Posts by fatchap

Pounding

The point is that pounding Afgan villages is not the tactic that is likely to work when fighting a counter insurgency battle.

What you need is very accurate delivery of smallish payloads to take out targets that can not be destroyed by small arms or portable munitions. Hence Hellfires are currently the best we have.

remote wipe

Just to be clear the remote wipe on an iphone only works when it is on a network and has a valid signal. If you have already had your telco disable the SIM and block the IMEI you can not wipe it. Equally if it is out of network range (perhaps in a Faraday bag?) the remote wipe wont work either.

The BB on the other had can be configured to wipe after a number of unsuccessful login attempts.

Check out Jonathan Zdziarski for more info on flaws with iphone's security.

You are right about the certification steps, one other thing to note is that the CESG guidance also includes configuration guidelines for the server to force certain parameters on to the devices.

Shuffle?

Even better would be really small phone with no screen or buttons that would just dial a small selection of contacts at random.

Never?

I think that your definition of never may need revising! Surely the Victorians had some issues with it.

DPA

There is a specific exlusion to the DPA for criminal investigations so this complies with it no questions.

No

The obvious way is to identify areas where the vote is close and then exploit the weak process controls to stuff the ballot / cast more votes for your candidate.

Roundhouse-kick

Chuck Norris naturally.

Data Controller?

Surely he must be the data controller and so be getting ready to write a cheque to the ICO for £500,000

Digital Ecconomy Bull

In fact due to the recent legislation they have to keep it and let a copyright holder know about it.

Why?

Why would it matter who employed the progammers?

If you have weak assurance controls over the validity of the code you use the risk of getting attacked and defrauded is high no matter whether they are good ol'boys from the bank or code cutters in India.

DRM

When it comes to copyright protection I mainly look for a game that does not punish me for paying good money for it. Especially a game that does not need me to be constantly connected to the internet during play and dumps me out if my connection stutters.

Strength in depth

The normal reason is that IF someone does manage to guess your password (or read it over your sholder, or install a key-logger, or just replay the content of the traffic etc.) they will only have access to your account for the life of that password. Once you change it they will have to go through the same process to access your account.

Pretty straight-forward reason really.

Now you are certain

Now you KNOW that the DECT phone is insecure and that badies could intercept the info. Previously you just hoped that it was secure and that nobody knew how to intercept the info.

Now you know not to transmit credit cards over it or discuss things that you could not bear to have intercepted.

Now you are living in light of the knowledge of the risks you are taking and not in the darkness of ignorance.

Well yes, but but

The point is the earth's climate has always has a fluctuating temperature. If you take the stasitical analyisis that produces the hockey stick away you end up with something that looks like the normal fluctuations. It might be going slowly up now, but there is nothing in these figures to tell us that this will continue and not start to dip in the near future.

The theory is that this slow rise is anthrogenic due to increased "greenhouse" gases but without the hockey stick the correlation between rise in temperature and rise in level of GH gases disappears. This surely casts doubts on the validity of that theory.

Now as to whether the oil will run out (and of course it will), that is a separate arguement. We have a finite resource, what will be do when we have no more of it? You are correct we should do something about that, like increasing paper use rather than plastic, like increasing nuclear power and like reducing use. None of that has anything to do with whether we are warmer now than we were 5000 years ago.

Me to

It triggered another banks alarms for me. ISACA must be dodgy!

TV License

Surely if it can pick up live iPlayer content it would need a TV license? It would be receiving the pictures at the same time as broadcast signals and so would fit the definition of a TV receiver.

Not that simple

"How about just designing simple systems that do the specified job[?]"

Mainly because the job is horrifically complicated. Try designing a simple system to manage the records of very patient in the NHS or calculate and pay the correct amount of benefit for every person in the UK eligble or manage the logistics of the British Armed Forces.

The scale of most government projects is massive and the requirements change more rapidly than the development cycle. The real issue is to simplify the specifications by simplifying legislation and what governement does, but that would not suit Nu Labour.