Posts by P. Lee

Re: Cisco: Be Bold!

>Nimble's only route to market is to go straight to the floor on price

I presume they'll be absorbed into HPE's product line and be pushed out via that channel.

Re: Design the new defender... quite simple really

>Volkswagen didn't just lie though, did they? They taught their car to tell the lies.

See! Car-based AI is already here!

Shocked!

Simple protocol for mail syncing works. Document rendering is munged into a massively complex application platform and fails.

Who'd a thunk it?

I know, let's make a messaging system from Adobe PDF and Flash!

>Success breeds success...

and you end up with lots of little successes running around...

Re: Benoit - The new Italian Dictator

>The EU seemingly can't get rid of him. Why?

Ok now I'm confused. If the EPO is not an EU institution, the EU couldn't be expected to get rid of him.

Re: Oh noes, MS is putting its prices up...

>Same old same old, you'll whine but you'll pay, because no one gets fired for buying MS do they.

Ok, ok... We'll only buy 16% less... which is the reason they've switched to subscriptions - you can't easily terminate them.

However, if people suddenly see their opex rise, they are going to start looking for other solutions. Maybe ones which allow them to sweat the assets.

Re: Cattle vs pets is not really about cloud

>you won't have super elasticity without buying a lot more tin to cover way beyond your best guess at a worse case scenario.

I was with you up to here.

Tin is pretty cheap, especially if you compare it to the costs of getting the cattle model to work.

As much as a I dislike Uber's business practises, is no-one delighted by the delicious irony that the police can't arrest uber drivers because they refuse to break the law at police request?

I have to think that this is an LEO power grab. If they know the uber drivers, they know the car, they can track them down like any other vehicle & owner they want, they don't need the uber app to do it.

Its far better to have a customer-blackball mechanism and make the police use their normal procedures for catching criminals, than give the police special powers to force companies to recode applications they don't like.

There have been some dumb comparisons with rapists in this thread. We aren't talking rapists, we're talking people who give cheap lifts. The police aren't even going after Uber, they are going after the drivers. We are talking very small fry indeed. This is the kind of story you get when you give the police quotas to fill.

>the way to cover yourself will be to append the output from the tool to any contract

Indeed, though, relying on HMRC's *web* application which could be updated at any time and in any unknown manner and not under your control, seems like a poor plan.

(I see you there, Windows 10!)

Re: Cutting data costs millions

>They don't invest in getting the data which can optimise their operations

Or rather they only invest in data which allows them to optimize their operations.

Spare capacity is wasted investment which lowers roi.

Re: EU response.

Why don't they go with tax-type laws?

Is the local company a "controlled foreign corporation"? Fine the local corporation and assign joint responsibility to the parent company. Do they fail to turn up to court? Carry on without them. If found guilty, do what the US does and go after their income streams - block payments and hold intermediaries liable.

Sure you can do business, but you have to comply with our laws.

Re: 'seeded' from the same extrasolar source

>That's dangerously close to a "turtles all the way down argument" and solves nothing ultimately about the origin of life.

Once you've accepted that the universe sprang into existence when "nothing" exploded and resulted in something (in defiance of the laws of physics) and then the debris from that explosion defied the laws of thermodynamics and went from chaos to extraordinarily ordered systems, "turtles all the way down" is the least of your problems.

I'm all for research, but I seem to think we've seen this before - was it rock structures on Mars? Really old inorganic stuff which doesn't relate to anything we know as organic, but seems to follow a pattern, so it might be and we might be able to disprove God by proving life on other planets! Though I'm never sure how those two things are related.

'Tis but a funding expedition. Not to say its unworthy, but probably nothing to get excited about.

Re: I sometimes wonder how we can justify your salary

Ah the time before ir35!

Re: Disruptivity

>as long as it is outside my door when I want to go somewhere it could be out playing with the sheep for all I care

Until you forgot you needed to nip to the shops because you forgot to buy onions and its gone off and got stuck in a traffic jam in London.

Re: "That these products broke is an indication of defects in their TLS implementations,"

>maybe you could offer a rollback option anyway,

BTRFS anyone? Well, who trusts software vendors to do the right thing?

It did take me ages to work out why my laptop (Suse) was apparently out of disk space when df said there was loads left, but it is very, very cool.

As for Bluecoat... resting on their laurels for far too long. Seriously, if network security is your game, at least put some effort in. If Google can put it in a browser for free, you can do it when people pay you for support.

Re: systems that are no longer "secure" but "immune."

>All. Software. Contains. Bugs.

Yes, but that's a cop-out.

The major problem is that a modern OS is huge and the attack surface is massive. We need a redesign which minimises the attack surface. User-id based rights don't cut it. We need to be able to restrict rights at run-time in a reasonable manner. Things like EMET and capabilities are a good start but not anywhere close to having the required user-friendliness. We need to be able to clamp down on access to the directory tree, raw network stack, localhost-based web proxy, and config system. Those rights need to be defined during installation and managed by an admin system, not from inside the application - no self-updaters.

My internet browser and its sub-processes needs access to the GUI, these particular libraries, its disk cache and its download directory. It needs read-access to part of the registry and it needs r/w to where it stores user preferences (a config file or registry subtree). It does not need access to my whole user directory, screen-saver binaries and preference settings.

I may even need to define a second less secure browser config for intranet work. Maybe that one allows Java but won't connect to any non-rfc1918 addresses. It still does not need access to my whole user directory, screen-saver binaries and preference settings. Some of these things are in EMET and the host firewall settings on Windows, but they need to be brought together and made mainstream, integrating them into the application installer.

We need to kill extension-based interpreter selection and stop hiding "file types." Applications should not be able to overwrite files on their own -they should use an OS-mediated file-save dialogue. OS dialogues should be triggered if they try over-writing files for a mime-type they did not register during installation. Non-installed binaries get r/w to an auto-created subdirectory only.

Maybe I've got some of these details wrong, but this is the kind of OS redesign we need. Even Android and IOS at least attempt fine-grained controls.

Re: For any non-tech/Slashdot readers here by accident...

I doubt MS are under any illusions that they will convert any Linux users to windows.

It is mostly a defensive play - if you need a couple of tools, do you want to fight for a Linux install (another unmanaged VM/SOE) or are you going to just use the tools Windows comes with? The idea is to keep Linux off the radar.

Re: That's not how hashes work

The issue is whether you can compromise the client before they realise the code is not what they think.

If you can compromise the GIT client and then pull down the proper code in the background so you don't know you've been compromised, you have a problem.

This is one reason its good to avoid monoculture. It would be hard to compromise lots of different clients (while maintaining the hash) and you only need one client to notice the compromise and the user to alert the others.

Re: There's still a market for dumbphones

Phones don't cost anything like their retail price to make, but the do cost money to sell and if you sell cheap ones, you aren't selling high-margin ones.

The problem is, if you go cheap now, you'll be subsidising the network usage of the more expensive phones.

Check out Telstra's BYO / PAYG plans... not that different from getting a phone with it.

Intel have nothing to lose in mobile, it would be nice if they could put together a standard for phone hardware which allowed both ARM and x86 chips to interface with common phone hardware.

What it really comes down to is that the bulk end of the market can't be sustained so the vendors skim from the smaller purchasers (who expect lower "economies of scale") to fund it. That only works if you can prevent the bulk market redistributing.

As for the argument that you own the asset but not the IP in the asset, that's morally rot. If I buy a DVD, I can sell it on. If I start selling copies, that's a different issue. The fact that the US (and EU) government colludes to outlaw the grey market through IP law is irrelevant. Its indicative of a society in economic and moral decline. As for not selling stuff to "bad" regimes... really? That that fuss over Cuba while the US messes around in Vietnam, Central and South America, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan? Do you really thing the Iranian government can't get its hands on plenty of compute power? Is this about, stopping them doing bad stuff or retarding their economic development? Maybe half the country dislikes their president - perhaps the government should be toppled and one more friendly to foreign powers installed...

Re: Warrantless mass surveillance is one thing...

>First, it's not warrantless.

I think the point point is: the police's surveillance isn't warrant-less, but Amazon's is.

The whole thing looks fishy to me. It would be easy to comply with this request and say, "see, we keep nothing" which would make them look good. If on the other hand, they are snooping more than they should, then things would get ugly and no-one would trust them, or Siri or Tay....

Of course, if he yelled, "Alexa, call the police!" and Amazon did nothing, that would look bad, even if it is entirely excusable.

Re: "I wish for world peace"

>If this guy wins, expect your next contract to be like something written by Tolstoy.

He won't. We have juries to even out the edges and maintain the spirit of the law, which in the US is, "tough luck for the employees."

More likely, there will be clauses concerning the requirement to "ensure the continuity of corporate systems' functionality as required by the company for operational activities..."

Re: Get a cat.

Well you have to pay for the dedicated fibre link and the salary of the guy who sits there and watches the videos... of the cat catching the mouse.

Re: Weasel words

I think the problem is the scope of the request.

This would appear to be a one-time prosecution device. No-one involved in this type of crime is going to use their fingerprint for unlocking in the future.

However, rejecting the request does stop the government from abusing the system when they want to trawl for fingerprints.

Re: The problem with Facebook

>it's overkill and painfully distracting and ultimately unnecessary.

I disagree - and I'm someone who can't stand fb and doesn't have an account.

What facebook does provide is an authenticated presence. Not authenticated in terms of who you are, but authenticated in terms of, you're the same person attached to that facebook account as you were yesterday. - at least for people who already know each other offline.

It is a bit like a telephone number - once you know the right one, you can call it and be reasonably sure of the person picking up.

People use fb like an address-book + group chat. It's power is in the data that is already in there - the pictures that we assume will be around forever, but won't be.

What we are in desperate need of is a point of presence protocol and sophisticated address-book and identity management. We need to ditch single-identity communications systems, such as skype.

I think we'll need to see a revenue collapse at facebook which leads to service degradation, before anything changes. There's too much historical data that people want to keep in fb for them to move to another service just because its trendy.

Re: Here we go again

>there are a few solutions, but most are fairly draconian, and even they are rarely bullet proof.

What was the error? Hiding data and mixing formatting with data.

Do not do unexpected things with data processing. If you have the data there, keep it in plain sight. If it shouldn't be in plain sight, don't just pretend it isn't there.

Keep a canonical list of templates which have no data in them and have reports populate them. If you must import the data to provide a snapshot, don't hide it, put it in a separate sheet and have your formatted report reference the data.

Of course, if MS could, you know, innovate in security, it could get the mail client to check attachments when they are added and run the "ready to publish?" checks it already has in its own products which pick up on hidden fields and so on.

Maybe they could add an "attachment" api to windows so that picking up a file will run it through checks based on the file type and system configuration. It always looks a little weird that you "open" a file when you are actually not.

But hey, people will buy Windows and Office anyway, so why bother spending any money on developing it for security?

Re: ugh

>I'm trying to figure out why that is a bad thing.

Best case: its a pointless upgrade

Worst case: they might make it work

Re: Luddite here

There are a couple of things worth mentioning.

I was working for a company which had everything on citrix. I had my own laptop, but mostly it was a citrix client. A phone with a decent video-out capability could easily take that role and mean I can ditch a large lump of metal from my bag.

We are constrained quite a bit by battery power. Even a phone running as a smartphone can suck the battery down quickly if you have the screen brightness up and you're running a game. If we can add a power to my screen-docking, we can really open up the CPU.

Instant-on and quiet. I have a powerful PC desktop, but web and email are the most used functions. These are bad on a small screen with no keyboard and mouse, so just adding that would be worthwhile. A phone doesn't replace the PC, but it does mean I only need to turn the PC on when its really called for.

And the downside? I don't trust mobile OS's. I don't want them transitioning to my desktop, I'm going to need a new linux OS for this to be a thing.

Re: Its all posing

>Google actually sells advertising on many of these tunes videos while the copyright holder gets nothing.

Possibly true, but look a little closer at many of the music videos.

Product placement much?

There are also two more things:

1. if the illegal stuff on youtube disappeared, would you go out and buy it instead?

2. if the illegal stuff on youtube was allowed, but it became unprofitable to produce more of that kind of thing, would the world be a worse place?

Re: Overcomplicating it

Only one question required: Would you steal a policeman's helmet and go to the toilet in it?