Posts by Disgruntled of TW 189 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jun 2010
@JimmyPage and when somebody else drops in some "extra bits" into the hoovered data they have on you, what do you do then?
You have precisely no proof you didn't go there, and they have the logs.
If you weren't monitored "by default" in the first place, this scenario can't happen. Privacy is an individual's right, not a right the government is required to grant, or authorised to take away.
... this is a Liberty vs Control debate. By foregoing a grown up discussion of the benefits of monitoring, we neither validate or reject the business case. We are wasting time considering implementation options with judicial oversight. Hearing those that request these invasive powers repeatedly provide hyperbole such as "we can't tell you, it's national security" is utter nonsense. In the absence of such public proof, and the associated business case our government should not be asking us to give up our privacy to them in this way. Through repeated data security blunders, our government has demonstrated an inability to manage our data safely. They have not earned our trust. Snowdon has provided evidence of how our government has indeed undermined our trust.
Why has Ms May not been held to account for her use of the draconian "because I say so" loopholes in the Telecommunication Act? She is a politician, not a member of the judiciary. Hold her to account.
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
... it will have O(n!) different licensing mechanisms. I mean seriously ... Priva-what? I'm keen to understand how this will be disseminated and whether profit or control will be evident, and exercised by a select few individuals. It has a name that stinks of commercialism.
Chaum has an impressive cryptography pedigree, with an equally impressive list of patents. Popcorn out, projector on ...
Let the 4% good times roll ... they are all guilty of negligence in maintaining their database, and are not being held to account. They should not be able to sell their database which we clean for them, at our intense discomfort when they cock up. A 100% fail for us when they get it wrong, is a 0.000001% fail for them.
I'm sorry, but why should we listen to anything Osborne says about information systems security?
It's as if getting voted in suddenly endows politicians with years of experience and knowledge that they didn't have before they won an election.
Get some experts involved, not mouth puppets.
Any day now Theresa May will slam home the Snoopers Charter RIPA legislation, without a single shred of additional information on how the data helps track terrorists down. She will use the Paris horror and people's reactions to take away our freedom.
ISIS will be winning the battle if that happens.
"Anybody would think they didn't want to provide this service."
@AC - they don't. I called up and asked for FTTP at "any price" and they said "nope - never happening at your exchange". My exchange has had FTTC for 9 months now, so they have the bandwidth, just not the "will" or "desire" for reasons they are not telling anyone.
We need to wait and see what ridiculous proposition Osborne will propose in the statement.
HOWEVER, in one of my little Ltd companies I spend between £10K and £15K per year on IT equipment and services to build proof of concept infrastructure and educate myself. My clients reap the benefit of this, and pay for it in my day rate/fees. Would this be possible in the new world? Who knows.
Penalising my Ltd company by compelling it to pay PAYE and NI contributions on my client rate makes my investment in my knowledge unaffordable.
If Osborne's intention is to stop small companies from this kind of exercise, the rumours just need to be partially correct. But let's wait and see. There will be time to lobby and scream afterwards. I can't see myself voting Conservative after the debacle with the Snoopers Charter and now this. That means an abstention at the next election as there is nothing worth voting for. I'm a senior Security Consultant and Enterprise Architect. None of my engagements are below 6 months when changing the culture and approach of an organisation. Once changed, I hand the reigns to the guys who keep the lights on. My role changes the lights, once, hopefully.
I have already written to my MP (Greg Clark) warning of the decimation of the IT contracting industry if even some of the rumours are correct.
Boring.
Only FTTP will catch us up with the APAC countries rolling out fibre. Anything else is folly. Peter Cochrane (ex. BT CTO) told our government this repeatedly before leaving BT, and they ignore all similar advice from "experts", preferring to fill BTs coffers and support dead end copper connectivity.
Scrap HS2, and replace it with a FTTP project the length and breadth of the UK. Done.
It is about time that civil servants and security experts who are spewing out these figures and business cases were named, to make them more accountable for the immense cockup that looms ahead. Their track record is abysmal and unlikely to improve. Why should we give them another bite at the cherry? Get experts who know what they are doing, and can build business cases based on facts, or STOP with the trying.
If Dido hadn't gone on camera claiming that trusting the SMTP "From:" address was "ok", then perhaps the TalkTalk media engine would have a chance. But they let her do that, and deserve what they get as a consequence.
Geez - media really need to get their facts right, so that non-techies and techies alike are all happy to consume the goo they spew. As it seems to be right now, it all stinks.
Without actual facts, I ignore the headlines and media, as most of us probably should. Let them get fined, according to the seriousness of their cockup, decided by experts who have access to the facts. Mooing and bleating about it based upon media reports is putting us all back into the medieval ages.
It pains me to see individuals in government wield such power over matters utterly foreign to their experience in the real world. We should name the civil servants that advise the ministers, so we know where the commentary comes from, or the minister should state clearly that neither they nor the civil servants know diddly squat about the matter in hand and are "taking a punt" based on lobbyist incentives.
Right. That's going to happen. Almost makes me appreciate Mr Corbyn who might just say he knows nothing about something when that is indeed true. Almost.
There's nothing to spend it on. By giving BT the BDUK money, maintaining their monopoly, anything that isn't FTTC remains esoteric or too expensive. None of the Kent County Council ISPs could offer me FTTP when I called them up and asked them. FTTP is the only solution with a future, and far too expensive or just not available.
The fact that Ed Vaisey calls this voucher campaign a success underpins why people are disillusioned by politics in general. Utter nonsense, tantamount to lipstick on the pig that is BDUK support of FTTC as our future.
@NeilPost If you recall the entire debacle that is BDUK, you would realise that nobody has the commercial capability to compete with BT/OpenReach because of the way the funding framework is designed. Only the incumbent with the last mile copper had ANY hope of winning our tax money. The BDUK participants went from 10 down to 2, with Fujitsu fading into insignificance in the light of DCMS sucking up the "homes passed" rubbish, and endless definitions of "Super Fast" to ensure that VDSL2 qualified irrespective of distance from the cabinet or copper/aluminium line quality.
There really isn't any choice, so long as OpenReach owns the last mile. A vague glimmer of hope in B4RN up in Lancashire is being largely ignored by our government, where communities have demonstrated how to fund, deploy and manage *REAL* FTTP - dedicated fibre to every household. Utterly future proof. Not a G.PON in sight.
As for asking BT for FTTP, I did. My village switch was upgraded recently to FTTC, so I called up and said "money is no object, can you quote me for FTTP please". They said, "no, never ... we have no plans for your exchange". I guess rural areas remain "commercially unviable" for BT ... until they get more of our tax money and they decide when that time comes, not our government.
... and STOP with the ridiculous "homes passed" statistic.
Taking fibre from the exchange to the cabinet does not provide fibre optic broadband to everyone with a telephone line on the cabinet. You still have copper and you need to have an available port on the DSLAM. BT aren't putting enough DSLAM ports in the cabinets to cater for all the lines, especially in rural areas. They are taking BDUK funding (£1.2b) and telling MPs that a "home passed" has "access to fibre optic broadband" without explaining the lack of capacity and reachability of the VDSL technology (~1.2Km), and the oft discussed G.Fast technology which has less than 500m of useful range.
Utter poppycock. I might as well say I have access to teleportation - it just remains for me to invent it and create the portal.
Unfortunately, DCMS believes all that BT lay before them. They need to smarten up.
I've been contracting for more than 20 years. The nominal increase in dividend tax isn't so bad. However, the IR35 nonsense is pure stupidity. The troglodytes at HMRC that bang this drum need to stop banging it, as much as the Conservative MPs that listen to them. Nobody wants this tax. It doesn't make money.
If the Civil Service and public services were more efficient, and played by the private sector rules, then 50% of them would be unnecessary in months. My jaw hits the ground everytime I see a public service contract for IT services, or hear of the latest gross negligence on a multi-billion pound project with zero consequences for the civil servants at the heart of it. There are savings to be made there. Go get them.
@DrM I have to agree. The interface is poor, leaving you to forage through the convoluted logfiles. Errors messages are proprietary and misleading. Without support, you are dead in the water.
But wait, there's more ... even if you fork out for the full commercial version of True image 2015, you get 30 days support, then NOTHING. If you pay £15/incident, you get to call and speak to them, otherwise it's the forums and no guarantees.
Not what you want from a backup/recovery vendor taking your money.
Where is the justification, from places like Iran (ho ho ho), that such powers IMPROVE the situation?
Asking for a human rights/democracy bashing piece of legislation without saying WHY or presenting a compelling business case doesn't make GCHQ or Theresa look very good. I suspect she may not understand the implications of putting backdoors into open source PKI encryption, or have had the consequences explained to her competently by an authority without a vested interest. Legislation supporting such (impossible I might add) activities needs to be justified by those asking for it, with more than a "trust us" punchline. "Think of the children" is tired and old. Society as a whole thankfully doesn't appear to trust those using such futile propaganda - so that argument fails.
Perhaps there is no justification after all ... ergo .... stop this "anti-British" erosion of basic freedom. Nothing to see here ... move along please. PLEASE!
... so why would they share their mobile network infrastructure? By controlling access to the wholesale infrastructure, they control the market.
Last time I looked at anything "complex", doing it "quickly" was a sub-optimal approach, cough.
BT (Group) need to try harder and up their end consumer service standards, before getting bigger.I applaud the competition watchdog for taking their time, turning all the rocks over. Let the whack-a-mole games begin.
... feel the width! With the race to market for the "next app", developers drop quality like a stinky poo. Speed to market is all that matters. The complexity of modern applications, with the number of API layers bewildering, understanding security and performance is very, very difficult. Google and Microsoft are having a simply wonderful time right now arguing about it.
It's no surprise that so many organisations jump on the "cloud" bandwagon, as all evil is apparently removed from your plate of responsibility, handed to the folk that live in that "cloudy place" over there. Do the problems move? Do they go away? Do the cloudy folk do a better job than you were doing before you moved your primary data assets into their "cloudy place"? How would you know?
This obsession by IBM with the cloud thing is very dangerous, as they haven't defined the thing. There was a time when IBM might have been the company to call it for what it is ... a move back to conceptually centralised data processing using shared compute and storage resources. I'm not going to say it out loud :-)
If Mr Cameron maintains this position, I will do my utmost to explain to all my non-techy friends, relatives and anyone else who will listen why the Conservatives must NOT be elected, irrespective of their other policies or the unsavoury flavour of other idiots on parade. He just weaponised the competent security community against the Conservatives.
This is naive beyond comprehension. Mr Cameron - PLEASE ask a subject matter expert on security about encryption and privacy before you next get carried away in public. That does not mean Theresa, sorry. Without any cold, hard evidence of the benefits of further snooping, you do NOT need any further snooping capability, nor should you get any.
Until the FBI spokesfolk get some skin in the game and present actual verifiable facts, that would hurt if disproved, our confidence in what they say being true remains in the gutter.
They have lost our trust, and need to regain it with interest before such announcements mean I'll put my copy of The Beano down to listen to the news announcement.
So ... here's one of the best summaries around, dated August 2012 sure, of the mess Oracle are making while getting off the fence. Oracle’s Director for Cloud Business Development says it out loud at VMworld 2012.
http://www.licenseconsulting.eu/vmworld-tv-oracle-on-licensing-vmware-virtualized-environments-updated/
Yes, this is just RDBMS licensing, and doesn't directly address "app specific" RDBMS licensing or any custom negotiation that HMG should have done, intelligently, for eBS.
It's a humorous read/listen, as Oracle really don't want to lose the revenue they'd get by more folks using VMware in preference to Hyper-V or XEN hypervisors. Or indeed, in preference to SQL Server or postgres. Cough.
Enjoy.
Once again fantastic claims of "aiding crime prevention" without a shred of evidence to support them. Ms May appears ill informed, and thinks all she has to do is convince a non-technical parliamentary group to give her something she can wave as a trophy. Where are the subject matter experts, lining up to support her? Scared of peer review I expect.
And does a DSL DHCP allocation to a router go far enough? If not, do they think ISPs can afford to deploy technology to map an individual (ID cards anyone?) to an IP address beyond the NATing router? What about public access points? VPNs? Proxies? RFC1918 addresses? They have no clue.
If she succeeds, as there aren't enough security professionals to vote her out, she will go down as the Home Secretary that gave away our freedom.
Is there any? I see similar exploitation opportunities here, as within the motor vehicle insurance industry.
Protected no-claims bonuses are NOT transferable, unless your current insurance provider and your prospective one agrees to it. It's just a contract. Ever made a claim? Ever been told how much your underwriter actually paid to the injured party? Ever asked, "if I make a claim for £3k today, what will my premium be at renewal?" Ever had an answer?
The veil of secrecy means it is a market ripe for corruption. There is no FoI act here - this is plain private sector commercial profit, behind a veil of loss adjustment process secrecy.
... and Experian? A self declared, state supported tri-opoly. Equifax, Experian and Call Credit. Absolute power, little or no accountability for their mistakes.
[RANT ON]
Experian sent my "free" credit report to me with the wrong name on the address on the envelope. Not a statistically significant mistake for them, but a 100% fail for me had someone else opened that letter. Did the ICO prosecute or fine them, under the Data Protection Act? Of course not. Why not? You would have to ask him.
Accountability? ZERO. Unfair burden of proof on the individual before they update information they store on the individual. We are expected to clean their database, which they happily sell for substantial gain. It is THEIR mistakes that ruin lives.
[RANT OFF]
BBC Watchdog on credit agencies, to see just how bad they are:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1FV0VyS6DFgDCS64NP0T4bB/credit-reference-agencies
... in the commercial world, there would be real, tangible consequences for such failure. Businesses would go bankrupt, and people would lose their jobs if they were responsible for it. Otherwise, it will happen, again, and again ... etc.
Why doesn't this happen with tax payer funded IT? Is our only recourse to vote the "other" lot in next election? NRAC - not really a choice.
@Credas - sometimes a biased politician makes a statement that is no less true than if a saint had spoken the very same words. Perhaps you should wind your neck in occasionally, and remember this? It is hard, granted.
... this rather assumes the VMs are all on a fairly flat network, and there is a complete and sufficient set of VMs that can understand the egress/ingress network traffic involved in such a migration, and still function with everything they used to talk to from the original site. Think BGP updates, traffic volumes, DNS, AD DCs ... the list is substantial.
The security profile will probably look rather different when running in Azure. Why didn't the company just host their VMs there in the first place? This reeks of "tick the DR box for the regulator" with fingers and toes firmly crossed that it never gets tested with a real event.
Not convinced this is viable for anyone but SMBs with a few 10's of VMs, or organisations that pump out "the next app" barely alpha tested, who care more about ability to pump out "the next app" than any real service level for infrastructure/compute/storage services.
No you don't. It remains optional whether or not you have a fixed line or not. Many homes run on mobiles now. You can, optionally, register your VoIP number at a specific address as a work around.
There's no legal basis to "compel" a residential premise to have two wires with 45V to ring a bell and provide a dialtone on a phone when the premises have a powercut. If you MUST have a BT telephone line, then BT are compelled to provide that, but that landline is optional at your premises.
Utter waste of time and space. Politicians that make vacuous statements without any factual basis should be fired. That's how it works in the commercial world. You lie, you lose. They'd best be careful, as I and many others have been to Westminster to point out (some of us to select committees) how irresponsible such claims can be when public money is being spent.
Ed Vaisey, Maria Miller, and Jeremy Hunt are all too aware of this. Mr Williams of BT Group had rather a roasting on his 2nd and 3rd summons to the Public Accounts Committee to explain BTs fiasco with BDUK funds. The good bits start at 16:53:50
http://www.parliamentlive.tv/main/Player.aspx?meetingId=14733
... reintroducing this wonderful device may improve both the number and quality of CBAs produced by government projects when justifying the eye watering amounts they spend on IT projects which invariably (pretty much) fail.
In the commercial world, I can't recall a single government IT project that would pass muster at the "project mandate" stage never mind a business case that is believable.
... groan. Just groan. They ask for complete trust from the public, having demonstrated repeated inadequacy to manage databases of information that they collect. Until they earn trust, they will get none. In the process of earning that trust, they will perhaps learn all the reasons why collecting the data is an unnecessary and unwarranted privacy violation. Perhaps not.
If I hear "it will keep us safe" one more time, without anyone providing clear, objective data and arguments underpinning that statement, I will vote UKIP in protest. Well, maybe not that far.
... and with the checkered history of the mobile telco industry, there is only uphill ahead when selling space to the content producers.
We were all supposed to be watching TV on our UMTS 3G mobiles, remember? That didn't happen.
I have trouble getting a tweet out often enough, on my train journey into London. #fail
... this is shorttermism at its best - "I want a chunk of chocolate now", when the whole bar is available with a little patience and doing the right thing. This is ignoring the maintenance cost of copper and the restrictions of radio. Important to keep all those fields engineers employed ... far more important than a future-proof broadband technology, evidently. When a politician opens with a punt at the previous party, you know he's a technologist at heart <cough>.
With governments in Oz and the UK backing the incumbents that only have eyes for their rusty copper network profit streams, some communities are DIYing their fibre to break the profit cycle. Gob-smacked that government (we elect them don't we?) are not more supportive of public/community owned broadband infrastructure.
... demonstrated that young, beautiful women in very short dresses are exceptionally strong in IT security knowledge and skills. Why else would so many have crammed into the conference?
Didn't the French once try to sell washing machines, by putting a bra on a model and sitting her on top of the machine in the advert?
No different.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
