It is all a big waste of time

I spent some time going working with a network attached anti virus device that would scan all traffic coming through it for potential virus' and various malware.

The idea was brilliant, but there was one glaring little hole that didn't get mentioned much.... SSL.

Any data that came through an SSL connection was encrypted so we couldn't scan it to see if it contained malware unless we decrypted it first. It is possible to decrypt data, but it takes time and effort and is not feasible to do to all traffic so anything that came through SSL was ignored.

I would suggest that if this ever takes off everybody will just start using encrypted connections. The ISP's could log it, but it would be bloody meaningless to anybody unless they sat there for a few years decrypting it all (512bit encryption takes a while to break through and everybody can have it nowadays).

After randomly trying to go through a few peoples data and coming up with nothing they will probably give up dur to the prohibitive cost. Or they will demand the ISP's decrypt the data as well and watch them all go out of business....

Another well thought out idea by the Home Office.....

Erm...

Isn't it a well known fact that these machines can give no absolutes, only a possible indication if the person is lying...

By all accounts if you clench you arse while answering the control questions they are unable to get an accurate reading on the rest of the questions. Also if you are too shaken and nervous you will fail every question even though you are not lying....

If they start depending on this technology to find out who has perpetrated crime prepare for millions of miscarriages of justice, and lots of people let out to carry on with thier lavish criminal lifestyles with no comeback.....

Coffee.....

I take it it's an Irish one....

So....

Some clever person invents something and starts up a company to sell it. Later on in life he sells the company and starts inventing again and produces something new that shares some characteristics with his previous invention and the the old company he founded now wants to get thier sticky paws on his new invention and stop him selling it?

What a bunch of w****rs, and just more proof that the patent system is nothing more than a way for lawyers to get rich and companies to stifle innovation.

I hope they get told to feck orf in court if they decide to take it down that route.

@AC

You obviously have no idea how much damage an infection can do to a corporate network, not to mention the various problems you could suffer by breaking various laws (like the DPA) which mean you have to actually take care of the data you hold.

I could go on, but I have a feeling i'm wasting my breath.....

Crawl back under your bridge like a good little troll.

@Mark

Yes they have to charge BT Retail the same wholesale price, that will fix all the monopoly worries won't it.....

Lets stop and think about this, we Have BT Group which owns BT Wholesale and BT Retail.

Now they could charge a wholesale price of £200 per MBit making it uneconomically viable for everybody. However does BT retail care? BT Retails buys at £200 per mbit and sells it to customers for £1 per mbit making a loss of £199 per mbit for every line they sell. BT retails end of year look pretty horrific as they make a big loss, but BT Wholesale make a killing of £200 per mbit.

BT group take the loss from BT Retail and absorbs it with the profit from BT Wholesale making an overall profit of £1 per mbit. Excellent, all competition crushed, everybody on BT lines and they have followed OFCOM's instructions to the latter. Give it a couple of years and everybody will be using BT and the competition will be dead and they can lower the wholesale price to something reasonable, or just whack up the cost for end users who are now stuck with BT....

What if competition starts up when they lower wholesale costs? No problem, we just whack wholesale up to silly prices for another year and watch the competition go out of business and then drop wholesale prices back down again, rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

Still not worried about the monopoly that is BT?

E-mail.....

My company used to have BT as a service provider, and to be fair they regulary used to e-mail me updates....... to the BT e-mail address they configured for me when they set up my account. Not the company e-mail address i provided them with and consequently the one I actually use. Took a couple of month to get them to auto forward stuff to the correct email address.

Suffice to say we no longer use BT.

The point is....

For all you people screaming patent troll stop and think for a minute.

Picsel currently license this technology to a bunch of big hitters (Palm included). If they do not defend thier patent against Apple why should the other companies they license thier tech to keep paying them?

This is nothing to do with a failing company, or a patent troll. This is to do with a company protecting thier IP and ensuring that thier revenue stream from said IP does not suddenly dry up when everybody realises that if Apple can't be bothered to pay them and can get away with it, they may as well do the same thing....

Not all patent disputes are without merit and started by patent trolls!!!!

Getting worse....

This is actually getting quite scary.... The government is forcing these things onto people, it is becoming blatantly obvious that they are going to be compulsory (in a backdoor sneaky way) and yet the mainstream press seem to have totally ignored the issue......

At least the Reg is keeping us informed, NO2ID needs to get thier media arm in gear!!!!

Not Trolling

This isn't a patent troll, it is a technology company who create thier own technology and use it in house and have licensed it to a lot of people. These people may only have had thier patent approved in 2006, but the article does not state how long they had been working on the technology before the patent was granted, the company has been around since 1998, and who knows what the founders were working on before that.

This is actually a legitimate case of a company defending thier IP that they are currently using, and have licensed out to a large number of partners who do pay them royalties for using it. Apple don't have any right to be the only major player who doesn't pay them royalties just because they are Apple......

Not quite the same thing as a patent troll company who bought a few patents and then decided to sue anybody who are using any technology that looks like it could be slightly similar, and it is a shame (and speaks volumes) that this is the first thing people think they are.

I say good luck to them!!

Of course it is nothing to do with......

Of course the popularity is nothing to do with the fact you get a rebate of a couple of hundred quid if you file online.

They are effectivly paying people to use the service then shouting about how popular it is, I bet I could get people interested in using my website if I paid then £200 a pop as well.....

Sounds like the usual Nu Lie cretin out to spin a tale of how wonderful they are with thier amazing new system that it really good value for money because it's soo popular, honest.....

Muppets

@ Shakje

"I still think that big Gord has the best chance of salvaging the economy."

ROFL

Who the hell do you think sold all our gold (at the cheapest price he could get for it), spent all the countries savings, and then pension funds when he ran out of savings, and got the country into more debt that it has been in for donkeys of years.....

"big Gord's" policies have also encouraged the populace to get into record debt levels that are not sustainable in the long term no matter how much people wish they were, your average student now leaves university with £20,000 debt.

We have been changed from a nation of savers to a nation of debt whores!!!

So what is the solution to all of this? I know reduce VAT to 15% to encourage people to spend more money and get into yet more debt and borrow a shed load more money to piss up the wall..... Good one "big Gord" you most definetly are the "saviour of the economy"

Mines the one with the mostly complete emmigration papers in the pocket.....

@AC

Any web dev worth thier salt will have a style sheets targetted for for specific versions of IE e.g.

<!--[if lt IE 8]><link href="../css/ie_7.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"><![endif]-->

<!--[if lt IE 7]><link href="../css/ie_6.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"><![endif]-->

etc.

Web devs who just write for IE, hack it until it works and ignore W3C specifications are the problem here, not MS (despite MS being easy to blame because they released a hunk of junk in the first place).

If people didn't take the easy way out we wouldn't have half the problems we have today, although I admit making it work properly in various flavours of IE after making the proper W3C site is a pain in the arse, but that's what web devs are paid to do.....

Finally...

A car that will enable me to display rude targeted messages to tailgaters, or cheesy chatup lines to the hot chick in the sports car behind/next to me.

The futures looking good!!! :D

Won't somebody think of the children!!!!!!

Why on earth should the police have to pay for the requests they make to ISP's when they are trying to protect children!!!

What are the ISP's thinking?? That if it is free the police will start making spurious requests left right and centre to check on anybody and everybody.

We know that they will only check on people that are really suspected of harbouring sick images, and they won't go after your average Joe Bloggs who may have received that Simpsons e-mail a while back and not managed to remove it from thier hard drive well enough to prevent it coming back when some phorensic recovery techniques are used on it (then again maybe they should lock up those sickos as well).

They should suck it up and charge us consumers even more money to make the world a safe place for children if more money is needed, I know nobody but dirty paedo's would object to that!!!

I for one welcome our new internet log file overloards who will stamp out every perversion known to man and lock up anybody suspected of doing anything even slightly wrong, at last the world will be a safe place for children everywhere!!

@AC

Alcohol and Nicotine are classified as chemicals, and are completely legal.

Do you think this pill will have no side effects when it is followed by 10 pints, a few random shots and a pack of cancer sticks??

Oh Shit

Does that mean that everybody who has received that spam mail that went round a while back that displayed the Simpsons shagging each other can now be arrested and put on the sex offenders registrar???

Where will it end.......

I await the decree from up high that means all parents that have a picture of thier kids splashing about in the bath are arrested, put on the sex offenders registrar and denied access to thier children for being filthy peados who dared to have thier kids naked in the bath and possibly may have touched an inappropriate area while they washed them.....

Sounds wonderful but,....

Look at the size of it, and the time needed to deploy it. Current measures like the stinger are thrown in front of the car you are trying to stop seconds before the car passes because your average speeding criminal who is desperate to get away has enough brain power to drive round it, not over it given the chance.

This looks like a great big block placed in the road that you would probably try and drive round, even if you didn't know what is was. Wonderful idea but i doubt it will work in its current form.

I guess

They are happy to be labeled as a bunch of wa****s....

Government department in truth shocker!!!!

Mines the slightly stained one that everybody else is refusing to touch.

Another patent troll

Oh whoopee yet another one.... Haven't these idiots realised that this is really not a good way to make money yet??

Oh yes thier lawyers don't tell them that do they and they always belive thier lawyers......

Hope they are soon bankrupt!

Warhammer 40,000

I think somebody at DARPA has been reading some space marine novels!!! Next they will be genetically modifying soldiers so they have two hearts and the ability to regenerate from wounds that would kill a normal man in mere minutes....

Have to remember that

Its one way to get the cops round if your neighbours won't turn down the bloody volume!!!

Then again, with UK police they will probably turn up about 2 hours later when they think the perpetrators have fled......

You need 32-Bit IE to download.

I originally tried downloading it with my Firefox and no dice. Then tried My default IE (64-Bit), it tried to install the active-x component and then just did nothing, so eventually tried in with IE in 32-bit compatability mode and all burst into life.

I'm betting the active -x component just doesn't work with 64-bit. Bit crappy considering everything in currently moving across to 64-bit.....

If Osama can do it.......

Well Osama has managed to avoid the US of A for a long time despite being the most wanted so called "terrorist" they have.....

With this in mind it should be easy for a crooked Indian billionaire to dissapear and not be found!

His is the invisibility coat on the corner.....

@DutchOven

Assuming this is a large store, you will probably find that the inside lights are left on because they have people working all night to restock the shelves so that the shop is nice and full when you go in to grab some groceries in the morning.....

This tech won't be useful for everything, i'm thinking mainly household electrical goods, and/or computers. You could use a piezo crystal to provide a electrical signal to trigger the wakeup, or in the case of a remote control utilise some of the RFID technology to energise the circuit and trigger a wakeup.

Yes things like PVR's will probably not be suitable items to use this tech on if they are tracking recording times, but nobody said this was a panacea for everything....

This should send the greenies into a state of ecstatic hysteria

Sounds good to me, that means that the many devices I have in my house sitting on standby will now be able to use no power and drop my electricity bill.

I'm sure all the greenies will get very excited as well because there is no doubt a "climate change" angle due to reduced usage of electricity (I'm only worried about my electricity bills though).

Nice work NEC

BCS??

So they are going to recommend a solution that is roughly 10 years out of date and only something that somebody in academia would think is a good idea because it is completely impractical in the real world hey......

I don't know what is worse, the current shambles, or letting the BCS have a say.....

@ Nic Brough

Have a read of this:

http://www.marxist.com/global-warming-socialist-perspective-part-one.htm

The parts 2, 3 and 4.

Lots of science explaining why "climate change" is a load of old tosh. Enjoy the read then come back and let me know if it was enough proof.

Secondly, Using fission for 40 years while we perfect fusion would at least deal with our energy problems for the next 40 years. this should be plenty of time to perfect fission and will also give us lots of experience of dealing with nuclear fuels, meaning we will be able to make the process safer and safer.

Easy to destroy.

Why bother removing it when you could just blow the capacitor with a decent sized electrical charge (Taser yourself?). Seems like a bloody silly idea all in all.

NU Liemore's cunning plan to waste a few more billion on IT projects that will fail no doubt.

@Nic Brough

Only 250 years of Uranium left... How is that an issue??

Do you really think that these new power stations that are being built will still be in service in 200 years time?

I think not, they will have ben decommissioned and new plant will have been built (probably fission plants as well).

Amusing to hear whine like this that means absolutely nothing.

@kissingthecarpet

Tories didn't manage the economy well either ???

ROFL

Nu Liemore makes the tories look like the economic superpower of that past century. Seriously do some research and get a fecking clue before you start typing drivel.

The Tories were bad in many ways, but economics was not one of them. Nu Liemore have all but destoryed the economy of this country by pissing all the money we have up the wall while creating more and more debt and stealing all the cash from pensions + raising taxes i an attmept to pay for it.

@Roger Cambell

Try Firefox with the web developer plugin.

You can modify the source and the css and apply it to the page you are currently viewing.

I wonder...

Would it have been OK if it was animal faeces? Where the hell do they get these people from??

Human rights for worms, i've heard everything now....

@Anonymous Coward

You don't need to know a password to reset it, how long have you worked in IT???

Secondly it wouldn't surprise me to find out they are still storing passwords in plain text so they can just look at the DB and read out your existing password if they wanted to anyway.

Muppets

What is the point?? Getting the disks back once the data has been copied/used is going to achieve nothing. Another glorius waste of tax payers money so that the incompetent government can put out some spin about how seriously they take this threat......

What a load of old cobblers

punished to the full extent of the law?????

Sounds like he got off scott free to me. £350 is neither here nor there for somebody on his wage and if he was given the extra 6 points and then as a result a ban of 42 days he gets a nice clean driving license back when he has finished.

6 Week holiday abroad and a bit of loose change out of the bank and he's back on the roads with a clean driving license, result!!!