* Posts by Jimmy 1

70 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

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UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files

Jimmy 1

Mr. Rubberband

Meanwhile, back in the real world the authors of this farcical situation, represented by the Foreign Secretary David Milliband, are desperately trying to suppress evidence of complicity in the torture of an innocent UK citizen while he was off-shored to countries that take a more relaxed view of water-boarding and genital mutilation.

Milliband is now preparing to appeal to the highest court in the land where his pathetic whining will be treated with the same contempt as it received in the lower courts. But please don't expect Inspector Plod to be waiting outside the Supreme Court ready to slap the 'cuffs on Wavy Davey, that's a privilege reserved for the peasants.

So maybe JFL is lucky in the sense that he wasn't off-shored and tortured to reveal the content of his encrypted files. But hey, this is New Labour so don't hold your breath.

UK gets final warning over Phorm trials

Jimmy 1

Let them eat toast.

@ Marmite Toast

"The point of spoiling your ballot paper is that every spoilt vote is counted and acts as a vote of no confidence in British politics"

Looks like a good idea on the surface but unfortunately it won't change anything because our current bunch of self-serving politicians simply won't get the message. It's time we exercised some real voting power and administered some punishment for those who hold us in such contempt.

The strategy is simple: on election day go along to your local polling station and regardless of previous party preference or the quality of the candidates, record your vote for the person with the best chance of unseating the sitting MP. If enough people did this it would be a double whammy for the citizens of this benighted nation: firstly, we would have a clearance of the spineless lobby fodder who have failed to defend our rights and secondly, it would provide a salutatory lesson for the new boys and girls of what to expect if they failed to speak up on our behalf.

Mandy declares 'three strikes' war on illegal file sharers

Jimmy 1

Two strikes and counting...

Twice forced to resign from ministerial office because of alleged dodgy dealings we now have our unelected (and probably unelectable) business supremo laying down the law about the unethical nature of file sharing copyright material. Pardon me, Pete, if I puke in your soup to cover up the stench of hypocrisy.

Windows 7 - the Reg reader verdict

Jimmy 1

Pro UAC

I did a clean install of Win 7 over XP pro without any problems. What has impressed me most is that the developers have had the good grace to finally acknowledge the superiority of the Linux security model with the introduction of the UAC. Okay, its only a nod in the right direction but at least you no longer have to install an app like "Drop My Rights" in order to retain the convenience of having an admin account and being able go online safely.

As for the people who advocate disabling this security feature we can only hope that MS have the balls to lock it down completely in service pack 1.

Security boss calls for end to net anonymity

Jimmy 1

@Mahatma Coat

Your parents, Duffle and Rain, certainly endowed you with a great sense of humour. It's just a shame about your wee brother, Under Coat.

Home Office backs down on net censorship laws

Jimmy 1

Yesterday's issue, tomorrow's problem.

"The IWF's website blocking is seen as yesterday's issue."

In matters concerning child protection the IWF's blocking filter is, and always has been, a complete irrelevance. This alliance of government and a group of well-meaning people has significantly failed to produce one iota of evidence that mass censorship of the UK internet has protected or saved one child from sexual abuse or commercial exploitation. The work of child protection is best left in the hands of professional police officers like those employed at CEOP.

However, under its mantra of 'think of the children' what the IWF has done is to establish a precedent that any future government, acting in cahoots with any special interest group, can deny the population of this country access to information on the internet. We currently have a situation where a bunch of Rucking lawyers have tried to suppress unfavourable information about their clients appearing in the press. How irresistible would it be for them to have the prospect of filtering that same information on the UK internet?

The future may be Orange, but it will almost certainly be heavily filtered.

The Twitter storm that saved freedom of speech

Jimmy 1

The obliging judge

By Tom Smith

"So who was the judge who granted this injunction? Or is that information not in the public domain either?"

According to the Guardian:

"The Guardian is still forbidden by the terms of the existing injunction, granted by vacation duty judge, Mr Justice Maddison, to give further information about the Minton report, or its contents."

So far this year the paper has been served with twelve of these so-called "super injunctions", details of which cannot be reported.

And our MPs are too busy whining about the injustice of having to pay back their fiddled expenses to be concerned about trivial matters like free speech and suppression of information that should be in the public domain.

Please vote for your local Raving Loony candidate. Honestly, you won't be able to tell the difference.

Guardian gagged over Commons question

Jimmy 1
FAIL

Legal tidal wave.

Now all Carter Ruck has to do is get a legal injunction to shut down the internet in order to protect their scumbag (allegedly, my lord) clients from the tsunami of information and adverse comments that are now in the public domain. There is no hiding place in a wired world, even when you employ the services of very expensive Rucking lawyers to cover up your sewage.

Google strips Pirate Bay homepage from search results

Jimmy 1

Google schmoogle.

The IP owners are entitled to take whatever legal measures they deem necessary to protect their property, and the big G explicitly states that it will honour any such legally served restraints. But what we are seeing here is a blatant attempt to suppress 'information' that should be freely available on the world's biggest search engine.

The fact that it is trivially easy* to find this information elsewhere on the internet does not excuse Google's abject surrender to the floundering morons who have consistently failed to devise an effective business model for their industry. Bought and paid for politicians in the US and Europe are no substitute for a viable business strategy.

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*Try the excellent Clusty search engine for more structured results from its clustering technology. http://clusty.com/

Or how about the cheeky lads from Yauba who provide anonymous links straight from the search results. http://yauba.com/

Google and Microsoft bombard Brussels over ad tracking

Jimmy 1
Big Brother

Fecking twockers

@ MinionZero

Yes, you can be brutally honest and call it spying or surveillance as opposed to the euphemistic bullshit churned out by these parasites. On the other hand you could really indulge yourself and call it by its real name, Data Theft. That would be theft as in "taking without the owners consent" which is what car thieves are charged with when they get nicked.

The present government's cosy relationship with the digital twockers is a conspiracy of thieves in which Captain Brown puts a telescope to his glass eye and proudly proclaims "I see no ships!"

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Brown apologises for 'appalling' treatment of Turing

Jimmy 1

The Turing Test

Is Gordon Brown a human being or a Sinclair ZX80 with 1K of RAM?

With generous apologies to previous ZX owners.

New web filter laws questioned by top child abuse cop

Jimmy 1

Grumpy Graham.

@ Graham Marsden

"... it sounds like he's being sensible, but I'm wondering if he's just looking at preserving his nice little empire?"

Considering the amount of time we have spent on here criticising the IWF as an ineffective political sticking plaster it would make sense to offer more than grudging support when a professional copper like Jim Gamble comes on board our side of the argument, even if he is obliged to express his opinion in diplomatic language when talking to El Reg.

Gamble's so-called "nice little empire" consists of hard-pressed staff who, in addition to standard investigative work, have to cope with monitoring deeply disturbing images that are the stock in trade of the paedophile fraternity. I believe the turnover rate is quite high so maybe people like Graham Marsden would like to offer their services and advice.

Investigators blind on P2P child abuse

Jimmy 1

Re: AC @ 13.06 GMT

"What is the point in CEOP if it does not do the slightest thing to protect children and goes after people looking at pics of abuse to make themselves look good even though that benefits not a single kid?"

Actually, CEOP is probably the most effective child protection agency currently operating in the UK. The unit is staffed by hard-nosed cops who don't feel the least bit inhibited about kicking doors down, arresting paedos and recovering exploited children. The stats are available on their website: www.ceop.gov.uk/

As to their motivation for issuing this report, well just take your pick.

1) As someone above posted, number one suspect is the sticky fingered Lord Peter Tweeter of Little Twittering who is busy tending to the interests of his corporate friends in the failed music industry.

2) Time to ratchet up the unit's budget before the public spending cuts that the pols are promising us come into effect.(someone has to pay for the bwankers folly)

3) Kite flying, purely as an activity indicator.

Archbishop condemns Facebook, email, footballers

Jimmy 1
WTF?

Pie in the sky.

Why doesn't this this cleric just get on the hot-line to the Chief Fairy and ask him to sprinkle some magical dust along the digital highway? Divine filtering would also be useful for eliminating other annoyances like freedom of expression and images of people having sex for pleasure rather than purely for procreation.

Alternatively, the guy could spend a lot more of his time putting his own house in order. At the last count, the Catholic church had paid out several billions in compensation to vulnerable young people who had been abused by priests. The priests themselves were victims of the unnatural and repressive system of Catholic seminary education which is based on the Jesuit injunction 'Give me the child and I will give you the man'

Dubya surveillance exceeded warrantless wiretaps

Jimmy 1

Focus - don't f*ck us.

".....the report reaches a troubling conclusion: that the sacrifice of civil liberties has led to no measurable improvement in the safety of the country."

Gov.uk.plc is currently engaged in a public consultation about its very own mass surveillance programme, the Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP). Exactly why it should take a twelve week talk-in to establish what is bleeding obvious to anyone with half a brain is beyond comprehension.

Searching for needles in a haystack is made infinitely more difficult if you insist on increasing the size of the haystack until it occupies the whole field. Conversely, loading a haystack with millions of needles makes it extremely difficult to distinguish between the good and bad needles.

The security agencies understand only too well that they need to focus their resources on specific zones of interest rather than waste their time on politically inspired fishing exercises like IMP. With the government's known complicity in the Phorm scandal you can be absolutely sure that any reassurances the offer about "not reading your actual data" should be taken with a large pinch of the proverbial sodium chloride.

Cops to step up use of phone and net records

Jimmy 1

Ivory tower thinking

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Janet Williams asserts that this new approach to policing will increase CID productivity by 20% which in normal circumstances would be regarded as a very good thing if it meant 20% more real criminals were banged up.

What Janet fails to explain from the comfort of her ivory tower is how she is going to accommodate these so-called dangerous individuals in a prison system that is already bursting at the seams to such an extent that really dangerous people are being released early onto the streets under license in the care of an underfunded and under resourced probation service who have just had to admit that they don't know the location of various child sex offenders, rapists, and violent socio-paths

The real world is on the streets where young kids are running around stabbing and shooting each other and children are being imported into the country and pimped on the streets. Get off your arse Janet and down on the street with some real cops instead of talking NuLabour gibberish.

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Child exploitation chief to defend net snooping plans

Jimmy 1

Jim's Gamble?

Jim Gamble's CEOPs is actually a very successful organisation with a staff of real cops who kick doors down, arrest paedophiles, and recover exploited children. The stats are available on their website: http://www.ceop.gov.uk/

It's plain to see that the reason for their success is the tightly focussed nature of their targeted surveillance strategy; these guys won't be handing out speeding tickets or assaulting innocent protesters in the centre of London.

So, while it is easy to understand why the government would want to parade the IMPish Tim Hayward before the committee in defence of their indefensible mass surveillance project it's much harder to understand why Gamble would want to poison his success story by having his people running round in circles, chasing down thousands of false-positives every day. No doubt, in true NLab style, inducements have been dangled. Lord Gamble?

Masked passwords must go

Jimmy 1

Bruce is having an off day.

Just can't get my head round the idea that someone with the reputation that Bruce Schneier has established for himself would endorse this laughable concept of stripping out a layer of security for the sake of convenience. Schneier has been advocating a multi-layer approach to security for years, so why is he suddenly giving his approval to an idea whose only justification, according to Jakob Nielsen, is that "it does cost you business due to login failures"

What next Bruce - leave your house keys under the doormat when you go on vacation?

Law lord lashes out at ID cards

Jimmy 1

@ A good track record

"Government case is tenuous and incredibly poorly presented by people with the apparent intellect of aquatic molluscs."

Thank you and god bless you, my son. My day is fulfilled.

Error time counts towards FOI rejections

Jimmy 1

So much information, so many questions, and so little time.

Dear Mrs Francis

We are really, really sorry but we are unable to fulfil your request for further information regarding your son's medical records at this NHS Trust.

It may help if I describe the scale of the problems we are faced with when are tasked with retrieving old records from our information storage system. Imagine, if you will, a gas lit Dickensian workshop with hundreds of clerks seated at desks consulting large, leather bound ledgers. Below them in the basement more clerks scurry about retrieving documents from the hundreds of metal filing cabinets that line the walls. Communication between the two sets of clerks is achieved by means of modern high speed voice-pipe technology.

In a supplementary question to your FOI request you ask "what happened to the £20 billion that the government has spent on computerising NHS records?" I regret that I am unable to provide an answer to what is essentially a political question. Please contact Alan Johnson MP who has moved from Health to the Home Office for what is expected to be a very short stay.

Yours Sincerely

Justin Othershill

Head of PR.

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