Posts by Chris Miller

Hardly surprising

If the number is accurate, it sounds surprisingly (and creditably) low to me.

It would be interesting to know how many laptops are in the hands of gov departments (and their contractors) - I'm sure it must be thousands. Anyone who is responsible for more than a hundred laptops knows that 'shrinkage' is inevitable - whether though stupidity, negligence or targeted theft. If you need to use portable devices, occasional losses are the cost of doing business, you can (and should) minimise the risk, but you can't eliminate it completely.

The best solution is to ensure that no data is held locally (<cough>Citrix</cough>) or, failing that, strong encryption (preferably not involving a password stuck underneath the device). The 'unloseable' portable device has never existed and will never exist.

Meanwhile, back in the real world

90% (99% ?) of corporate travellers (a not insignificant segment of the laptop marketplace) need: Office*, a web browser and 1 or 2 key applications (Siebel/SAP/take your pick). The obvious way to provide this is via a Citrix* client running on a thin laptop. No setup, no local storage, so when (NB not if) it is left on a train, nothing is lost except the cost of a replacement.

This is not a solution for developers or graphics designers, but it will work for the vast majority of businesses. It won't play GTA or movies on a trans-atlantic flight, so you can either work or get some shuteye!

* Other products are available, but (in the real world) no-one uses them.

Wise words

The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't. - Ernest Rutherford (Baron Rutherford of Nelson) 1871-1937

It doesn't work in the UK

because there's no completely consistent mapping between letters and numbers (although mobiles seem better than landlines in this respect). So you might dial PLUMBER and get SEXMEUP (or, even worse, v.v.)

Can't he afford a decent speechwriter?

"I'm not saying everyone is not going to go on a little bit of a diet"

WTF does that mean?

Can't they just

provide them with tin (aluminum) foil hats?

Is the excitement generated

anything to do with the Beeb homepage showing a 'restricted format due technical difficulties' message from (roughly) 22:00 - 08:00 last night?

@George

"White Wilderness" - Disney (1958). Snopes confirms this story is true:

http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp

Visitors' networks

@AC - see my comment above for why (IMHO) completely open visitors' networks are a really bad idea, even if there's an air gap to the corporate network. Post a daily userid/password on the intranet, so any legit visitor can be given access - there, that wasn't too difficult!

Martin Jarvis strikes again

Turns out "Our Brave Boys" was a documentary.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ourbraveboys/

I laugh at Llap Goch

Even a master of the noble Welsh art is powerless against:

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Ecky-Thump

And even if it did work

Let's pretend they could get this to work with a false positive rate of only 1% (pure science fiction, even assuming someone has a recent high quality snap of O-bin-L). Then Heathrow, with 68 million passengers a year, will result in 2,000 innocent folk being pulled over for intimate body cavity investigation/redeployment to Gitmo every DAY.

Brilliant! Where do they get these security clowns from?

There goes "Private Lives"

Amanda: Very flat, Nor-*beep*.

According to my OED

Hune (naut. obs.): a knob at the mast-head (from the Old Norse)

No melting

Surface temperatures vary between 90-700 K - hot enough to melt some soft metals, but nowhere near enough to melt rock. Mercury was thought to be tidally locked to the Sun (as the moon is to the Earth), but we now know that it is actually in a ratio of 3:2, so a solar day on Mercury lasts for two local years (2 x 88 days).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)

Not impossible

It's actually quite easy to block ALL encrypted traffic, it's just a question of how much this may reduce your revenue (I'm assuming this is a chargeable service, except maybe in premium class seats). Put simply, it's their network, so their rules apply. If you don't like the rules, go fly with someone else!

Porn sites are frequently contaminated with malware - the thought of some bad stuff getting loose on an airliner is rather worrying. I hope that there's a big fat air gap between the IFE and flight control systems, but my experience doesn't fill me with confidence.

In the words of Captain Renault:

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

Not that IBM would ever stoop to trying to get a proprietary system recognised as a standard - no sirree, Bob ...

True story

A few years back, I was called out to a data centre in the former-DDR. Servers were tripping out 'over temperature', but the air-con seemed to be working perfectly. On arrival I found all the windows open to the chilly outside air - unsurprisingly the thermostats were inhibiting the air-con.

I asked one of the local operators, who was seated beneath a large 'Nicht Rauchen' sign, why the windows were open. "So that when we smoke, it doesn't set the fire alarms off", he replied.

When will they ever learn?

Rule of thumb - no IT project should ever cost more than 7 figures or take longer than 18 months, otherwise it'll never happen (or, even worse, will be obsolete by the time it's implemented). If you're faced with a larger project, break it up into smaller ones to meet the above criteria.

If you insist on a multi-billion pound project and you advertise for outsourcers capable of taking it on, don't be surprised if you end up with the usual suspects.

Now we've all had a good laugh

Microsoft are, by any measure, one of the largest software development operations in the world. Their development effort, for its size, produces significantly fewer new vulnerabilities than most of their competitors (whether open or closed source).

If all developers could achieve the level of secure development currently demonstrated by Microsoft, we'd have a lot fewer web sites with gaping XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities. It's not as though sanitization of input strings is a particularly new or difficult technique, but it's obvious that it's still not widely practised.

Secure development is not that difficult:

IF you write all your own code yourself;

AND you know what you're doing;

AND you have access to some fairly sophisticated testing tools;

AND you know how to use them.

But once you're looking at a team of 100 developers, the security of the systems produced is likely to be only as strong as that of the weakest (from a security standpoint) member of your team. Production of secure code is only possible with a strong, secure development process and very good QA. If Microsoft can assist in making this combination more common, good for them.

@Marvin the Martian

You may be confusing the (US) Herald-Tribune cartoon with the (UK) Beano version. Astonishingly, both started independently within 3 days of each other in 1951, and both have given rise to TV spin-offs.

I've never found the H-T version very funny, but I attributed this to my lack of a US sense of 'humor' - for all I know it has them rolling in the aisles in Peoria ...

Where does this end?

I demand equal rights for Pastafarianism! Should we be teaching Scientology or Jedi* studies in RE? If we mention the history of the moon landings, must we also say that of course there are a large number of web sites that claim they were all faked?

* As reported in the last census, there are more folks claiming followers of The Force than Creationists in the UK.

Silicon/Silica

The article uses both - which is it? (I'm guessing silica.)

Why Canada?

I got one of these this morning (swiftly deleted). I wondered why Canada would be contaminated by an exploding 'UK' power plant outside London (leaving aside the obvious fact that any such explosion would be making rather large headlines).

My guess is that the original spam referred to London, Ontario - although AFAIK the nearest nuke plant (Pickering) is about 80 miles from there.

Don't the spam-merchants do any research?

Let me see if I understand

I can buy liability insurance against making fraudulent financial transactions? So, if I put in my tax return that I earned only £1,000 last year and the authorities find out, the fine will be paid by the insurer?? What if I get caught holding up a bank, will they send someone else to do the time for me???

Where do I sign????

RTFR

"Following the accident, 66 fuel samples were taken from the aircraft and the engines. A number of these samples were tested and critical properties such as the freezing point, density, flash point, viscosity, contamination, fuel additives and presence of water were tested against DEF STAN 91‑91 and ASTM D1655 requirements. The fuel samples complied fully with the fuel specifications for Jet A‑1. Additional tests were carried out to detect any unusual components that would not normally be found in aviation turbine fuels. No evidence of contamination was found."

If you choose to ignore all the evidence and persist in concocting implausible conspiracies, surely there are some wiki pages you could be editing?