Posts by P. Lee 5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007
Suicidal terrorists are pretty much impossible to stop. Far worse than people being killed is catching the government with its pants down. Journalists and people like Mitnick and Snowden are the real targets. People who embarrass the government. Finding those people with end to end encryption in place is hard and leaves a huge paper trail of warrants.
It won't. We now repudiate the religious system which gave us the values which lead to the renaissance.
We'll continue to preach survival of the fittest and nature red in tooth and claw as the basis of reality. The more we draw from the idea that humans are merely lucky animals with higher IQs and better language skills, rather than separated from them by moral obligations, the more we will fight for the females and the food. The harder the times, the more violent we'll become. The most depressing thing about the war in Iraq wasn't that the populace was tricked into going to war, it was the fact that when they found out, they voted those responsible back into power. The killing was far away, so they just didn't care.
Freedom? I heard today we'll now be getting "preventative detention." Its just for the terrorists of course. Until it isn't. We are building massive infrastructures to track people and control commerce. When the next repressive regime rolls around it is going to get far uglier than last time. One third of US white goods are built with prison labour and most of the prison population is Black. Three strikes legislation means you can go to jail for a long time for trivial offences. That isn't corrective or protective - that's just economics-driven slavery. Freedom? That parrot isn't dead, its just sleeping, honest guv.
Tolerance? It seems few people seem to know what that is. We try so hard to say everyone's beliefs are equally valid, when they are clearly contradictory, that we just end up suppressing everyone who isn't politically trendy. I'd far rather have people tell me I'm wrong, but I'll be tolerated, than have them try to claim my beliefs are the same as everyone-else's but I may not express them in case I hurt someone's feelings.
/rambling rant
>Apparently Microsoft didn't have the brains to realize that there would be a meaningful number of people who would take advantage of the "unlimited" offer in ways that never occurred to them.
Oh I'm sure MS knew exactly what would happen if they offered "unlimited" storage, but decided it was better to attract some users and lose a few when it was withdrawn, than never to have users at all.
Personally, I prefer just to buy my own multi-TB disk. I don't need MS or Google or Amazon or Instagram, Flickr or Free Willy for storage.
The fact that people want a "cloud" for storage speaks volumes to me about the complete failure of the IT industry to make a simple and secure server product suitable for home use. Surely a router/disk server/backup unit with stackable disks to increase storage would be the logical resting place for WindowsRT?
>All religion should be classified as 'if you want to do it, do it, but don't push your ideals onto others' - i.e. make it like stamp collecting or train spotting...
>GET RID OF IT.
It depends what you call "religion."
"Worship" is a contraction of "Worthy-ship." It is about what you consider to be most worthy of your time, effort and resources.
Are you still suggesting that everything that anyone considers worthy of time, effort and resources should be classed as a hobby and we should GET RID OF IT?
Or are we only getting rid of the things you don't approve of?
Irony-troll is watching you.
>Cherry picking from one religous book to justify predjudice?
Easy to do, although presenting sentences from different books as a single quote may be more than just cherry picking. "Take the text out of context, you're left with a con." Cut off her hand? Well, if she tried to forcibly castrate someone in the heat of someone else's fight (Deut 25), maybe that was considered appropriate. For teaching? Probably not, but that wasn't the context.
There is more merit to the argument than you are admitting though. While putting together the odd quote is dangerous, we do seem to be very surprisingly shy about evaluating beliefs. "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelets were popular at one time. I see no reason why we should not ask, "What Would Mohamed Do?" As the chief exponent of Islam, how did Mohamed behave? Why not apply IT or business analyst skills to the problem? If we take the life of Mohamed and the Quran as "architectural governance" what sort of HLD or detailed design for life do we end up with? If we take the Bible and the life of Jesus, what sort of principles do we apply to come up with a detailed design for living? If we take the Hindu, Buddhist, Communist, Nazi or Atheist writings, what sort of values can we derive from them?
I'm not talking about taking any old person as an example of their value system. The question is, who is considered the best model of that belief system? Did they live up to the values they espouse? Were their actions compliant with their beliefs? If we did a traceability matrix what would be the result?
When we look at the follower's actions, are they compliant with their beliefs? Westboro Baptist church for example, is probably out of compliance with their nominally stated belief system. If I follow the humanist manifesto or the communist manifesto or Buddhist scripture or Mein Kampf or Donald Trump, is there a logic, stated or implied which governs (or fails to govern) my actions?
We need to stop pushing religion into the "private only" sphere because it is really about what drives us and like it or not, it has a public effect. Religions certainly re-badge "values" as "religion." Put aside reservations about the supernatural, re-badge "religion" as "values" if that makes the analysis easier.
All religions are not the same. They logically contradict each other. Lumping them together is about as sensible as putting the Taliban leaders and the Swiss government in one category, on the basis that they are both political. We need to evaluate the content of value systems and the compliance of our leaders to the value systems they espouse, not just take a sound-bite and get back to watching "The Good Wife."
>This technology is delivered to cultures where the rutting behavior of males to create more conceptions gives better survival odds for the culture.
Herein lies the problem.
No, not excessive population, I mean the worldview which implies that people, especially *other* people, are no more than animals and really don't deserve to be treated as anything more than cattle or dogs.
The world is not overpopulated and we have plenty of food to feed everyone. We just don't care enough to actually give it to them. We'd rather spend hundreds of pounds on a new phone or tens of pounds on a Friday night out, or a few hundred on a new big-screen TV, than help someone who may need it to buy some decent food.
>>"...poor people die in the cold & dark..."
>The world's extreme poor are most often not cold.
... and people have more sex and get more sleep when then environment isn't artificially lit.
Maybe we should think about feeding people before we give them TV? Better yet, why not teach them how to farm the land sustainably rather than trying to flog them GMO cash crops? Maybe with enough food and efficient water usage, they don't even need electricity. Hah! An idea to send shivers down Apple's spine!
Permaculture anyone? You don't have to be a hippy to move a bit of earth around and put some mulch down. Alas, there are no billions of dollars in training and having people grow food for themselves is bad for business and bad for tax receipts.
>the mouse will be replaced by the touchpad and proximity gesture control (hand movements, rather than needing to touch a physical screen.)
Nope, fingers are too fat to be accurate and touchpads have too much friction, are too slow and the clicking action is too hard or too close to the "just touching" position. Touch pads are a nice workaround for not having a flat surface for a mouse, but they are no substitute at a desk.
Funny, but a bit harsh. As a user, I really liked webos.
Personally, I'd be willing to lose app ecosystem in return for floss-managed privacy mechanisms. No gps unless I say so, ff browser and privacy extensions, let me manage what data in the address book an app can see, own cloud support.
What we need is easier os swapping on phones. Maybe even a hw hyperviser for near instant swapping. The current lockdown approach stops new entrants from being tested by interested but uncommitted users.
>Like so many other people in the "finding faults in other people's work" business (like auditors), their competence rarely extends into interpreting what they find
That's true, though its almost always also true that the client also can't be bothered to pay anyone to analyse their own applications and workflows. You can rarely do much when that is the attitude. Without knowing yourself, how can you improve yourself?
At that cost level, we are talking about a consultant, not pen-tester. It works because at that price-tag, you have the attention of the very top people in the company. If you can talk to them and you can demonstrate the business case for improving security, something might actually come of it and they might start putting some decent security-improvement programs in place.
For 15k, that's probably a good deal for the client who previously had to endure unintelligible talks on nmap and EMET, web filtering and dark web peado drug pushers from fear-salesmen who had no interest in improving the client's business prospects.
>Stock coolers tend to be loud as jet engines under continuous heavy loads.
Not even under load. My 3930k was running at 60-75 idle with an Intel air cooler
It's now down to low 30's with a prebuilt water loop. It doesn't need to be that low but my ambient often hits the high 30's in summer so a low base is useful.
>pre-assembled water coolers barely beat good tower coolers
True, but I think the point is that water coolers move the weight off the chip and motherboard. A few percent difference in performance is not that important compared to the damage a large tower cooler can do, especially in in transit.
>So you side with the perverts and blasphemers who are building a big telescope to look up the Sky Fairy's skirt? Burn him!
Nope, siding with those who don't wish to build a barnacle on the lips of the volcano god. Personally, I'd have expected him to be well able to make his wishes known on this one.
"Sacrificing a telescope? Not the usual consignment of virgins, but I'll take it."
But does Telstra do cheap like AWS?
I think not.
What do you think will happen to the pricing when the last SAN is disconnected and the last storage admin is let go?
What happens when the contract comes up for renewal and the new terms state that everything uploaded to Telstra's cloud is owned by Telstra and may be shared with trusted partners? Will you move those petabytes, pay for a new premium service or accept the new terms?
Information and IP is core to almost every business.you don't have to manage it yourself, but you give control of it away at your peril.
>it can be looked at as giving Microsoft a lower tier offering for price sensitive markets that they can use to try to persuade developers to stay with them
+1. This is not going to attract non-MS devs.
Has anyone ever noticed that most "appliances" run linux? Linux solves two things: proprietary licensing becomes commercially quite easy and cheap as long as your product isn't modifying GPL code; and the appliance vendor can control the platform. Not having someone else own part of your stack is important. Did you see what happened to Novell? Did you see what happened between Stonesoft and Check Point? Do you see Apple's attitude to anything which is similar to their own stuff? Remember Windows' support of HPFS?
The aggressive pursuit of profit means no-one trusts their suppliers and partners not to compete with them. What happens to .net core when it becomes so successful on linux that it starts making a significant impact on Windows sales? Ah yes, the libraries start to slip out of sync, suddenly things start to get a little easier on Windows than other platforms. Windows gets a few "released first" features and as a .net dev, you have the choice of a second rate platform or specifying Windows as the deployment platform.
Linux isn't just about being a different OS, its a different approach to IT. The open-source is not just a development and support model, its about people with common problems helping each other. That's a world away from MS' business practises. If you just replace "Windows" with "Linux" but the business model remains the same, you probably aren't going to gain the benefit you'd hoped for.
>As the recent thing in Paris shows, all this is just totally a waste of time and money.
You are assuming "people terrorising the general population" are the target. What if the target is "those who terrorise politicians"?
If someone is willing to die, there's not much you can do to stop them. I suspect the people they really want to catch are those who would or do embarrass them and disrupt their quest for power and expose corruption. That endeavour will always have endless endless buckets of money thrown at it.
>If you want to keep your Yahoo? Use Gmail to access your Yahoo or use thunderbird
You might lose your account that way. My wife used macmail/imap with hers and they shut her account because "it hadn't been accessed." She couldn't be bothered to try to get it back.
It was inconvenient but just accelerated the use of our own domain email. It's a pretty horrid web interface anyway - there's no way she'd use that.
>The problem seems to be that there are a lot of people in various countries who believe that they don't have any idiots. So, they tend to cast quite a few stones.
This post is closest to reality. This isnt solved with tech - web or military, this is a war of values. Not even education will help here. Much as the "ignorant foreign ragheads" idea may play well in the tabloids, they are not the attackers. The question is, are we going to allow and encourage debates about values? Do we allow space in our school systems where students can talk about ideas and values and defend their points of view, or do we squash all discussion in the name of multiculturalism (which is faux) or secularism? Do we allow debate about the role of women or polygamy or the philosophical basis and implications of our value systems? When we push religion into the "private only" sphere we do nothing to allow young people exercise critical thinking about the content of the value system they grow up in. In the secularist rush to exclude all but what they hold dear from from public life, they push all religious activity underground, where it can fester out of sight and unchallenged.
For all the flak these "extremist" cultures take, what does the west have to offer in it's place, philosophically? Historically, Christianity - love god and your neighbour as youself. Now what do we offer? Science doesnt cut it as a religion. It offers no hope for the future, no sense to existance, no answers to pain and no hope for justice. In the vacuum, all sorts of silly and unpleasant ideas flourish. Until we offer more than amusement til you die we will have problems. Actually we will always have problems, but they are our problems, domestically created.
Despite the atrocities and the itch up do something, we really need to consider if our response is proportional. How much crime do we chalk up to the "cost of living in a free society?" Moving everything online provides a great choke point for spying, far easier than anything the Stasi could have hoped for. I already see Australian tabloids calling for "extremists" to have their rights stripped. No civil rights for those who don't think "right", apparently. Is this what we've come to? The same thought processes as the jihadists? Merely a struggle between power groups with no moral high ground? The secularist would say yes because morality is just a tool to ensure group survival and has no inherent significance.
I disagree, but unless we get past the skyfairy jokes and engage people regarding what values control their thought patterns and decision-making, what they hold to be most worthy of their time and effort - the content of their religion - how can we hope to influence them? If we do hope to influence them away from destructive beliefs, what do we intend to use? Do we have more to offer than a different tribe - a different group with a will to power?
No the didn't deny the money aspect. One PR flack denied being aware of it. If they were denying the money the could have said, "No payment was made in money or in kind to the researchers and no pressure was placed on them or incentive given to them to keep their research secret."
If the govt funds CERT and CERT finds the uni's researchers, then the govt is funding the uni. They are also paying for the results if they are benefitting from the uni's researchers' output.
There's would be nothing wrong with them doing the research, but for the govt's hypocritical stance on "defeating security measures" being illegal.
'Cos it would have been obvious who snitched to the authorities about Jesus' location.
The pope's right of course. Not about the robe thing, though, that just make you look a bit daft.
I taught some kids today. Attention spans of a gnat and behaviour I'd never have contemplated at their age.
I blame tech and industry. Not just hi-tech and the internet, basic TV too. Too much emotional programming, to much on-demand satisfaction. To many parents out at work for too long then watching tv at home, depriving children of adult company and social interaction.
Perhaps the government will be happy when Silk Road 3.0 / the Chinese / bogeyman-of-the-day returns the favour of putting a bounty on analysing government networks.
No?
If they were doing it ethically and by the book, they should have set up their own tor network and done their research there.
I would have thought breaking intended protection mechanisms breaks the DMCA, but perhaps not.
I'm not sure that "I'm trying to break your network security but don't worry I'm an academic (working for the US gov)" is congruent with the government's stance on security.
er... you think a catholic monarchy would be an improvement on the situation?
We'll have to agree to disagree on that one.
/confused
Public school plutocrats or not, you'll find that all varieties of government tend to grab power, whether they be Communists, Nazis, or Tories or Labour. They all operate under the illusion and lie that if you have enough control over people and force them to do what you want, then you can make things better.
It simply isn't true. It is demonstrably not true. In the twentieth-century we tried all sorts of ways of forcing people to comply with various philosophies. They all failed. The philosophies were shown to be deficient, people worked around them until their failings were so obvious that they fell.
Tech brought a new frontier. The internet was thought to be so decentralised that it was impossible to control. That turned out be untrue when people saw the scale of computing Google could do and found out (though it should have been obvious) that the government was operating at a similar scale, or just snaffling Google's data. Having failed to control people through physical controls, even liberal governments have seen IT as a way of having informers without the need to recruit informers. While we all suspected it, when a "handler" went rogue it was all too obvious to ignore what was going on. People went back to being sneaky. Encryption systems proliferate and the "informers" find themselves shunned. Still not sneaky enough (in my opinion) but with databases being made official and shunted off to the private sector, it is just a matter of time.
I don't know if anyone has noticed the encryption tech ending up in chips. Forget TLS, just wack up a full IPSEC tunnel. Get the OS to try for a tunnel to new servers and to old ones every now and then and keep a database of what can be encrypted to where. Until this becomes the default and easy to manage/see changes, we are going to have problems. Allow policies such as "don't bother with IPSEC for RFC1918 addresses on wired LANs.
I think we are getting there. Certificate Patrol, no-script et al are bringing security to the fore on the desktop. There's still a bit more integration work to do.
Perhaps a less time-critical more distributed method of movie distribution could be found.
It doesn't have to be piracy. How about a trucrypt partition for caching films? Yes I know it can be defeated, but that happens anyway. I'd be happy to plan a day or so ahead for a discount based on overnight downloads.
Is there no breakdown by suburb?
If the data comes from Netflix how many subscribers will continue to pay if the quality is inadequate for purpose? It seems to imply that the stats may be relevsnt if the decision based around hd content availability.
"Slower" may not be as relevant as "fast enough" for basic service.
This kind of assurance is a bit like arriving home and announcing to your wife that you haven't had an affair.
It brings fear uncertainty and doubt where there was none. At least, now I begin to wonder about weasel words - sure the files are where I left them, but where else are they too?
>we're still a few years away from being able to voice control your character
and even then, while it might be fun, it would only be appropriate at non-critical times. Voice control is too slow and too tedious for normal use. If I had to say "reload" every time in an FPS I'd go nuts.
Isn't the fetching part of a pipelining operation rather than a processing operation?
Also, going back to the must-have-an-fpu-to-be-a-core point, that implies that anything which doesn't have a an FPU isn't a core... so the 486 sx had no cores?
It may be a little tricky, but anyone who pays attention knows AMD chips don't match intel on performance and they don't cost anywhere near as much as intel charges. Maybe that's because more features cost more. Surprise!
"The only winning move is not to play."
Ancient words, ever true.
I find it hard to like all these apps. I've got so many better things to do than fiddle with a phone.
Email is fine for emergencies. Video is mostly too small, maps are handy for the GPS, the 4g Modem is handy too.
SMS and telephone calls, also seem to be a good idea. The web browser, ebook reader and music players (local content only) are also fine for the commute by rail.
Apart from that, I rather dislike using the teeny-tiny inaccurate interface.
>You could do that, but if you wanted to eke out every last bit of annoyance/ecstasy you might want to start with 1.0.0.1 instead :-p
Oi!, gerrof my home network ;)
NAT'ed internet-legal addresses FTW or lose, or confusification!
I wonder if I can get the addresses from my private home network to show up in carrier proxy logs? Maybe I'll get Squid to pretend we're all using TCPWare on VMS from Apple's network.
I think it might be relevant that government IT is now probably large enough that you can't flood them with data as a DDOS or, likely, signal/noise defense.
One question would be, if NAT is a problem at an ISP level, Why is it not a problem at the home gateway level, where there are no logs. Are they just relying on mobile device use - as the geolocation suggests?
Do you think they know this will end up badly for everyone and just don't care or do they really think that (a) it will do some good and (b) they will get away with this in the long run when the general populace realises what's going on.
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