Posts by streaky

Re: "just last year they invested half a billion euros in a Scottish wind farm"

The UK is a large investor in the EIB (we put up the same capital as Germany and France). We get little back from it. I'd assume when we leave the EU we'll pull all future funding - and if they behave themselves we won't recall all those loans.

Re: Reaction Engines funding - you don't think we've given the world enough shit for gratis without throwing that in too? Plus RE Ltd is well funded enough.. For a company without a functioning product they're making plenty of bank. Plus FWIW BAE systems is a great fit for them - besides making aircraft they're positioned to take advantage of first use (military) sales.

Re: Again?

The question is this - how many times are ACPO going to need to put out guidance on this before forces start paying attention.

Re: set up a DMCA takedown system

I refuse to engage with it because it is USA Law that may be in conflict with International conventions.

Not convinced it does. The problem with this argument - and I take your point - the problem is that most jurisdictions will consider the DMCA to be a standard form of copyright notice. If you ignore it and it goes to court (the DMCA is intended to be a delete all for the media industry obviously) then the court might frown upon your behaviour.

It's a super risky thing to ignore, even outside the US, even though it's US law. I know it sounds odd, and it is odd, but courts do recognise other country's legal systems all the time - but with a DMCA they don't even need to do that. To get around that you'd have to prove not that the DMCA is incompatible with the convention (it's an irrelevance in a hypothetical case) but that a standard copyright notice signed under the penalty of perjury doesn't apply. That being said 95% of the DMCA notices I see are vexatious..

Re: Encryption is not made "illegal"

outlaws the implementation of truly secure encryption

That's the end of the economic system as we know it. Quantum key distribution is out, vpns are out, ssh is out. This will never happen.

what I got from the document which means they will block them

They can block my outbound ssh if they're willing to pay my wages until I'm 70, or they can do one. I'm happy to take this to court. If they're not blocking ssh then the law is moot.

Said this before in the article about the guy in Ireland who decided to use a titanium ring. If you're gonna do this use something with a bit of stretch to it..

Re: Not entirely correct.

It's worse than that, the voter's view of Clinton is formed by the picture that was painted. Plus yeah hey she got more votes regardless. The key point here is a picture was painted, so yeah voter distrust. If voters chose to believe some of the things that were said part of me says you get what you deserve versus the guy that won't even show you if he paid any tax last year.

Re: It was only a matter of time.

"There is a reason that my firewalls run BSD on aging hardware"

Hope that isn't pfsense. *cough*.

Seriously it's a useful tool in principle, it's just badly implemented (like all the alternatives) and DMA shouldn't be anywhere near it.

Re: After all...

I don't think the law does that honestly. Here's the thing - the lawyers advise their client and act on instructions. If a lawyer gives bad advice to client, they make threats then end up on the wrong end of this law, their client possibly has a case of professional malpractice - that's for them to argue with their lawyer over. What the changes in theory seek to do is stop the other side from using threats against the lawyer as opposed to their client and driving a wedge, which creates moral hazard between the lawyer and their client.

TL;DR: There is a cost for lawyers giving their client poor advice, this shouldn't be about that.

Re: A long time coming

It is a temporal pre-election anomaly while they are looking for some votes (and in the labor case money from the Unions). Do not worry, it will pass.

Nope. This report has been a long time in the making and is not related to the election. These companies are doing active harm to the state's budget. Employees don't care because they're covered by the state and obviously the companies are getting away with bloody murder.

Both left and right understand this is a problem - I'd expect to hear more about this long after the election.

Re: Not regulated?

It's demeaning to real engineers that had to get a bunch of A Levels, do a 3 to 4 year University degree and in some cases nearly a year of work experience before they are called an Engineer.

I'm a qualified engineer and I could care less, I know the difference - and if I ever leave software and go back into engineering - employers know the difference; the rest is window dressing. It's certainly not demeaning.

Most people who care are the sort of people who join trade bodies and shockingly those bodies are pay to play which is totally something to get excited about. If you pay your subs you're an engineer and if you don't you're not by their standards. I've built things and I've forgotten more about engineering that some of those guys will ever learn.

On topic though: wat.

Re: mmmmmmmmmm...

So, nothing to stop you buying a KODI box and adding the correct software yourself...but EU law is now clarified to the point where it will be illegal for retailers to sell boxes with any such software pre-installed.

Inevitable consequence honestly. I've been saying for years this would happen and now it does and everybody is looking around at each other in a state of dismay. Not a comment on piracy a comment on trying to sell these as piracy devices. Legal systems wouldn't let you sell a tool that can unlock and start the engine of any car as a tool for stealing cars either. Don't advertise them that way is the first step in there not being an issue.

Re: There are more levels than that

Munich is a city of 2 million people. That is not a major city. Large sure - about the same as Manchester - but not major.

Also you misunderstand I didn't say nobody produces things there - I was suggesting your reasons for moving there are an irrelevance. I have no doubt there's lots of German business in Germany, meanwhile Siemens are investing massively in the UK.

Re: no surprise

FOI Act section 31 sub section 2 is a thirty two headed monster from the deep. You'll never get information like this out of a police force - one of the many reasons the FOI Act isn't fit for purpose; you could boil the entire exemptions list down to "because we said so".

Moral of the story?

Don't be indispensable.

From that moment on Roger treated me like I could fix anything, and came to me with all problems

As somebody who's done this before at several companies and government related jobs, this here is the worst thing you can possibly do. The things I could tell you about how my week gets off track by Monday afternoon..

Re: About f'ing time encryption was pushed as compulsory on the internet!

Probably something to do with the education system being f**ked. On a technical level and on a general internet (and non-internet FWIW) engineering policy level there's no reason any of this should be a problem.

I don't know why anybody would have a problem with that who doesn't work for the NSA or organised crime - if there's an excuse I'd love to hear it.

Re: Interesting

Clearly the linked community is actually rather active

Slightly propagandist take on the issue no? People use google+ because their platform forces people to when engaging with google sites, but they're minimally engaging with google+ itself. Which is perfectly fine but not at all what google intended for the platform.

It'd be like twitter not really being used and just providing identity services for all twitter's other sites (this is not a thing but I'm saying on comparable terms if they did own more properties). Like I said it's fine and does work for google but that doesn't really make google+ a "thing".

I can't see them ever killing it per se because it's how they unify their services together but lets be reasonable about it..

Re: non-citizens have an easy fix

Ask your government to flag any US congressman entering your country for a full search of their electronic devices

Have any US congressmen ever actually left the US, like, in their lives?

Re: Got What He Deserved

God save us for the crap that's coming with IoT

Wake up and smell the apocalypse when governments, local and otherwise, start IoTing the shit out of everything. What we need is that nuclear power station and all those street lights and that bridge to be cloud connected so it can be managed by app from India. Oh cool we can fire all the people who work there now.

Re: Immunity

I don't know if the outstanding warrant would still apply

He's still a bail skipper that would spend the time in jail on remand until it was all sorted out, which could take years.

Re: Pelican crossings

BTW -- "Pelican crossing"...? I've heard of "zebra crossings"; why "pelican"?

Don't forget Toucan, Puffin and Pegasus Crossings. I actually saw a Pegasus crossing for the first time a few months back but alas I forget where...

Also FWIW flashing amber always means you can go but give way to pedestrians (in the UK, to be clear).

Re: How to leak information...unintentionally

No the average management bod doesn't equate tech pay with quality of work. The look at people who do technical jobs like the person who empties the waste paper bin and cleans the toilets. Never mind the fact most of India's best tech people are probably working in the US and Europe already.

If I was dumb enough to be an IBM shareholder this stuff would bother me a great deal. But I'm not so..

IBM sales haven't grown because they're all about java, mainframes and patent exploitation - the first two are massively out of fashion, even in the classical places they did well. The patents they're creating have limited commercial value due to problems making the thing they're working on actually commercially viable. Millipede memory is the classic example, it was supposed to be the future of storage and they never saw flash coming which completely wiped out their ability to ever sell it and they had to write off all the investment they put in - and they couldn't really get it working right anyway.

The only thing IBM is renowned for being good at is AI and it's not exactly an area you can count on investment in. They obviously do a lot of business with governments but again, in times of tightening government IT budgets those sales can be extremely unreliable. The only time IBM ever got really crazy when they bought softlayer and all they've done with softlayer is pushed them to stuff they were already doing - as opposed to widening their business (and thereby sales) appeal.

Re: Seen some of the first season.

who gets on a private plane to fly to a remote lights out DC and fiddle with some servers that are being hacked? if its that important either have remote kvm access, out of band access even if its by dial up, or have someone at the DC that can either turn something off or is skilled enough to stop the attack. Its cheaper and quicker than driving to an airport, getting on a private plane and then getting to the DC at the other side. even with dial up out of band i'd be able to sort a remote server or network device quicker than the drive to an airport from an office.

Uhm, you've clearly never dealt with remote hands, aten-based IPMI (which they all are and garbage and prone to failure) or general shit hitting the fan with critical hardware/software before on complicated issues. I've done everything but the private plane bit, and frankly in the show it wasn't clear if it was a private plane or chartered. When shit really hits the fan even true OOB management can and does fail - and is often a pain in the arse to arrange in cages, which this clearly was. Sometimes it really is just easier to show up and fix it.

Re: Speculating

the best case scenario appears to be that the UK gets the same deal as other EEA countries, which can be summarised as applying the same rules as the EU (including freedom of movement of people, goods, services, and capital; plus rule of law, democracy, human rights, and all that) but having no say on what the rules are in the first place.

Neither remainers or brexiteers would like this option which makes it *extremely* unlikely. I think we'd remain in the EU before this happened which would lead to a lot of "over my dead body". The next option to a sensible deal would be we just leave and let the EU get on with it.

Re: opensource protocols

There is legal precedent in things like DeCSS and with encryption America's own export restrictions on cryptographic code.

Precedent in that it didn't work in a time before the internet was really a thing outside academia. I'd actually pay to see them try this. Good money.

Until they actually attempt it arguing over this is a bit stuck record like, the talking points are well covered but we should be ready to mobilise the day it ever actually is a thing.

Plus FWIW DMCAs at github won't work. Github would refuse and take it to court and US courts wouldn't allow it - and they can't block github in country because people like me would have them in court. Regardless even if all that proved wrong there'd always be somewhere you could get your bootleg copy of openssl.