Posts by Adam 52 2010 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
">Microsoft UI guidelines
???
watcha been smoking, man?"
The Microsoft UI guidelines were very good when I read them, back around Windows NT 4 time. Windows 8 and 10, and Server 2014 (especially Server, who on earth wanted a touch screen UI on a server on a different continent?) are obviously a bit weird.
"I don't think the UK will find many countries willing to even trade with it, or negociate with it on any matter of importance, should it not respect this fundamental international treaty."
Theresa May has ensured that most of Europe is a write off anyway (see Lionel Barber's piece in the FT today) with her pandering to the Tory right wing, so our trading partners are going to be Saudi, Australia and the US. None of those is a big believer in the ECHR.
TM even wants to bypass Parliament and be a proper dictator. It is scarily similar to the rise if fascism.
There are lots of answers to that.
The first is that victims have a right not to have someone stick a camera into their grief. If you don't accept that, go away and get some life experience.
Another article on here quotes "never store online what you wouldn't put in the newspaper" or words to that effect. You will lose loads of evidence if cameras are on full time, because people will just clam up.
And then there's the basic human rights. A PC has the right to go to the toilet without it being filmed and viewed by their boss.
Oh, and cameras are unbiased evidence? You don't really believe that do you? Centuries of camera trickery and Hollywood films should convince you otherwise.
Plus you've ignored the other point - anything recorded can be called as evidence, so you can't delete it. And if everything is recorded everything is disclosure, so every single case is going to take multiple times the amount of case preparation. Every interview with the victim, every interview with the witnesses all will have to be edited and anonymised.
Cameras on when outside by default, yes. But you need to leave the option to turn them off. If you want, add in a requirement to justify to control room why.
And factor in a minute or two to response times to detach camera from stab vest and attach to jacket every time an officer enters or leaves a building.
I'll get this in now - these will break just like any other piece of electronics that gets routinely smashed about and soaked in fluids. In 3 years most of the batteries will be on their last legs. You will see missing footage and it likely won't be due to any malicious intent.
What El Reg says:
"research has suggested that when the police are allowed to choose when to begin recording, they are more likely to be assaulted, and the number of incidents involving the use of force actually rises"
What the research actually says:
"Our multisite randomized controlled trial reported that police body-worn cameras (BWCs) had, on average, no effect on recorded incidents of police use of force"
OK, down vote magnet coming...
Some situations are best not filmed. Taking a sample from a rape victim. Picking up the servered head from a motorbike crash. Delivering a death message. Sitting in the paperwork office for 7 hours. Going to the toilet.
Some situations will lead to a different outcome when filmed. Asking the wife if her husband beats her.
Some situations are defused by turning a camera on. The IT worker who's had too many Stella and is kicking off in the pub.
All of the Police officers I know welcome the cameras, their only concern is losing hours of their day to slow IT. Imagine having to edit your entire day on a Windows 2000 era PC (one between seven) and submit evidence (all with handwritten statements in duplicate) for every single job. It would be impractical, and an easy way for a defendant to launch a denial of service attack on the Police if cameras were on full-time.
To copy Yes Prime Minister, when are you going to attack the jammer and start a shooting war? As they jam a couple of fishing boats? As they jam Al Jazeera? As they block cell phones in Syria? As they block comms to your not-really-there surveillance drone?
No? So when are you going to attack short of an all-time,out world war?
Really? I know that in theory a JVM can run on a Psion Organiser in 8MB of RAM, it's just that every real-world Java program I've ever encountered starts by grabbing 1GB and eventually consumes all the physical memory on whatever it's running on and then carries on until the thrashing makes machine unusable and someone kill -9s it.
I also, partially tongue-in-cheek blame Java from the one service, one VM culture that's grown up. If it wasn't for every JVM release being subtly incompatible with the previous one we could run multiple services on one operating system (until they compete for RAM), and then nobody would have needed to invent Docker or Solaris Zones. If you want to make Java lightweight, fix the overhead of needing an entire operating system stack to isolate it from everything else on the host.
The comment on Section 3 is interesting; the US routinely uses techniques that are banned in Europe as incompatible with human rights - ankle chains and sleep deprivation, for example.
But the judge's thinking is typified by this quote (she says this twice):
"Millions of dollars’ worth of damage was caused"
Which is a completely evidence free assertion that she's happy to take a face value.
Like the House of Lords famously said about boxing, these extraditions to the US are objectively illegal (no right to a fair trial, inadequate human rights) but they continue to be legal because they always have been.
"You need to do the analysis instead of relying on gut feelings and doubt"
I have. For both a £200M turnover SME and a £5BN turnover FTSE 100. In both cases public cloud worked out cheaper.
The real killer is people and opportunity cost. You need huge numbers of people to keep up with the public cloud providers if you want to be anything other than IaaS. Thousands of developers waiting for you to incorporate, for example, Kafka into your stack when they could just be buying Kinesis from AWS is massively expensive.
We had the luxury of already having data centres in Europe, US and Asia with comms between them, if you didn't it'd be even slower and more expensive.
Indeed. It's also not hard to grow food if you have access to land. Or make cloth if you have access to a professional grade loom. Or to make clothes if you have access to cloth and a needle and thread.
Most of us choose not to and those that do choose self-sufficiency usually have to form a cooperative to make it work (so aren't really self-sufficient).
If you have a drought then just you will starve. If you source from multiple farmers then you can survive famine. Same with the cloud; use one region at risk, use multiple suppliers for reliability.
I should have read the link first... Should know better than to trust El Reg reporting...
He waded into the middle of an arrest without asking first. When told to piss off he did, and then came back. When they asked him for proof he really was a clinician he got all bolshy, and then they get aggressive.
That makes much more sense.
At first glance the odds are against him. 4 vs 1 is going to make it tricky to get over the balance of probabilities line unless there's independent evidence, which the state has much greater powers of access to than a private citizen.
There are plenty of people with a grudge willing to lie about the Police so he could get lots of witnesses but that plays both ways.
Gaps in procedure are going to be an approach to cast doubt on the Police story. Usually known as "getting off on a technicality".
"undermine WADA and the global anti-doping system."
I'd say WADA has done that for itself. There's no reason why one person should have access to all that information, so phishing shouldn't have been a viable option in the first place. Encrypt everything for an athlete with one or more keys, and only make those keys available on a need-to-know basis. And then you have to ask why there was no 2FA and no process to prevent this, and why they didn't know it had happened.
After Stepanova's hack they should have predicted this. The Reg commentards did...
"conservative brain with the liberal brain"
I don't understand this. In most political thinking conservatism and liberalism are considered complementary not opposites, involving free enterprise and minimal regulation. Socialism, by contrast, tends to only work by imposing order on people which is illiberal.
David Cameron considered himself a liberal and Tony Blair famously sought his "third way".
The whole thing is a bit smelly. Pick on one bloke, dump the whole thing on him, make criminal charges that, for him, are tenuous at best and then offer a plea bargain.
They should be prosecuting the VW board. That's what Directors are for. But the board will have good lawyers and political connections.
It's a stitch up, and any fair court should refuse to accept.
On the other hand I try to single-step every single line of my code before release. I'm not arrogant enough to think I write perfect code and I've found lots of subtle errors this way.
This used to be a common tactic 15 years ago, when graphical IDEs made it easy, but seems to have fallen out of favour these days.
There used to be a C library/preprocessor that logged every single line as it executed. You'd hate that but it was incredibly useful for finding bugs that couldn't be reproduced. I couldn't find it, so would love a link if anyone's got one.
Going to the Courts is always a lottery; UK (playing a video amounts to "copying"), EU, US (Apple vs, well, everyone and Google books can scan copyright without permission), even Zimbabwe (Mugabe lost today). Maybe not Russia.
Making the ambiguity an EU issue is just silly.
"replicate the behaviour of humans, most of whom never notice emergency vehicles until they are 3 feet from their windscreen"
...and then hit the brakes, slowing to a speed that impedes progress but isn't slow enough to make overtaking easier.
As a public service announcement, your average panda is a small diesel, Ambo a heavily loaded van and Fire is an HGV. None of these accelerates well in the 40 mph to 80 mph range. Please help the driver keep momentum.
Cue some rant about the Met in an X5!
"Given that powers will not be used to actually fight crime"
Do you have any evidence for that statement at all?
Yes, we have about 100 officers to investigate thousands of offences a day but some will get looked at.
"various undesirables (according to your local elite"
That's pretty much the definition of criminal, and if that's your complaint then look towards Parliament, the judiciary and the prosecutors not the Police.
"Citation needed"
You won't get one. Not until there's a death and an inquest, and even then you probably won't because inquest verdicts aren't that detailed. And that's good, the last thing a vulnerable person needs is
random commentards interfering in their life. It's called "privacy".
If you think you live in a world where there are no Internet criminals, well you must be very blinkered.
Try Googling "suicide pact", you think everyone there is innocent?, Nobody posing as a 16 yr old girl for kicks? Then you are too naive.
Or do a volunteer stint for a mental health charity? Just don't think that playing at being a Special gives you any experience, because it doesn't.
You won't, of course, because uninformed opinion on a forum is a much happier place to be than informed, real-world experience. The world is a nasty place. Doesn't mean you should roll over and do whatever the FBI say, but does mean you should listen to what they have to say because they are massively more informed than you.
*One* possible solution to his problem is impossible. There are others - a master key, for example, that are possible but unlikely to survive for long.
There are yet more - multiple keys, one held by each of the branches of government - that might be more practical. Or a real-time key generation and revoke mechanism. Or a hybrid solution where the master key for a person is on hardware in their possession, so the Police need physical access.
There are multiple ways to reach a compromise, if both sides want to have an adult conversation. It sounds like the Reg readership don't want an adult conversation though.
By the way, there was a vulnerable person over the weekend. He's been lured into sending his life savings to some Internet scammers and was in the process of connecting up his car exhaust to the car window when found (the scammers had given him instructions on the best way to get an air tight seal). There is no chance that those scammers will ever be caught, and chances are that eventually they'll be successful in killing off one of their victims.
Law enforcement see issues like this one, and then they see the tech industry going "la la, we don't care". And they get angry, as would you if you'd just seen someone killed and people actively refused to help you find out who did it.
Solving the problem above doesn't involve anyone having my PGP key and doesn't involve mass surveillance, but does involve some way of tracing communications with an effective judicial oversight.
These days, a whole load of "professional" programmers will just cut-and-paste from Stackexchange, so if this takes off then it gives Facebook and easy way out (or an easy way to delay a case until it becomes too expensive for the other side to continue) of any patent troubles.
Facebook's big push to make money is to enter the corporate market. That means national sales offices. Which brings them under the jurisdiction of local data protection offices, even if they weren't already. And of course their European operations are based out of Ireland.
Canada seems to apply it's rules worldwide already.
The problem regulators in both the US and EU face is that IP addresses are close enough to personal identifiers to be used for marketing tracking and nefarious other spying. They want to protect privacy and so have to restrict the sharing. Otherwise the ISP would be free to release the fact that household X has been browsing at Marie Stopes, for example, something liable to provoke the US brand of religious terrorist.
If you use the analogy of IP addresses and postal addresses, imagine if the postal service published all the addresses that commubicate with each other and the dates/times.
Where, in my view, the regulations they go awry is to just have one classification of personal data and just one classification of storage/processing/disclosure.
As someone who has had those conversations with Google and AWS... I can't comment because I'm bound by NDA. As is everyone else with an informed opinion, ergo all opinions here are uninformed.
What I can say is that nobody in their right mind would accept the boilerplate terms that these providers start the negotiations with.
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