Posts by Dodgy Geezer

Don't Worry!

As soon as the US Film Industry and Walt Disney get to hear that their DVD encryption might be weakened, the US Intelligence sector will back down.

Because no one annoys The Mouse.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O03M6Tm7sWI

Where is the illegality?

...Given the vagaries of defamation law, every outlet reporting on the breach including The Register is constrained to note that there are legitimate reasons for using such entities, including estate planning and inheritance rules, so it's unsound to assume that all Mossack Fonseca customers were breaking the law....

Actually, it's unsound to assume that ANY Mossack Fonseca customers were breaking the law. The vast majority are presumably running offshore accounts, and these are frequently set up by people who are able to claim that the money they earn is not tied to a specific country, and should not therefore be taxed by that country.

This is often viewed as 'unfair' by people who are tied into a specific countries tax regime, but it's not generally illegal. It MAY be supporting an illegal transaction, depending on the specific details of the case,but simply having an offshore account is not something you can be charged with.

The interesting stories will no doubt turn up when accountants go through these papers and unearth specific wrongdoings. But I can't see why people are jumping up and down about the mere existence of an offshore account....?

The last time it was this hot..

...was 2010. And then before it was 1997. Both of these years were MUCH hotter than 2015. According to NOAA's own figures at the time.

This article is a set of lies.

Though I concede that hippos were living in Britain the last time it was as hot (in 1997 and 2010. In Whipsnade...

....So, in summary, hackers have never been credited with taking down a power grid...

Why should they worry, when the UK Department of Energy (now driven by climate change activists) is pretty close to taking down the UK power Grid all by itself...?

On the contrary...

...An issue with the device's power supply is the reason for the delay. Which is fair enough as it's all very well to teach kids to hack, but not if they learn what it's like to cop a jolt from the device's batteries along the way....

'Copping a jolt' is an essential part of every electrical engineer's learning experience... and used to be part of every kid's learning experience in the days when science labs still had van de Graff generators...

...Junaid Hussain – the UK fugitive hacker turned ISIS recruiter killed in a US drone strike in Syria in August – was understood to have been behind the "cyber attack"....

He is a paedophile climate change denier, was also responsible for plotting an attack on the Queen, for ensuring that Britain failed in its bid to host the 2018 World Cup, and is understood to boil little kittens to make gloves - oh, and he runs several UK banks which charge exorbitant amounts of interest....

Sir George Iacobescu...

...is not a mathematical moron. He studied Civil and Industrial engineering at Bucharest University. After graduating, he worked as a structural engineer in Romania, his first job designing pump stations for a state-run business. This was behind the Iron Curtain where, if you didn't get the maths right, you and your family suffered.

So he knows that it's rubbish. Which is why he's not putting any money in. But you have to ask the 1M$ question - why is he praising it?

And the answer to that is the same reason that scientists are falling over themselves to claim that 'Climate Change' will kill us all, and that politicians are claiming that war in the Middle East is what the West should be encouraging, and that the Saatchi brothers are claiming that Tracy Emin is a great artist. It's because humans have a 'herd mentality' and they follow weird, provably wrong ideas all the time, because social pressure stops people saying that 'the Emperor has no clothes'.

Charles Mackay wrote a book about it. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds . You can pick up a copy from Amazon for only a few pounds...

I wonder what 'fake CISCO kit' is?

It might be a box with a Cisco sticker on it, but with completely different cheap low-quality insides.

Or it might be a Cisco unit made by the same factory which makes Cisco kit in China, but one which was made in excess of their order and then sold by the factory without Cisco getting paid a license fee.

Or one of several other combinations...

Pity we aren't allowed to have the money to put up the British equivalent of Space-X - the Skylon....

Listen carefully...

... I shall say this only once...

...PI said that GCHQ is starting to see itself as “above the law”....

The security apparatus of this country (which includes GCHQ, Security Service and Secret Intelligence Service) is a hangover from WW2.

At the end of WW2 our military was not completely disbanded, but switched into providing defence during the 'Cold War'. Essentially, much of the military structure was kept going, which was good for those who had a job in it. So Britain ran these services, essentially as in WW2, right up to the middle of the 1990s, which was when the Cold War ended.

Since then, the people working in this area have been frantic to keep their jobs, and have tried to justify them by looking for other things to do - crime, or terrorism.

At this point it is instructive to look at the position that a Secret Service holds in a democracy. Normally, democratic institutions HAVE to be open - you can't run a democracy any other way. But in times of crisis - during a war when there is a danger of invasion, for instance, even democracies need systems to provide immediate executive action with no democratic balances. They may need to lock someone up who has committed no crime, for instance. The bodies set up to do this are by definition 'above the law' - they have no requirement to have democratic oversight or to abide by any legal restrictions. They can't be challenged in the courts. This is where the SS, SIS and GCHQ were born.

It is not true to say that these organisations are "starting to see themselves as above the law”. They were always above the law from their inception. The oddity is that, in the absence of any critical threat to the existence of the nation, these bodies are still trying to justify their existence, and laws are being bent to achieve this.

If you need an illustration of this, look at the court cases which the Security Service has tried to bring. Even with the benefit of draconian legislation and administrative banning orders, they usually fail. The way Security Service works is completely alien to the way, for instance, that the Police work. The Police investigate a case, suspect a person, amass evidence, arrest someone and pass the accused to a court. Security Service suspect someone, imprison them, and then try to extract information from them with no interest in due process.

There is certainly a current terrorist threat - though considerably less than the Irish threat in the 1970s. At that time the Police, suitably staffed and supported, were quite capable of dealing with it. That is what should be put in place today, and the wartime security apparatus closed down. We no longer maintain a Bomb Targeting Committee - in the same way we should no longer maintain an extra-legal state enforcement arm.