What's sauce for the goose...
After they had been forced to implement technology for censorship, it is hardly surprising that they use it for their own purposes. This is the same argument as Apple's "back door".
365 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2009
Clicking on some recent Radio 4 programmes, I get "This content cannot be played in our HTML5 Player - Download Flash Player now" (under Ubuntu/Firefox with various blockers like AdBlock, NoScript, Ghostery but no Flash).
RadioTray only streams, it doesn't appear to play archived programmes. It doesn't come pre-configured with BBC Radio and it stops playing after a couples of minutes.
No, I don't mean that literally.
During the Cold War, we had the Communist "Control Economy" to point at as an object lesson in how not to run an economy or a society. Without it, the victorious Capitalist system has become more and more of a Control Economy, in which only the CEOs of huge companies are allowed to say how things should be done and ordinary people just have to do as they are told.
The reason why The Free Market and Democracy, and indeed Evolution by Natural Selection, work is that many minds are better than one.
However the original concept of the web is now so seriously broken and I can't see how it can be fixed.
and the rest of the post - my thoughts entirely.
I want a "browser" that treats every incoming byte as possible malware/spyware, shows me the pure information content and sends nothing back to the source.
The reason why banks refund fraudulent payments is that it draws attention away from the fact that the system is fundamentally moronic in its design and cannot possibly be secure.
In a secure system, customers would initiate payments (cash or BACS) instead of giving payees the authority to take money off them (16-digit numbers, Direct Debit or, craziest of all, "contactless").
You can be 2 or 3 miles outside a major town like Reading in the "high tech" Thames Valley, an area that by any comparable international standard is densely populated, and still get shit broadband speeds.
You can be 2 or 3 miles outside a major town like Stratford in the "high tech" Lea Valley (in London Transport Zone 3), an area that by any comparable international standard is very densely populated, and still get shit broadband speeds (4 megabits/sec).
The "last 8%" that is mentioned elsewhere is familiar. In the early 1990s the Stratford exchange (code 555 to the amusement of Americans) was in the "last 8%" of mechanical Strowger exchanges.
They now have sufficiently many members that it can be used to compile a shortlist of people to contact by email to do a job.
They do verify whether the reviews come from customers, though they have not yet told me what penalty they intend to impose on a trader who sent in one purportedly from me.
Of course there is suppression of negative reviews - by the customers themselves. Was this mediocre job bad enough to warrant a complaint or do I just want to get on with my life?
But it's much better than when we only had the Y*ll*w P*g*s.
HP will this year refresh BIOSphere, a self-healing BIOS tool that can spot when someone's tried a BIOS-level hack and return things to your pre-determined configurations before reboot.
Ah yes, that useful "feature" that considers my Linux installation to be a "broken" PC and offers to "repair" it back to M$, but fortunately gives up after a minute or two of "preparation".
I read about it at www.physicsworld.com and picked up the paper from journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102 with no paywall. (And that's my first use of links in El Reg.)
The problem with phishing emails is not that they make any serious effort to look like banks - often they're illiterate - but the lengths banks go to to make their emails look like phishing.
The article doesn't say how gmail recognises whether an email is genuine, but the obvious tool is SPF. Unfortunately, banks and utilities like to send their emails via third parties such as messagelabs.com, without bothering to declare the fact in their SPF records.
Then there's their liking for registering loads of domain names, not just bank.co.uk but bankonline.co.uk, thebank.co.uk, mybank.co.uk and so on.
Linux servers power pretty much most of the Internet
I know that, which is why I was careful to say "desktop".
I would guess that servers and websites (at least their hosting companies) are on the whole run by more competent people and have fewer frilly "apps" running on them than desktops.
My point was that if Ubuntu becomes popular on phones it will attract malware and spyware, which would then have its way clear to my desktop.
I am glad that Canonical is trying to break the Apple/Google duopoly. Running Ubuntu might conceivably persuade me to buy a smartphone. However, my worry is this: Linux desktop users like me have so far avoided malware because (the security model is better and) we have been too small a part of the market to be worth the notice of criminals. This is not so for Android. If Ubuntu is successful in the mobile market then the malware that it attracts will be compatible with desktops, servers and websites and so spread to them.
I have been a (Debian/Ubuntu) user of Linux for 20 odd years (and a user of other Unix variants for 10 before that), but I don't feel the "vice-like grip" of Red Hat. Please explain. I have never voluntarily used Microsoft, but I do feel their "vice-like grip" because I am forced to buy their OS with my computers and possibly surrender my consumer rights when I remove it and install my own choice of OS.
Is this a scare story put out by M$ to frighten people into not disabling "secure boot" and so not installing Linux?
If the Linux installation in question is being used for some industrial purpose then there will be physical ways of preventing access to it.
If it's a laptop then for someone to be able to do this they have probably stolen the machine first. In this case the owner has bigger things to worry about, the thief will probably give up once he sees that it doesn't run M$ and the operating system is not going to be able to defend itself anyway.
So the protection is (1) only buy a laptop that is only as powerful (expensive) as you actually need, (2) encrypt your private data and (3) keep it backed up elsewhere.
It's easy for those of us with long experience of using computers and email to mock bureaucrats who make blunders like this. However, the fact that this kind of blunder is easy and common does raise the question of whether IT could actually do something about it. It would be easy for mail programs to refuse to send emails with more than a (configurable) handful of addresses in the To: and CC: lines, at least without querying the use.
by establishing a connection to a remote site you are sending "personal data" across the ocean
No. Sometimes I may choose to visit an American site. Too frequently, when I visit a British site, it calls in some completely gratuitous javascript from Google or some other transatlantic "cloud" or "analytics" site without ever bothering to ask for my consent.
Let's call it Safe Harbor to make it clear where it came from.
Why are all these companies sending my personal data across the ocean?
We have plenty of clouds of our own here in Britain in November!
But I'm certainly glad that I am still a citizen of the EU with the benefit of the Human Rights Act!
I need to do a soft reboot (Ctrl, Alt, Del) to get it to boot into Linux
Regard this minor inconvenience as a protection against theft. A thief will think the machine is broken and leave it behind, or at least be unable to read the stuff on your disk.
When I installed Xubuntu, I completely trashed the M$ on the laptop that I'm using to type this. So when it boots it shows a blue screen with "your computer needs to be repaired". I have to hit ESC, F9 and scroll down to get to the grub startup.
Albigensian.
You'll be senting DPA complaints to every website that you visit.
Whatever the politicians do will be a fudge. What we need is to boycott Silicon Valley and start up similar or preferably superior services in our own countries or continent.
I thought you were about to go in a somewhat different direction
I was. Originally I just thought of the verb "to google" in its sloppy meaning of "to search on a database, but then the activities of the real Google came to mind.
this tech would allow any of us to present one or more fingerprints to the search engine and have it display the owner's anonymized information
I was told yesterday by someone from Peru that that country had recently gone from ponderous bureaucracy to having a system in which you could indeed present your fingerprints and obtain a newly printed passport a few minutes later.
Anyway, what I really had in mind was that this was a back door to getting ID cards with their associated all-seeing databases, in particular for the police to get easy convictions by fishing.
So all of these fingerprints will be copied into police databases, so that lazy PC Plod can sit at his desk and G**gle (there's another horrible thought!) the perpetrator of any misdemeanor, with the risk that some distant unconnected person will be nailed, instead of doing proper detective work.
Why the hell was all this personal data going across the Atlantic in the first place? Europeans (for example El Reg for their lectures) have lazily been using American websites (such as Eventbrite) when it would be easy and entirely in line with the principles of Capitalism for there to be similar sites offering competing services in other countries. We should all take this ECJ judgment as an opportunity. It is time for all sorts of reasons to overthrow the American monopoly of such services. To Hell with Facebook, Google, Amazon and the rest of them!
The handwriting is probably rather tricky to read, but the text looks like pretty simple Latin and a great deal more comprehensible than Norman French or Anglo Saxon would be. That is the reason why people continued to use Latin for important documents up to c1800, after which the Tower of Babel took over. In 800 years' time, when people speak some language whose current roots we now consider to be pidgin, they will no doubt complain that 21st century stuff is written in a dead language called "English".
www.thelatinlibrary.com/magnacarta.html
Excellent article nonetheless
I hope Stuart charged the solicitor at the rate that the solicitor would have charged him for doing something completely elementary. Having recently done probate and conveyancing twice each, it was clear to me that they are money for old rope. However, there is some niggling detail at a level comparable to the questions about computers that are answered for free on numerous websites.
There is a new curriculum for computer science at school, based on an initiative involving universities (especially Birmingham) and various big and small software companies that has been running for several years. I encourage you to take a look and participate.
See www.computingatschool.org.uk
> Lenovo, for example, has written off a substantial amount of stock in Western Europe.
Every word I have read on El Reg about Windows 10 over the past fortnight has made me bl**dy glad that I am a Linux user. There does not seem to have been a single polite comment even from M$'s captive market.
If Lenovo is chucking stuff out because the sheep don't like it, does The Channel have anything to recommend to users of other operating systems?
Better to leave Openreach and Wholesale alone but instead do something about the unfair advantage that BT Retail has because of customer inertia. Retails shoule be sold off in ten bits, with the existing customers allocated according to the last digit of their phone numbers. Then the bits would have to compete with telcos who treat their customers with more respect and are competent in getting faults fixed.
At least the BBC iplayer is delivering sound or video. I complained to (not about) my ISP about my broadband speed and they gave me some testing instructions, in particular to run the BT Wholesale Broadband Performance Test at speedtest.btwholesale.com. This is a crappy program that seems to have been written by some schoolkid and insists that Flash be installed, apparently so that it can show its progress bar, and in the end displays its results in a form that can't be cut-and-pasted back into an email to the ISP. It's all very well refusing to install Flash, permit Javascript, etc, but the Web is increasingly full of this kind of crap programming and some of the stuff is actually essential.