Posts by localzuk 1653 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2011
What does the law say about it? Is there a law in the US requiring Apple to put a backdoor in their phones? No? Then the government should be working with Congress to put such a law in place.
If Congress disagrees? The govt is out of luck, and should move on. Dragging Apple's name through the mud over it doesn't change the law. All it'd actually do is end up with Apple taking the govt to court due to them being lied about by the AG.
"The majority of bank employees are call centre, branch front of house, or HR/other support. None of those people need or want a desktop, just that’s been the legacy heap of junk given to them."
Hang on, what should those people have then? Call center staff? Why would they have anything other than a desktop? It isn't legacy to give them a desktop - its what the job needs.
HR? In my experience, most HR people sit in an office all day. Why would they need something different to a desktop?
Front of house? Most bank branches I've seen have service desks, with security glass over the front. Why would they have anything other than desktops? Not so easy to use an OMR or coin scales if you're hovering about with an iPad...
You are doing the opposite I think - making out that real work is only done on mobile devices and not desktops. The reality is that in the majority of businesses, desktop PCs still rule supreme for working on. Laptops and tablets are often "extra" items as well, and some more modern businesses have swapped desktops for laptops with docks etc... but overall, go into ANY office building and you'll find desktop PCs. Go into your local mechanic workshop, and they'll have a desktop PC at the front for invoicing. Go into your local doctor's surgery, and every office will have a desktop.
We've long known this - whilst the law may apply to the rich, powerful, ministers, prime ministers, spies etc... What actually matters is the consequences.
The reality is that the organisation that would bring any prosecution is controlled by the government - the CPS. They have absolute control over this agency, as part of the executive. If something is determined to be covered by "national security", at the sole view of the Attorney General, who is appointed by the government of the time, then it is entirely up to them whether it goes ahead.
Well, unless someone pays for a private prosecution that is... Ha.
With a majority like the one Boris Johnson has now also, it would be very difficult for anything to stop a change in the law also. So, the Supreme Court's powers are still limited by the government.
I don't get that. Company has a problem with thinking they're crap, so they launch a new business with the same name. Why!? Everyone will just think "eugh, more of the same".
Just like Natwest launching their app only bank "Bó". Great. Nice fresh name (even with the hilarious connotations of BO from the name). But, no, they advertise it as "Bó by Natwest".
Why do they think Natwest, the brand linked to the bank that has major IT outages constantly, would be a great way to advertise this new service? Come, use our new IT only bank...
A potential scenario. You're a vet, out on a farm on a welsh hillside. You vaccinate a bunch of cows. You've done half the herd and head back to the office for the end of the day. Once you get back, your phone connects to wifi and Android goes "ooh, updates" and downloads Chrome 79. You then open the app up, ready to do its sync, but your data is gone.
Beef burgers, pork sausages and dairy milk are animal products.
Last I checked, having a veggie burger doesn't change beef burgers from being beef burgers. Pork sausages still exist and having Linda McCartney Veggie Sausages doesn't change that.
It doesn't damage the "meat" market having those names.
People don't get confused between meat and non-meat burgers/sausages. Saying it is "passing them off" is nonsense. Glamorgan sausages, which don't contain meat, have existed since the 1800s, and people don't confuse them for meat products.
Xerox's business is mostly large MFDs and the like. HP's is mostly smaller printers (workgroup and what have you). The 2 do match quite nicely in that regard. HP also have their burgeoning 3D printing division, and their large format division as well.The technology that underplays all of that is a very nice asset.
Throw in the fact that both engage in "business services" and it kinda makes sense.
But the rest? Laptops, Desktops, Tablets & Displays? I could see that being spun off into a separate business relatively soon after merging.
I would've thought HP buying Xerox would've been the more sane way of things going though. HP could buy them, and bolster their various divisions with the assets nicely.
I'd suggest both your suggestions are technical solutions to a people problem.
I'd approach it a little more brutally - send out a reminder that ALL work must be saved on the network drive, say checks will be performed next week, and that anyone caught using the local documents folder to save stuff will face disciplinary...
The last 2 bulk purchases of laptops for our organisation were AMD - the price:performance comparison for business use at the moment makes Intel unaffordable. As an example, a low end laptop, i5 8GB, 240GB SSD is £20 per unit more expensive than the Ryzen equivalent. Multiply that number out enough times and it becomes expensive. Go up the range, and want better performance, and that price difference becomes bigger and bigger.
So, a user buys a license to something and then leaves. That license does what? Goes into the general pool? Can an admin then assign it on to someone else? What if another user wants a license for that thing, if they go to buy it, will it assign that existing license to them? Or will it buy a new license, leaving the old one unused?
Seems like a really badly thought out system.
Between work and our nearest "big" town, 4G coverage is about 30%. 3G coverage about 30%, 2G around 30% and then total blackspots about 10%. 5G coverage is non-existent, and won't be for a long time.
So, companies considering turning off 3G or 2G are effectively saying they'll reduce the coverage in this area of Somerset to about 30% total. Because that'll be great for business. Bearing in mind there's a good 70,000 people who live in the area too.
That isn't actually true - let's stick to facts.
End to end encryption is when data is encrypted at all points between clients, without the middle bit knowing what was sent.
So, WhatsApp has end to end encryption, as the encryption key is held by the client, and not the server.
HTTPS is a secure connection between client and the server. Once the data gets to the server it may no longer be kept encrypted. VPNs, again, are encrypted from the client to the server. Not from client to client.
This isn't about finding abusers, or child pornographers. That's just the usual excuse. The only use for this sort of thing is mass surveillance. No more, no less.
Actual criminals, the ones out there hurting people, would use something else. As I've said before, there are apps that allow strong encryption that only the end users have - as they generate them when they launch the app. The code for such apps is already online and downloadable. Takes a fairly small amount of time to get your own personal chat network running.
If it truly were about the children, then end to end encryption would be a requirement of all online tools. Remember the old hole in Yahoo Messenger? Allowed people to connect to running sessions and see the users' cameras. If the encryption in place across the net now gets weakened by back doors, then that is what we'll be going back to.
Escape Velocity was where I started with space games. I *loved* all of the series. I just wish there was something like it now, that had the long story to go with the galaxy size.
EDIT: Just discovered that Ambrosia SW seems to have gone out of business too. So will not be able to play my copy of EV Nova ever again :(
Put it this way, they could charge $1 a year per domain and suddenly they're earning more than $100m a year in income. I don't know of any organisation that would go "hmm, nah, we don't want to pay $1, we'll switch back to the $150 a year company". Hell, make it $10 and most would still pay.
You can't really blame a touchscreen for the issue. You have to blame the interface running on that touchscreen. Split throttles on 2 different screens? Why? Did the manual throttles have 2 levers in 2 different places on the bridge to do the same? No? So why do it when you change to a touchscreen?
Moving to a different piece of kit doesn't mean you have to fundamentally change how everything works. Want to put a touchscreen in to replace a big button? Go for it, just make the interface also be a big button. Not have some odd UI that you have to navigate to get to that button!
"It would be much easier for people to apply pressure to you."
Except, that isn't really true. We are ALL able to be pressured. We all have things we love. Families, friends etc... Why go to all the trouble of pressuring someone with photos of them smoking a joint at an underground poker game surrounded by communists, when you can just get a nutter to buy a gun at Walmart and threaten their family?
I know digital signatures have been around for decades, and are widely used in various industries, but its probably time they become mainstream with consumers and "normal people" tech.
Digitally signed videos/photos etc.... Though, I'm not so sure how anyone would go about spreading the tech. It'd basically have to be driven by Apple, Google and Microsoft at this point - slap it in phones and tablets.
You are again defining a potential extension of IPv4 in terms of what IPv4 is now. That's like saying "we can't put a door here because there's no door here!".
Whatever solution was pushed forward necessitates updates to kit. Arguments about how IPv4 works *now* being broken are, to be frank, irrelevant. There is no technical reason why it could not have been extended. That's the reality of it. Old kit needs updating regardless - all billions of bits of kit.
Your argument that people are wrong is also one of theory - you theorise that they are wrong, but you do not have knowledge of everyone's networks. You don't have knowledge of every ISP and how they're handing out IP ranges. You theorise that "these people are wrong".
IPv6 does the job, but it is certainly not the best solution to the problem. If it were, we wouldn't have an uptake problem.
No, not joking. Legacy systems are all well and good, but EVERY other industry in the world modernises when new needs arise.
People complain about IPv6 because it requires a complete redesign of their networks. So, a suggestion is to not have to "completely redesign" them, but extend existing concepts - just like every other industry does.
Those downvoting me - what is your suggestion, because as far as I can see there are very few options:
1. Run out of IPv4 addresses - this has pretty much happened
2. Roll out IPv6, and redesign everything to handle it - including those "legacy systems" that people so keenly cry about constantly.
3. Come up with an easier solution that doesn't require a complete redesign of how networks work.
From what I can tell, people here seem to want things all ways - they want IPv4, they want it to be replaced with something that doesn't require work, they don't want to replace legacy systems. Remember, those legacy systems that only support 32 bit addresses won't support IPv6 anyway!
Its basically Brexit, but with IP addresses - you want unicorns.
The UK needed more phone numbers, so they added a digit.
Why didn't they do the same with IPs? So instead of 10.10.10.10 you have 10.10.10.10.10? Takes you from 4 billion up to over a trillion addresses available. Surely it would've been easier to update everything to handle an extra octet? Need more still? Add a 6th octet.
Same suggestion over and over again, yet the mainstream media (I don't include El Reg in that title) don't discuss the key flaws in the concept suggested.
The biggest flaw is that you can grab an open source app, sideload it onto an Android phone and voila, you've got end to end encrypted comms which don't have the mandated back door in. Takes minutes to do.
So, fundamentally, this is not about catching criminals - they will use these tools if they don't want to get caught. It is still about mass surveillance of the population.
It'll last about as long as it takes for a Minister's private info to be hacked and released before it gets backtracked.
Law abiding citizens will all use the tools provided to them easily, but a criminal? One with half a braincell? They'll use an open source app sideloaded onto devices. Takes a minimal amount of minutes to do. Grab the source to Signal and away you go.
So, in reality this isn't about criminals - they'll continue to use end to end encryption that can't be cracked. Its about surveillance on everyone else.
I take the opinion that:
a) Everyone is already working hard to get by
b) Our economy is weak
c) People are generally lazy, and prefer to just shout on Twitter than actually do something
You'd need telecoms/data expertise all across the country, when we've already got a shortage of it - especially in light of Brexit. You'd also need co-operation from numerous landowners all over the country, some will say yes, some no.
The logistics of doing it in a couple of villages is not insurmountable, but scaling that out, in the timeframe given also, is pretty much impossible.
So, you're left with the other option - big providers like OpenReach. Where everything costs 10x as much and takes 100x as long. Flexibility is not their name.
Why is our government obsessed with fibre? Why not do what other countries do and make a sensible minimum speed a requirement of our ISPs? Obviously it'll still need lots of work and subsidy, but obsessing over fibre is weird.
Why not say "all homes must have 100Mbps by 2025". In some places, that means fibre, others cable, others 5G and others satellite. It would be unfeasibly expensive to run dedicated fibre to every farmhouse in the country - some of the farms down here are 5 miles from their nearest village! Why must the taxpayer fund the digging up of 5 miles of road, and installation of 5 miles of fibre for 1 farm, when better use of wireless technologies would do the job, cheaper?
Just the blind leading the blind really.
Look at homes - we make our walls from layers of different materials. This material has a use, but I doubt anyone is saying "build actual walls entirely from it". We build walls from brick, wood, metal, insulation, glass etc... At the moment, so why would it be different in space?
You don't think we'll have humans on Mars in our lifetime?
Seriously? We only started flying planes in 1903. It took us 66 years to go from that to putting a man on the moon.
Technological advances are coming thick and fast. We'll have people on the moon in the next 10-20 years at most.
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