousands of images, where the probability of a face having similar biometrics to at least one face in the database and flagging a false positive increases greatly in proportion to the number of faces in the database.
Matching a CCTV image to a single face in a database of mugshots has to compensate for a different face position in sub-optimal lighting, and which might have additional features such as a hat, scarf, beard, long hair, makeup, glasses, completely different facial expression, age difference between sample and real-time face and/or (especially these days) a mask that obliterates many of the key biometric measurements. Trials in the UK showed that the algorithms used were so bad that it's essentially useless. Heck, humans often have great difficulty matching faces in a large set of random photograhs that include the same person in completely different conditions. There are many stories of siblings accidentally using each others' passports and going through multiple border checks undetected.
My own experience at an airport e-gate showed that I was initially denied entry because I was smiling when looking into the camera - it worked only if I deliberately held the same sombre expression as I had in my passport photo.
Since publication of this article, the minister concerned has recruited a bloke he met at his local pub (coincidentally being his wife's brother, though the minister was unaware of the connection at the time), who, after long detailed negotiations and 7 pints of cider, has promised to set up a web sight (or is it cite?) as well as an intertube mail address thingy for a cut-price 7 or 8 figure sum, which over the next 5 years (if not delayed by unforeseen circumstances such as a cold spell over Winter) will result in web pages containing at least 5000 real words of e-content and one or two JPGs, all generated by leading-edge AI in conjunction with his mate's 7 year old daughter and her pet gerbil. A committee to discuss what font to use is already in the initial stages of formation, with £15 million having been allocated to that end.
It will be World beating.
So stop spreading fake news!
In the late 1990's I received a panicked call from the accounts department. The outside auditors had arrived to sign off on the annual accounts, and were demanding to physically see various items listed on the assets register. One item was an asset valued at a high 6 figure amount. It was a CAD software suite used to design integrated circuits. The Cadence software was 100% genuine (as was its value at the time), but physically existed on several SunSparc workstations, and so it and the associated licences were just digital files on the same workstations. The workstations themselves would not be acceptable as they were listed as a separate (and far less valuable) asset. I thought of producing the backup tapes, but there was no obvious proof that those tapes contained the software in question. I suppose it would have been possible to produce the paperwork showing the purchases etc, but the auditors, who had not quite caught up with the digital World and were not quite sure what "software" was, were expecting to see a physical asset of some sort.
So I used some graphics software to print a few snazzy labels, put the labels onto some CDs, and the CDs into some ostentatious-looking CD cases I found lying around. I then ushered the auditors into the room containing the firesafe from which, after putting on some white cotton gloves, I delicately and reverently extracted the "valuable" disks - which fortunately satisfied the auditors.
Then there are the times when the tech support person on the other end of the phone is just wanting to kick the can down the road, and so asks you to do a load of time-wasting checks or tests so as to put the ball in your court and fob it off to someone else it the following day. At such times it is perhaps excusable to claim to have carried out such tests with negative result.
Every study I know of has concluded that crime rate has almost no correllation to severity of sentencing. A person who commits a crime has either acted "on the spur of the moment" or has no intention of getting caught. In both cases they have absolutely no consideration for the sentence they might get if convicted.
Things that reduce crime are (1) increased probability of getting caught and (2) reduction of the factors that cause crime in the first place (e.g. inequality of weath, environmental factors such as street lighting, road and building layout as just two things.)
Unfortunately only lip-service is applied to most prison rehabilitation programs. If it were applied more seriously it would almost certainly reduce the percentage of re-offending considerably. There are no votes to be had by increasing spending on prisoners. Unfortunately the prison environment is more toxic for most inmates than the environment outside prison, with many inmates being taught to increase the severity of their crimes. Probably the most effective education an inmate receives in prison is how to avoid getting caught next time!
The licence period is probably the most effective rehabilitation method we have.
The system has been this way for many decades. The fault is with the media for giving the impression that serving a certain part of the sentence in prison and the rest out of prison on licence is an unexpected leniency rather than how it has always been done.
If the full term needed to be served in prison, judges would simply reduce the sentences they hand down proportionately. But it is done that way for a very good reason. Having criminals closely monitored after release from prison, and subjected to significant restrictions on what they are and are not permitted to do makes it *far* less likely that they will re-offend after the end of the full sentence period.
Licence conditions are customised to the individual offender, and can be extremely restrictive. If they are caught breaking the most minor restriction it results in an immediate return to prison to serve the full sentence. This method has a very good chance of ensuring that (say) a person whose only income has been the fruits of burglaries will be forced to get a normal job and adopt a non-offending lifestyle while on licence, which hopefully becomes a habit that will continue after the restictions on their life are lifted.
Highly unlikely on two counts:
1) The police and security services will always pretend to have far *greater* abilities than they actually have, and
2) Hardly anyone would choose to spend years in prison over revealing a password unless revealing the encrypted material would result in at least a similar penalty.
You can exchange your passport for one in a different name simply by making a unilateral declaration (deed poll) that you have changed your name (and paying the necessary fee). Date of birth might be a better item of data to use, as that cannot be legally changed - although it will be shared by around 2000 other people in the UK so not exactly a unique identifier. The most common name in the UK (David Smith) is shared by over 6000 people (though that may well decrease a lot if a middle name is added).
Maybe a person's NI number should be used as the primary identifier. Babies could have it tattooed on the sole of their feet in UV ink at birth, in either numeric or barcode format. Together with the words, "Property of HM government UK"
Dyson spheres are highly unlikely to ever be constructed anywhere. They would have a totally devastating impact on the climate of any planet orbiting the star, so are not a practical solution even if the means existed to make them.
I'm pretty sure that if we advanced to the stage where the construction of a Dyson sphere were remotely possible, we would have found far better & easier ways to get as much energy as we needed. Theoretically anything that has mass can be converted to energy, and a small amount of mass can produce a huge amount of energy. 1kg of any material (sand, rock, water etc) could be converted into about 25 TWh of energy according to Einsteins famous equation. Currently man's *total* energy consumption worldwide is running at about 160 thousand TWh per year, so if we could convert mass to energy we would need only arould 6300kg of any material per year. We just don't yet have the knowledge needed to convert mass to energy in a controlled way.
While nature can indeed produce similar pollutants than those that Man produces, in most cases it can only do so after there is significant macrobiological life on the planet (e.g. combustible vegetation), which while not indicating that sentient beings exist would at least show that life exists elsewhere.
It depends what the password is protecting. If you want to stop people doing certain things from your computer, then yes it is bad. But if you want to ensure that a service can only be used from a particular computer, then it is more secure than a password. Someone could find out my password and I might never know. They are unlikely to be able to use my computer without me knowing.
Tell me what you believe is the more secure situation ... Allowing people to take money from your bank account if they know the password to that account, or allowing people to take money from your bank account if they have a physical credit or debit card associated with that account?
"Hacker" is only a perjorative if used in the context of doing something for an illegal or immoral purpose. If someone is decribed as a "hacker" with no context, my first thought is that it is a clever and innovative person - someone who achieves a goal (good or bad) via unconventional methods. . Perhaps someone who comes up with satisfactory way of opening bottles of wine when there is no corkscrew available, for example.
A "computer hacker" might be doing something bad, but might just as well be someone who cobbles some code together to do something the computer or OS was not originally designed to do. Only if the context is that of hacking someone else's computer or code without their permission or circumventing security features would I assume that it is probably a "bad" person.
For less than twice the cost of 1 year's subscription, you can buy a 1TB portable HDD. This will back up 10GB of data per month for more than 8 years. If it is only powered up when you backup or restore data, it is likely to be more reliable than an online backup service - as well as being a heck of a lot faster.
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