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* Posts by Arweet

11 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2010

ACS:Law's mocking of 4chan could cost it £500k

Arweet
Grenade

Plain text Excel attachments over unencrypted email.

Yep, seen that before, in places where I could not believe my eyes.

The problem is the management culture. Something is deemed a negligible risk simply because it has never happened before. A potentially fatal assumption.

Now, that a small law firm has trouble keeping up with new technologies doesn't surprise me.

That a telecommunications giant fails to grasp even the very basics of secure communication, however, is inexcusable.

Somebody must be sacked over this, otherwise this culture won't change, and the next data disaster will make this one look harmless.

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How extreme is your pr0n? Depends on your lawyer

Arweet
Big Brother

I don't owe an explanation

for the picture of a tiger prawn on my mobile. Not to the police, not to a judge, not to society. How it got there, how long it stayed there, what I use it for, or what I don't use it for, is irrelevant because it should be my right to own pictures of tiger prawns, regardless of what people may or may not do with them. A nation that does not recognize this most basic of freedoms cannot call itself civilised.

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Apple, Google, NASA, and the Rainbow connection

Arweet

Does it have a sauna?

Otherwise I'm not joining.

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3D films fall flat

Arweet

Novelty?

3D cinema has been around for 50 years. Every decade or so there is a 3D hype, and of course the so called novelty wears off quickly.

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UAE sees security threat in BlackBerrys

Arweet

VPN is routinely used by a large number of business travellers

Also on other devices; also in UAE.

So what's all the fuss about?

Or did I miss something?

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UK.gov slams Facebook over Moat fan clubs

Arweet

Cameron, please don't feed the trolls

Cameron, you don't get how the web works.

People who show support for Raoul on Facebook aren't doing it because they are *really* fans of Raoul.

Primarily, they are doing it to seek attention.

And to provoke exaclty the kind of outraged reaction displayed by you.

All that you are have achieved is that even more people will join the fanclub now that they've read about this in the news.

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Futurologist warns of malevolent dust menace

Arweet

Sounds like those futurologists...

have been snorting too much modafinil.

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Reverse engineer extracts Skype crypto secret recipe

Arweet

Yawn

If I wanted to communicate securely, I wouldn't use Skype anyhow. There are a number of open source voip programs that implement strong and well-documented encryption, if that is what you need.

At any rate, Skype still provides better security than a landline phone. And I can't remember anyone complaining about those being eavesdropped.

So what's all the fuss about?

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Arweet

Re: Camouflage is to armour

Camouflage is to armour what steganography is to cryptography.

The kind of obscurity that Skype is relying on has nothing to do with steganography though.

What they are doing is more like bluffing the enemy with cardboard soldier silhouettes. Or rather, multiple enemies. It's still better than nothing at all, but it's a very shaky tactic to rely on.

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Child protection campaigners claim hollow victory over Facebook

Arweet

hurray! the world is saved!

Parents all over the UK can finally sleep at night.

Because now there is the Faceboock-Predator-Hysteria-Button (TM)

Their children can now simply click away online dangers.

And the parents are absolved of the burden of learning how all that fancy schmansy Facebook technology works, and of the responsibility to educate their childen about basic internet skills.

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P2P judge trims student's fine by 90 per cent

Arweet

Street Performance

In the information age, if you make music publicly available a digital format, it's basically the modern equivalent of street performance.

The RIAA is like a gang 20 of thugs hired by a street perfomer who round up and demand payment of $5 by any passer-by who stops to listen, even for 3 seconds, or else they get their teeth knocked out.

It's a crowded street corner of course and most of the passers-by still slip through the thugs' net. A few people who stop genuinely feel obliged to throw money into the hat after they enjoyed the perfomance. But many do so even if they didn't enjoy the performance, because they fear the thugs who are lurking around. The more youthful and street-wise among the passers-by are usually agile enough to outrun the thugs.

Every now and then the thugs will pick out a random spectator from the crowd, extort $1000, and then beat him uncoscious in front of everybody to set an example. Apart from scattering the crowd of spectators this doesn't have much of the desired effect.

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