Posts by Peter2

Re: Look at the super markets.

Personally, I think some people are spending way, wayyyy to much time playing disaster/ survival games and want their little virtual world to become a reality because they are level whatever in it, and a big player in that virtual world. Then IRL they aren't a big shaker and mover, and are basically fantasizing about the real world becoming their game where they will be huge. Except of course, they won't be because clicking buttons on a screen doesn't actually give you any useful skills.

Food chains are perfectly secure and are just having some trouble delivering 4x the amount of normal food. If they end up either limiting the amounts that people can buy, or telling people that if they self isolate the government will deliver food packages then the food problem ends overnight.

The problem also goes away as soon as people are happy with the size of their stockpiles so it's a moot point.

If people are self isolating at home and avoiding any contact with people who might be infected, they aren't going to be inclined to participate in mass riots since by definition that requires people to group together with people who may be infected.

Now come on, get yet more hysterical. You know you can do it. ;)

Alternately:

- - - ♔ - - -

Keep Calm

. . and . .

Carry On

Re: Look at the super markets.

You can have either home isolation or riots. They are by definition mutually exclusive; pick one.

Incidentally, have you seen the news reports saying that people are trying to spread disinformation about Covid19 to spread panic?

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/18/europe/eu-kremlin-disinformation-coronavirus-intl/index.html

Re: Look at the super markets.

People are stocking two weeks worth of food at home to outlast having to self isolate. People having weeks worth of food at home and starving are inherently incompatible. Get a grip, watch less bad TV dramas and quit trying to spread panic.

If you've ever gone around door to door across a few thousand houses for something like the poppy appeal you'l meet such a wide range of decent people that you'll quickly realise that some peoples fantasies of civilisation collapsing and roving bands of idiots raiding houses for their stocks of food are pretty much zero.

The military civil contingencies directorate is being doubled in size, from 10k to 20k. This is to allow the military to (in extremis) deploy military logistics trucks to increase the flow of food from distribution centers to supermarkets, to reduce bottlenecks etc.

Your not going to see squaddies in CBRN kit filling in people that piss them off if for not other reason but the British army is smaller than the London police force and wouldn't have the manpower.

Re: "Ransomware operators of DoppelPaymer and Maze malware stated . . ."

I suspect that between GCHQ & the NSA the government probably does know who these people are.

What they don't have is legally held information proving it, or they don't want to give away their information sources so they have to engineer some way of getting the information. It's already somewhat known that the drugs bods occasionally get quasi anonymous calls telling them to pull random cars over to get sniffed over by a drugs dog, along with a specific vehicle registration which ought to have an extra sensitive search done of the sealed carrier bag under the spare tyre in the boot. And this telephone call didn't actually happen, it was a figment of your imagination.

I'm sure that there are equivalent deniable ways of getting some information to police in this sort of case, even if it's something like spoofing an IP to do something to get a search warrant for the hackers computer, which allows them to find real evidence.

That, or the level of surveillance by GCHQ/NSA is massively overblown.

It's probably actually because their systems are so outdated that they are using paranoia induced security precautions to prevent any problems.

Personally, I simply prevent my users from opening any form of unauthorised executable code, which reduces the number of possible infections down to zero unless I screw up and authorise a virus.

Re: Look at the super markets.

If this does go on, ration books might actually be required just to prevent people from over ordering.

Re: Look at the super markets.

Now that I think is totally absurd. How much toilet paper does a person actually need for two weeks? Especially since this doesn't cause diarrhoea.

I would imagine that most of the people mass buying the stuff are probably doing the same as that American bloke and trying to create shortages so that they can resell it themselves at a higher price. And that did ought to be cracked down on harshly.

Re: Look at the super markets.

Well, that one is arguable actually.

Government: If you get infected you have to stay at home for 2 weeks. Do not leave your home.

Supermarkets: Btw; we can't do home deliveries to everybody; we don't have capacity.

One can't be too surprised that most of the population are busily trying to lay in 2 weeks worth of food at home; they've been told to do it!

If people were told that they could register as self isolating and the number of people at the address and they'd have care boxes delivered twice a week with food etc then you wouldn't have any panic buying, would you?

Re: For furniture...

Any store that stocks it normally that nobody shops at.

Around out area that's B&M, which has like most other supermarkets parked entire pallet loads of stuff anywhere it will fit. Unlike other supermarkets, they don't have any serious numbers of visitors because (almost) nobody habitually shops there.

Re: Delays

I needed one laptop for the managing partner this week who had previously said he'd never work from home and changed his mind based on recent events.

Any low and almost all mid grade equipment was sold out as of the start of our telephone call. By the end of it my supplier candidly told me that the last of the mid grade software had just gone to being unavailable, and stock was dropping on the more expensive laptops like a rock.

I ended up with a Lenova laptop which does the job perfectly well, but doesn't match the rest of the company fleet of laptops.

Re: and desks and chairs at IKEA

Well, Ikea can't complain about that.

Hopefully the huge spike in demand will even out the drop following it.

I think your too addicted to hollywood films.

Who'd take the job? They would have a limited ability to deliver, have very severe risks involved both during and after the operation (if they got caught, they'd probably never see daylight again as an example would be made of them to discourage any re-occurrence) and the "blow back" would be on a scale last seen in the Trent Affair last time America tried this in 1861. ie, major diplomatic crisis and if they did manage to kidnap somebody the extradition of everybody involved would be demanded and probably granted to preserve international relations.

And if they didn't? Well, best never deploy abroad anywhere again ever in case there was an "accidental" friendly fire incident.

There are more than a few cases of US Bounty Hunters going into Canada, Mexico, Germany, UK and kidnapping the suspect(s) to successfully bring them back to the USA.

Great. Produce an actual EXAMPLE of this happening then.

*insert sound of crickets chirping*

Re: That $11,000 valve story

In the UK i'd just tell them that i'd be filing a defense of "necessity" on the basis that they couldn't supply it, and it was required to save (ten and counting) lives and that the decision would be made by a jury.

Anybody with any sense would quietly let it lie at that.

If you can prove your statements as to how incompetently your criminal justice system is run then that can be used in Europe to prove that somebody won't receive a fair trial, and shouldn't be extradited. Please be our guests.

And private bounty hunters won't come with "guns blazing" to almost anywhere other than the US, since the entire civilised world prohibits carrying firearms without good cause.

From our point of view "private bounty hunters" are also known as "illegally armed vigilantes trying to kidnap people", because that's not a thing outside the US. It's also not a good reason to have a firearm. In other words, they wouldn't be allowed to enter with weapons.

If they entered without weapons and then tried to break in to somebodies house to "arrest" them then they'd be liable to arrest for (without limitation) a breach of the peace, unlawful threats, breaking and entering, unlawful arrest and kidnapping, and frankly they'd stand zero chance of getting the person out of the country even if they did manage to kidnap them since the first question that'd be asked at the aircraft would be "so, where's the extradition warrant?", and i'll let you figure out what happens when they figure out that it's an unlawful kidnap attempt.

If you want somebody from another country then you stick in an extradition request, and our police arrest them, they go before our courts to confirm there is a case to answer and then we stick them on a plane (if there are any flying) to the US.

Re: Netscape is dead, long live Chrome

Chrome came along 3 years after Firefox's competition forced Microsoft to start developing IE again, having declared that IE6 was the pinnacle of browser development.

While I may have moved to a different browser these days, i'm only able to do so because Firefox won the second browser wars and introduced competition and choice for web browsers.

Re: This jumped out:

Sounds that the price differences are likely to be due to the company's policy rather than more onerous EU regulations.

Possibly, but if we end up with a less restrictive trade deal with the USA then said policy won't long survive people buying at a low price and importing to the UK and making a more modest profit reselling it at below the market rate.

Re: What about updates

I'd really like mandatory security updates for 10 years applied to any embedded software.

Whereas personally, i'd like a mandatory ban on connecting things to the internet that don't need to be connected.

And my definition of needs to be connected does not include devices such as freezers, fridges, toasters, kettles, lightbulbs, e t c .

Re: Hang on a minute there

Just wrapping them in clingfilm would be fine with me.

The marketing people would scream blue murder of course, since you'd then be able to see what your buying instead of the lovely picture (not to actual scale) on the box.

The only threat that comes to mind for this entire class of threats only actually applies to vendors like Amazon where you could potentially hire a VM on a stolen credit card and then do an exploit on your VM which allows you to compromise data from another customer's VM.

This is however probably not still a particularly useful form of attack compared to the well known Intel issues, and of course if your a normal system with servers on site on your own hardware then of course your utterly unaffected anyway since your not going to hire out a VM to a hacker.

Re: Digging the dirt

After the quite well known anti trust case I think people just assume that most attempted hit jobs on AMD come from their competition.

My view when first reading about Spectre and fellow exploit classes is that they are deadly serious if you are running a virtualised enviroment and have other tenants that you don't trust running on the same physical hardware as you. eg, cloud services hosting VM's. It's obviously a really, really serious issue for people like Amazon who have a bazillion instances spun up each owned by different people who can potentially use software issues to compromise other VM's.

When it comes to your own internal network though it's much less of a concern since by the time somebody has breached security enough to run untrusted code that's not signed (which would be blocked by normal security measures) then the possibility of an exploit that might expose things is less worrying than the fact they could be running a keylogger (if a desktop) or uploading the contents of the server.

Re: Light the fire

This sounds like almost exactly the design I did on mine, except that my steering was pretty gucci; I made mine from a pram and attached the pram handles to each end of the cross axle, which came to about the right place for the steering to sit on your lap and be pushed from side to side.

Cornering wasn't great, and by brakes were wooden pivot levers that pushed the parking breaks on the pram into position. This had two serious problems. Firstly, while probably a bit better than yours, the brakes were crap and were only used in emergencies or on very shallow hills. Secondly, if single crewed on the gocart you you could only activate them by letting go of the steering.

We didn't dare use it on any serious hills, and never exceeded something like 20mph. Even at that young age, we took one look at the more serious hills available and went "uh, no". We never needed somebody to tell us not to do something very stupid, we just learned from the cuts and scrapes doing mildly stupid things and acquired the requisite sense of caution.

Now, imagine attaching a concorde engine to the back? :D

And um, yes. I'll let somebody else fly drive it.

Re: Light the fire

Screw paper. Who here made gocarts out of scrap in their childhood before computer games came along and robbed youth or time misspent doing things you probably shouldn't have been doing?

All that's needed is some basic gocart style steering to add to that cart and that'd make an epic gocart if attached to fuel, oil and the requisite starting and throttle bits to light it off. It'd be interesting to see how long it took to get back to the office by road. Or um, by the direct route through every intervening obstacle.

Re: GDPR

GDPR will be one of the first things to go.

Technically speaking, the GDPR has never had any legal effect in the UK because it's a foreign law and the 1689 english bill of rights says that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate has any jurisdiction, power, superiority, preeminence or authoritiy (ecclesiasticall or spiritual) within this Realme, so all EU legislation comes before parliment and gets signed off as a UK law to work around this.

In the case of the GDPR, it was implemented as the Data Protection Act 2018, so it's actually a UK law that in many areas goes further than the minimum requirements in the GDPR.

And in any case, I don't think there is any serious clamour to get it revoked. Business always wants certainty and stability, and doesn't want to deal with cost of implementing new rules so certainly lots of companies didn't want a bit of legislation that required everybody in the business receive training and that every company in the country had to put new stuff in place and argued against certain aspects of it. (for instance; allowing companies to ask people to contact a compliance department for a SAR rather than being able to ask anybody including the office junior who may not have understood the significance of the request)

But once all of that is done then it's done and we'd really rather not change it at all, because having implemented it then any changes are additional costs which nobody actually wants.