Posts by Christoph

Well done Google. Even when everyone agrees it needs to be done, they still make sure all the legal requirements are in place before releasing information on an innocent third party.

"some answers on if and how we can do something about climate change."

If the denialists manage to stall everything for only a few more years, the answer will be:

Location: Up shit creek

Paddle status: False

“When we pressed the PayPal representative on the phone for further details, he "

said "Ouch! Err ... we .. . ouch! ... can't, um, comment on ... ouch! ... any of that"

Switzerland’s most visited historic monument

Not any more? Will people not bother to visit when they can tour it remotely?

Or possibly visitor numbers might increase, to view the real thing after doing a remote tour?

I hope someone will be doing a detailed look at the numbers to check what actually happens.

Deliver to no-longer-manned suburban tube station.

Pick up from locker late night when getting home from the pub.

Head out half-drunk, in dark, from known collection point with expensive gadget under arm.

What could possibly go wrong?

It's just that he's so used to that kind of percentage, since 90% of the City of London police are crooks.

(Which is an absolutely true number that I've just made up.)

It's a gigantic government IT project - what could possibly go wrong?

One obvious problem for a start. Once this is brought in all other methods of payment will be removed. The same way they are stopping cash payments for London buses. So if your card is lost or stolen, you won't be able to use any form of public transport. If you are stuck somewhere late on a Saturday night, you are stuck. Sorry young woman who's just been robbed, you're going to have to walk home and hope you don't get raped too many times on the way.

This story will run and run

"after refusing to pay criminals to stop the attack"

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

But we've proved it again and again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

You never get rid of the Dane.

Interesting. They announced the end of security patches for Windows XP with years of advance warning and fanfare, so they obviously thought it extremely important to warn users about it.

Which gives them a lot to explain if they've ended Windows 7 security support on the quiet a few days later.

“We nearly are alone in the world in not using our intelligence services for the competitive advantage of our businesses.”

Words fail me.

I mean really. I usually have a snarky comment to make about this sort of thing, but that claim is just beyond belief. You'd have to be a Fox News watcher to credit it for an instant.

It may be random but is it unbiased?

How do they manage to make it indistinguishable from perfectly random? Even if it has a quantum input, the process of digitisation might make it more likely for instance to get a '1' than a '9' - the article doesn't say how they get round that.

Would they be able to make certain that no production devices had any such bias?

The Cobblers Children Have No Shoes

That's a common problem - the snoopers are so busy snooping on other people that they neglect their own security.They think it can't possibly happen to them.

You walk into the interview and you sing "You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant" and walk out.

it follows procedures to "protect the privacy of U.S. persons"

The US has constitutional rights to protect 'real' people - US citizens. Everybody else is considered sub-human and doesn't have those rights.

Europe has human rights legislation. Everyone has rights, whoever and wherever they are.

Until the ConDems take us out of that system of course. Complaining that the Human Rights legislation stops them doing whatever they want, which is the whole bloody point!

"This is a tactic that the US government categorically denounces."

Pot, meet kettle

Is the personal side secure too?

Is the personal data secure from being read or wiped by the remote management tool?

How far will it be possible to go?

I'm not sure what linking railways there are. Will it be possible to go by train from John O'Groats to Cape Horn?

How about the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn?

Copper is a lot more expensive when you have to keep replacing it after it gets nicked.

And it will get worse as the price of copper keeps rising - it will get nicked more and it will cost more to keep replacing.

For a greenfield site, copper is ridiculous.

"And so you are not going to kind of be able to call up and say, by the way I need an extra 500,000 eight TBs I forgot to order"

Even the concept of someone being able to casually forget about ordering Four Exabytes of storage because it's such a trivial amount is somewhat mind-blowing!

I wouldn't go anywhere near a 'service' that changed the code every 16 seconds!

Besides anything else, how would they track back to what caused a fault?

If a new fault appeared, how would they identify the change that caused it?

How could they possibly check each version before live deployment?

How could they ensure that two successive changes didn't clash with each other?

Et cetera, for may many problems.

He's been in custody since August but only now confessed? How many times did they have to waterboard him?