Posts by Laura Kerr

Oh, he'll find a way round that. He could hand copies out at weddings, for example.

Re: Bring back Fidonet.

Indeed. So any trrrist with a modicum of intelligence would run two identities. The public one would be based around a Facebook account full of cat videos, gormless comments on minor slebs' public pages, semi-literate memes and photos of their meals. Bog-standard, run-of-the-mill banality.

The secret one - the Fido system - would be used solely for stuff that needed to be kept secret. No voice calls on the burner phones. Said phones are paid for in cash. The weak spot would be distributing the nodelists - they couldn't just download them from jihadistnutter.org without attracting attention. But there are ways round that - Allfix might do the job. So might burying them in MSI packages.

As a little exercise, I've put my Fidonet system back online. It runs quite happily on an elderly Compaq laptop under Windows 95 and the modem plugs straight into the phone line. No Internet connectivity needed. Files can be transferred via a USB drive. I still have an elderly Nokia with a serial cable that allows it to be used as a modem.

My system was primarily an echomail gateway - I used to transfer mail between five different networks. From looking at the logs, call durations were very short, even when pulling big packets down from the Fido backbone for distribution across Europe. If the Fido system was used only for essential comms, the calls would be even shorter. To monitor my traffic, an attacker would need to know (a) the number I was polling, (b) be able to take a copy of my traffic without alerting me, (c) either know or be able to crack the session password on the fly and (d) be able to decrypt the mail packets. Ringing the changes on the node number, phone number, session password and decryption passphrase makes the snoop's job just that wee bit harder.

An additional security measure is the fact that I could quickly swap hard drives. It's easier to hide or destroy a drive than a whole laptop. That would just leave the burner phone, but swapping the SIM for an innocuous one only takes a few seconds. All the plod could do would be to try to make the possession of a phone that could act as a modem evidence of possession of an article for preparing an act of terrorism. OTOH, I wouldn't put it past them to try...

Re: Where do I sign up?

If I hadn't already been assimilated, I'd be up for joining in, too. I do all codes, much quickness, plenty cheapness.

Not sure why you've been downvoted... that occurred to me, too. If VW just shut up shop and walked away, the Americans would presumably have to go after them in a European court. The outcome there might be a little saner.

Re: Quite nice - cadge a lift

I'm sure a quick refit would see HMS Belfast good to go, as well.

Re: Exam question

Quite correct, I am. Have an upvote.

As for why - in his rabble-rousing speeches, Trump is attacking Muslims in exactly the same way as Hitler attacked the Jews. In the early part of Mein Kampf, Hitler records his impressions of his first encounters with Orthodox Jews in Vienna. You can see the resentment swelling and festering the more he talks about it, but that particular passage has always stayed in my mind as a classic non-sequitur caused by one man's personal obsession. Hitler automatically assumed that all Jews were Zionists and those who professed otherwise only did so because they didn't have the bottle to nail their colours to the mast. Trump is doing exactly the same thing by implying that all Muslims in the US are Daesh sympathisers, while ignoring the law-abiding and peaceful majority. I genuinely would not be surprised if he were to demand that all Muslims in the US had to wear a yellow crescent when out in public.

I'd suggest that anyone wanting to understand the risks posed by people like Trump should read Mein Kampf carefully and compare the self-pity and festering hatred in that book with the personal charisma and fantastic public presence that Hitler had. He could carry a crowd along with him, talk the talk and put on a good show, but underneath that façade was a bitter and twisted man. Trump comes from the same mould - he whips up a crowd and tries to position himself as a real alternative man of the people, but you only have to take a small step back to realise he's a raving fascist.

Re: An uncomfortable noise...

Ha, Manchester's already BTDT and GTTS. About twelve years ago they had a set of singing bollards at the east end of the Arndale centre.

When they were activated to let White Van Man through, they would sink into the ground singing 'Caution, bollards in motion. Caution, bollards in motion. Caution, bollards in motion." It was the earworm from hell, but when I found it had been changed the last time I was down that way, I felt like I'd lost an old friend.

I expect the singer found a better gig recording IVR menus or something.

Re: James is a dick...

Have to say I'm with the majority on this one. The point is, when you're a director or a senior manager, you can and should delegate some authority, but you cannot delegate responsibility. It seems pretty clear that the IT Director intended to toss James and his boss out as soon as the network connection was established - but failing to ensure he or another member of staff knew the details is entirely his fault. He was ultimately responsible, so it serves him bloody well right.

And if it turned out he had next-to-no IT knowledge then he had no business calling himself an IT Director, no matter how big a mouth and MBA he had.

Re: @Laura @Palpy Another brain-dead politician

"Having to deal with countries, if you can consider a collection of tribes a country, with no tradition of any of those items is more than a bit frustrating, especially those of us (me, my relatives, and in-laws) at the sharp end of our Big Stick."

And that is the crux of the problem. Many Middle Eastern societies are tribal in nature and loyalty to the tribe over-rules any adherence to the nation state. Not only that, but they tend to be patriarchal in nature, and defer to the wisdom of the tribal and family elders. You could argue that's not necessarily a bad thing; it allows for things to be guided by experience rather than the vagaries of hot-headed youth, but OTOH, it leads to ingrained conservatism, which is why attempts to impose the Western model of a nation state just don't work.

Patriarchy takes precedence in democratic societies, too. If a tribal or family elder instructs people to vote for a certain candidate, that is exactly what they will do. We even see that here in the UK among Asian communities. Whenever it's uncovered, a lot of noise is made about vote-rigging, but unless people are prepared to stand up to their own families, there's nothing the authorities can do. Often, too, there's no coercion involved - the people vote in accordance with their elders' wishes because that's the done thing.

That state of affairs is the complete opposite of the Western model, and when attempts are made to impose that model following a sustained onslaught of high explosives, it's perfectly understandable that Middle Eastern people just aren't up for it. Without widespread support, it becomes child's play to undermine the fledgling democracy by using its own mechanisms against it. Look at how Hitler gained and consolidated his power. Same with Mugabe.

The bottom line is that unless it's possible to instil a deep-rooted belief in democracy right across the board, and ensure that it stays there throughout several generations, it's bound to fail when confronted with stronger social mores. The only way Middle Eastern countries have been held together since the fall of the Ottoman Empire was via military occupation by France and Britain and then via brutal oppression - Saudi Arabia, the Shah's Iran, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Bashar al-Assad's Syria and so on.

I admit I don't have all the answers, but it seems to me that some sort of federal alliance based on tribal or religious allegiances might be a solution, with enforced democracy taken out of the equation entirely. They'll have to embrace democracy in their own time, or it'll be doomed to failure.

Re: Patents?

A fair point, but I'd guess that if it's considered sufficiently important, the European response to the lawsuit will be that given in Arkell v Pressdram.