Posts by Trigonoceps occipitalis 1593 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2014
Have some sympathy. The plain old telephone network still functions if the power is out. At least at home the PC is plugged into this magic socket, where it goes to at work will be a mystery. If the phone works during a power cut why not the PC/network that is plugged into the same wall socket?
Woeful education and training of the user but you, the professional, are working on a help desk. Just help OK.
There may be some significant protection here. Granted I may only get a few cents out of it but after the first significant leak I fully expect the gentlemen of the American bar to contact anyone affected to sign up. We may poke fun at the way the legal system is sometimes misused in the USA but this may cost European companies. Won't make any real difference to leaks, surveillance or monitoring though.
Public Key Cryptography was invented twice, once by CESG who kept it secret and then by PGP who published. Is the fuss made by the various government tentacles some way to condition us to a new concept of "Safe Back Doored Cryptography" - for low values of safe of course? Is there a system in the wings?
My mathematics is no where near good enough to assess any new SBDC system but I just can't get over my gut feeling that a back door is open to any who obtain the secret no matter how complex, obscure or protected. Evidence to date is that the secret will leak or be discovered.
In any case it has proven difficult enough to implement cryptography that is supposed to be built without a back door. Given that the UK authorities, at least, can demand keys from suspects why bother with SBDC.
SBDC is, of course, an oxymoron.
How are you wrong, let me count the ways.
The Berlin wall was demolished 25 years ago. 40 years ago the Ukraine was part of a country known as the USSR, colloquially Russia. There was no way to detach the Ukraine for the USSR short of war, until the collapse of the USSR. Even then the Ukraine was not a beacon of western liberal democracy,
"Winning" the cold war allowed Poland, Hungary, etc (established countries in their own right) to be brought into the western orbit but not the Ukraine and other "republics" in the USSR. The mistake the EU made was to try to detach the Ukraine from a resurgent Russia. It was never going to happen and the EU, bless it, did not have, and has not, the economic, military and soft power to take on Russia. (Who has heard of "EUpop".)
Greece joined the EU in 1981 after it had returned to civilian government. Just after WW2 the UK was fighting with the Greeks to prevent a communist take over. Greece joined NATO in 1952.
I've not a lot of time for the self perpetuating, self aggrandising EU "state" but am very glad it has not got the gonads to take on Russia because it has no power to back up any threats, particularly given the parlous state of the Euro and the dire position of the southern EU members.
Evidence in a UK court is admitted if it is in the interest of justice for it to be admitted. The Judge decides and how it was obtained is largely immaterial. Of course with ANPR evidence there are many reliability and continuity problems but these should be dealt with by the opposing barristers who will explain to the jury all aspects of a large, replicated and distributed, secure database relying on optical character recognition in a system provided by the lowest bidder, outsourced, moved overseas, returned to UK, copied, backed up, restored and queried. No possibility of error.
I'm all for scroats driving without tax, insurance and MOT being collared but the police have to more or less catch them in the act. Once recognised and checked the VRN can be used to cue the traffic police or discarded. The database behind the ANPR system is all about surveillance and intelligence. It is extra-legal and our only hope is getting it in front of the European Court.
"What I don't really understand is why they feel the need to record the communication records of everyone."
Who is talking to who (allied to car registrations, addresses, travel plans etc) is a powerful tool in developing the organisation and hierarchy of an organisation (terrorist, paedophile or ordinary decent criminals - TPODC). Knowing the organisation and hierarchy is a vital step in defeating or neutralising the enemy. When someone, previously unknown, is spotted as a TPODC having historical data just makes it quicker and easier.
The fact is that the government are not going to go without this capability. All we can argue about is reach (IP address, search history, communications meta-data etc), funding, retention time, security of the data and, most importantly, who has access. Currently the reach is too high, ISP customers will be funding some of the system, retention time is too long, security is probably non-existent in reality and far too many low-level busybodies and aspiring dictators will have access for little or no good reason.
"Nobody is going to inform each other about test missile launches because it's not worth it."
During Cold War confidence building measures (the hotline, SALT, START, inspections etc) one agreement was to inform "the other side" of missile tests. No idea if this has changed, I doubt it so Russia and China probably knew about this test.
Telling the opponents is important. As weapons develop one side or the other will have an advantage. "Launch on Warning" is, at times, a rational position to prevent destruction of your missiles, planes etc. Knowing about test launches is intended to mitigate the risk of tests being misconstrued as the start of a nuclear strike.
"...in contrast to today when everyone seems to push for higher quality standards."
Yes, but back when Betamax and VHS were fighting each other the final visual output, at least in the domestic market, was crap. It was even more crap for NTSC (Never Twice the Same Colour). No matter how much Betamax was technically superior the result was much the same on a plain old domestic, built down to a price, CRT TV (usually very badly set up to boot).
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