Posts by P. Lee

Re: Remember kids ...

+1

Far more dangerous than the compromise is the mindset behind the lock idea.

Re: Even now, I still get..

My current favorite is my iPhone where the answer button once pressed is replaced by the end call button. A little lag, a retry and you have to start again. I'm sure it used to not have lag, but it's all part of the upgrade program! Pressing answer for a call I'm sure is one of the more advanced phone features which requires an awful lot more code complexity than in the past.

Re: Hardware as a service

>Is that "renting"?

That was my thought. To me it looks a little desperate. Although I agree with the de-risking idea, the move to small continuous payments indicates people are no longer willing or able to make a big one for the latest product. Has Apple really become the tech world's Radio Rentals?

> All that matters now is the supremacy of the state.

And that's now possible thanks to the removal of Christianity from public life and State consideration. Despite the corruption of the merging of church and State, there was at least an accepted principle that the State and the law are not the ultimate authorities, they can be rightly judged by an objective standard, indeed should be judged and held accountable now and will be ultimately judged later. We have essentially reverted to pagan times where the State is supreme because all higher powers with a claim to authority have been rejected. We base the relative authority of our laws on the geographical size of jurisdictions, (Sussex, England, Europe) rather than the excellence of their morality. We no longer really even expect or demand morality from government, merely management. It has "risen" to our expectations indeed.

While GrumpyOldBloke's analysis of who benefits and why may be open to question, I have to agree that there is a fundamental flaw in economic policy when it thinks that playing with money can fix problems. The problems are created because the money system stops reflecting real value being produced. Then we get re-adjustments when people stop believing in the game.

Our problem is debt. We've overspent and now we have to pay. Perhaps the previous expansion was fake and now the debt has to be paid. What if there is no "expansion in the economy"? What if the pie is not getting larger? Maybe it really is static. Maybe all those rising stock prices are not because people think the stock is worth it, but because with zero interest rates, anything is better than nothing and money is leaving the money markets looking for somewhere to go - stocks. Perhaps those higher corporate profits are hiding the fact that lots of people have been made redundant from high paying jobs and are now low earners.

Am I pessimistic? Well yes. I saw IT providing great gains in productivity through automation, then networking... but not anymore. When the great IT companies stop being IBM, DEC, Sun et al who provide business automation, R&D into much better tech; and start to become Google (looking for stuff which already exists) Facebook (cat pictures) and Twitter (speaks for itself); when we don't need more capabilities, but want things lighter and shinier; then we know we've no longer got much to contribute. Even all the server activity is about consolidation and catering to end-devices which are too feeble to do their own processing, by design. We aren't doing more anymore. All that network bandwidth going on streaming because we don't want people to have access to things without advertising being inserted. So much resource dedicated to stopping things being efficient. Moving to rental and usage models because resources are too plentiful for the IT industry to cope with. IT is becoming a parasite, not making business processes better, faster, cheaper, but merely extracting more rent for the same things we could do before. Shinier than before, perhaps, not not particularly more effective, not in a way which means we can produce more stuff.

The GFC, inflation, the Greek crisis, its all just symptomatic of corrupt minds given the tools and ability to hide, for a while, the consequences of their actions. The fact that we seem to get the same result, no matter who is elected should give us pause for thought about the current state of Western philosophical underpinnings and morality. What is it about our worldview that always seems to produce this result in those in power? Why is it that the great outcry over Ashley Madison is over privacy, not integrity? The moral aspect of it is seen mostly as foolish and in terms of a laughing-stock of techno-incompetance. Where are the laments over integrity, of acting rightly even when no-one can see you? Could it be that the lack of this in our society also drives the sub-prime strategy, the accounting cover-ups, the desire to buy votes by spending other people's money which they don't even have? It's just risk management after all and the risk of being caught is small.

Re: How is it possible

>that you can get to be CEO of an operation like VMware and think that there won't be difficulties with the varying data retention laws in different jurisidctions if you use just one 'data cloud' globally?

I'm sure he does know. He's trolling because otherwise his event would really not be newsworthy.

'Tis but click-bait which aids him and the press.

Re: MicroNSAoft.

Nice if you have the option of Linux, but if you don't, ms has just removed one obstacle to upgrading - what you already have is better.

Re: Unlimited doesn't mean unlimited then...

The problem is that it's marketing. They call it unlimited knowing you'll self limit on a phone. Why not just say 9gig and that's your lot? For most people a phone is not for calls but for comms. Saying unlimited in large text and redefining it in small print is not acceptable. Just say what you mean!

Relying on client side reporting was always going to fail. This isn't a new problem and he knew about it before the plans were sold. That sounds like a dumb move on his part. Maybe they need a CEO who has an clue about how people use mobile data.

Re: meanwhile

> feel the urge to comment on this.

>No, seriously.

You comment is incomplete without a picture of either a cat, a dog, a sign or some food. Is there something else on your mind... mass murder probably?

Re: It's a sport....

>"Welcome to Australia, where the wildlife want to kill you

Not just the fauna either, the flora have a tendency to spontaneously combust and try to burn you alive.

Re: Trust

+1 Just because the powers that be might not be abusing things now, why would you tempt them with the capability?

Let me rephrase that. Just because the powers that be aren't abusing you now, why would you give them the option or support a company/product which gives them the option?

Re: Doh!

>And what happens when an actual ROM has an exploit in it? Good luck trying to fix it...

That's why you keep it small and using well-tested tech with very limited functionality. (You could put it on a SD card in a slot which can't be written to by the general OS.)

If you need to update things, you write the software to an external device, move a slider switch (or hold a pin in a "reset" hole) to "config mode" and reboot. The rom then looks at the external device loads all local device drivers and updates the flash (now enabled by the slider switch).

It wouldn't be fool-proof, but it would prevent firmware malware from being downloaded an installed on the sly.

Re: Microsoft refused to comment

And we certainly won't fill in the time by making comparisons between the desirability of MS' new OS and the Ashley Madison website, no sir we won't!

Re: $$

Smaller might mean more expensive if you need more expensive materials to move the heat faster, but I agree - this looks like trying to sell a bin-sorted chips as premium. That's a business which apparently doesn't want to be seen as trying to do its best for its customers. It's accountancy-driven. It's a shame. I want AMD to do well but they just keep messing up.

Am I the only one who wants a pseudo-all-in-one? If I've got a large screen, hide the cpu/graphics behind it in a couple of boxes with large, slow fans, maybe with water cooling if the angles are hard. I like all-in-one tidiness but if I wanted a laptop-spec, I'd get a big screen and a laptop. ITX has missed the boat a bit. We need a new hidden-behind-the-screen form-factor standard.

Re: Who Cares..

>..After all Windows isnt a necessity anymore

Nice try, I wish that were true. Sadly its not true for most businesses.

What is true is that the OS just provides a platform on which to run applications. Businesses don't run on an OS for its features, they run Applications to facilitate business requirements.

The Applications don't need a Store or Cortana, they need a way to use a CPU and memory, read and write data to storage, interface with a user and communicate across networks. Some applications are used to distribute others.

XP did this ok. W7 added a bit more security and enough memory to last a long time. W8 added tablet access (which very few people in business need or wanted to rewrite their apps for) and W10 adds, erm, what exactly?

W10 might be a bit of a boon to business if a Corporate Store is easier/cheaper to use than the current software distribution software, but most companies already have a sunk investment in software management. It might be a requirement for those who need a "supported OS" but not for a few years yet.

W10 might never be enough is if Cloud means even Windows apps get containerised. I'm not talking (necessarily) AWS, I'm talking the logic extracted from a Windows-specific app and maybe the UI moved to a browser. The whole lot could still be installed locally. I mean, if you have to rewrite the UI to be a universal app, wouldn't you just use HTML instead allowing "clientless" network execution and possibly Cloud-provided software rental at the same time?

Re: Even more obvious a candidate.

>Tony Blair.

I think you've missed how the site operates. Unless you're gay or one of the presumably very busy one percenters, AM gets paid, you get... nothing.

Forget the privacy problem, until that news came out, AM still had a chance, because fools and their money are always easily parted.

Now though, AM, through its adverts, have climbed the Tower of Wrongness to the height of the top floor of Irony and are about to leap off into depths of the Custard Pie of Laughing Stock. If you want to play doctors and nurses and resuscitate them, you will need the services of one Dr Frankenstein. This one, however, I suspect is going to be reported as "missing presumed dead - last seen drifting off in icy waters, alone, wearing nothing but custard, with a lawsuit sticking out of its chest."

Re: Break that self perpetuating game..

>Quite a lot of these patents are defensive in nature: if you don't patent it, someone else will do it and screw you over.

Cheaper to file than to fight in court. That sounds reasonable, but in that case, they should have contributed it to a patent pool and not held onto it.

Re: Another day...

Not sure why you got all the downvotes there.

Cloud uptime is generally quite good. Having said that, a seventeen hour outage is long, even for a small business with no support.

The only thing I would say is that if you run your own stuff, is that your own stuff is generally simpler and therefore less likely to go wrong. You are more likely to be able to hack together a work-around than a cloud-provider can. Popping an extra 1G NIC into a device is easier than working out how to deal with an extra 40G going somewhere unexpected.

Multiple cloud providers are an option, but then you need to be careful about who controls DNS and how wide-area load-balancing is carried out.

>Maybe the manufacturing cost is like $1 or $2 but they are sticking $1000 price tags on the things.

Do they still even sell chips or even sparc hosts?

It's been ages since I used a sparc but they were never about high-volume throughput, they were about being rock solid. That attribute has been devalued as systems scaled up and everyone has much wider redundancy and failover solutions, than "it hasn't gone down in living memory - if it does, we'll restart it, but its rather unlikely."

Re: NT - Long filenames

but NT did things properly, such as requiring graphics to be arbitrated by the kernel... and we understood that that was much harder and slower to do. The NT model we knew was the stable, sensible thing to do but we just couldn't afford it yet and there were many times when speed was a more useful attribute than stability.

Yes, 95 was a kludge, but only if coming from NT, not if you were coming from 3.11 and still had to operate in a DOS world. You could say NT 3.51 failed because it was too far ahead of its time (not as far as LISA/Apple ///). W95 gave NT the breathing space needed to let the hardware catch up and when it did NT4/XP was waiting to step in. The software (even OS software) was driving the hardware requirements market and that was ok because it was better (in some way) than what went before.

MS' current problem is that their software is not "better." W8 was written for tablets not PC's. It wasn't better for a PC so no-one wanted it there. It was fine on x86 tablets. W10 with Cortana is actually worse. Apart from Cortana sounding like "[Ford] Cortina", it is basically the PC equivalent of the Samsung fridge which leaks login details. You don't really need the USPs - Windows store and Cortana; the security turns out to leave something to be desired and still with the tablet interface? Is Cortana useful? Probably, like Siri, when you're in your car and want to dictate a text message or for voice calling. On a PC - desktop, laptop or tablet? Not really.

I'm sure how much to blame MS. Yes they've got things really wrong, but if we really have reached the point where we don't need new features then they're in trouble regardless. However, I suspect that like many incumbents they can't think outside the solution they already have. As I've said before, I think they should have spent the time working on a new security model, with the OS arbitrating security access to raw sockets and the like. That would have been a feature to at least make the IT people happy. They could have crowed about it, demonstrated how it keeps your data safely on your computer, rather than snaffling your data themselves. They could have shown how it blocks zero-days and forces malware/trojans to reveal their network traffic via OS-provided HTTP and TLS services. That DVD backup software you downloaded, would you like to allow it to connect to a w.x.y.z? (Located in Outer Mongolia) (Yes/No/Always/Log Transfer/Log Data): Sent A bytes / Received B bytes....

It would be really cool to have IPSEC tied to a user, not a host, providing network connection authentication not a tunnel.

They could have offered a subscription service to their cloud providing IP-address geo-blocking because I rarely need to talk to servers in eastern Europe or China or Russia or the Middle East or Japan or south-east Asia.

How about restricting applications' disk access unless done via an OS-provided and logged GUI element/api call? No, that flash streaming player can't have access to My Documents, even if it running under user "me," but it can store cookies in this nice little ramdisk filesystem I have located here...

All these features would have slowed things down. But would they be worth it? I think so. I think you'd have business such as Sony and the OPM crying out for such features. A new browser MS? Is that what the world needs most?

And yes, the tablet GUI would have been a great option, but I don't need it without a touch-screen so it must be an option. It's one I simply don't need.

Evidently you don't remember what an execrable mess the railways were under state ownership.

True.

All I remember is that the trip into London didn't cost almost 1GBP/mile, took 35 minutes rather than 75 minutes and was available outside peak times with relative frequency.

Re: Simple solution

>The data from Win10 should also go to the Russians. Problem solved.

You're right, I think that problem has been solved.

--

However, the backlash against W10 is just further proof that this linux thing is a pinko commie conspiracy to hobble our security services and should be banned as aiding and abetting terrorists and dictatorships around the world. We didn't spend all that effort winning WW2, Vietnam, iRaq and Afghanistan to be thwarted by some ungrateful Europeans who want to run their own rubbish email servers and refuse to pay for things that have no business being free. They should be grateful for our shield of protective nukes and corporate hegemony which have kept a few of us richer them them, which is their punishment from God for being foreign.

Re: Spam started...

>here are decent sites if you look but sadly you may be better off just downloading the 10 gig dump and checking yourself

Why would you bother? If you signed up, you should assume that you're in there. What are you going to do about it?

As for "imposing a personal view of morality," well, I guess if you don't subscribe to that view, you won't be bothered by practical implications of it - the data going public. That would be a bit like calling yourself a Christian but being embarrassed to tell people you go to church.

Re: II thought El Reg was exagerrating

It's the "you won't be able to use our service but we're still going to bill you" that cracks me up. There's no technical problem, but we just feel like doing it.

I suspect spotify is going to learn how fickle Internet users of free services are. Perhaps not straight away, but it will happen. Someone will accidentally allow spotify to tweet or advertise on fb that they are listening to Celine Dion, the newspapers will pick it up and the userbase will disappear.

Re: People "trained in IT security" are a lot of the problem

>Within 30/60/90 days an infiltrator will have managed to syphon everything out, even over a bumpkin broadband link.

You'd be surprised how many people put in firewalls and then allow a fair amount of outbound traffic from their DMZ hosts. SMTP from their webhosts to their hardened, but non-monitoring mail servers and DNS straight out to the internet, for example - that's quite handy for ex-filtration of data.

Another problem is encryption everywhere. It's quite hard to get your NIDS to be fast enough to do decryption and security checking fast enough to be usable. Actually, it isn't so much that its really hard technically, the problem is that all the security vendor appliances are pitched at high-end customers with prices to match and are performance-limited to ensure upgrades every few years when they go "end of life."

Re: Or the opposite could happen....

>Cheating is an action that is expected to cause harm, by definition.

Actually, no. Cheating just means you aren't following "the rules". "Survival of the fittest" implies it is prudent to break the rules if you can gain competitive advantage. Anyway, "the rules" are just a thing society made up and not an objective standard. Morality is just a social construct to increase our likelihood of survival, right? There are no moral absolutes, right?

Besides, definitions can be changed, by law if required, allowing the police to be used to enforce the change.

Re: Too Dear! Too Flawed!

Have an upvote!

I too look covetously, although my iphone 3G does need an upgrade, but I think... that, or a macbook air?

As for the magic quadrant... top *left* anyone? Ahem. Sooo transparent el reg ;)

Re: "Obvious reasons" ?

>Did Snowden have a history of whistleblowing then?

No, the "obvious reasons" refer to why USIS was fined:

1) "the government" is never to blame

2) someone must be blamed

3) We need to keep focus on other people's failings, not the government's failings.

4) We need to further legitimise the pursuit of Snowden by having already convicted someone of something.

Perhaps we should have a whip-round to help USIS out.