Posts by itzman

Re: I've yet to come across an encrypted one.

Well all you are saying is the average level of security on most sites is total pants.

I've written several that are, simply because of certain isues pertaining to those sites that made it possible that entire databases might be stolen by e.g. sysdadmjns responsible for the server infrastructure, or in one case where a portable database was carried around on a ;laptop. In the latter case we split the database from the application using a USB drive so that even if the laptop went AWOL with the encryption keys, the database would not. And vuice versa.

Given that SQL injectins is something that no competent programmer should have left the possibility for, in this case encrypted data clearly would have prevented critical information from becoming public.

Those that have suggested that encryption would not have helped seem to have no idea how a website built over a database actually works, or what sql injection is.

By definition..

Hacking is not 'using the correct credentials;'

I have implemented several websites that store sensitive information, The scripts that allow 'correct credentials' to extract pertinent information do NOT allow global access to all information. Because the strictly limited SQL queries are built into the scripts., And the keys are stored outside the scripts themselves so that even if the scripts are compromised, they cannot be run successfully on another machine against a stolen encrypted database.

In order to extract data from a database encrypted in this way you need all three elements to be accessible - the database, the scripts showing how the keys are used to decrypt it, and the keys themselves.

To get all three you need to root the machine,. SQL injection will not help.

Re: In what way do you assert that excerpt requires

Just because there is a way to access the data, doesn't invalidate encrypting it. I.e. the ability to access your OWN data does not mean you can access everyone elses.

What good encryption does is to ensure that someone who copies the entire database alone cannot get access to reams of data.

However there is a downside to encrypting all of the customer data. SQL queries no longer work on fields that are encrypted.

And if you build the ability to search the encrypted database into the SQL level, then once again you are vulnerable to SQL injection.

Re: encryption doesn't help?

The point is really whether the database itself is compromised, or the code that accesses it.

If the database is compromised but the codebase is secure, then keys in the code are secure, and the database is worthless.

It is even possible to locate the key somewhere else in a hidden file so that even if the code is known, the key is not.

Nothing is secure on a rooted machine, but a lot can be made secure on a machine that is not rooted. But is still hacked.

The point about SQL injection is that it exposes some or all of the tables, not the code base or the machines total file system

Re: Smells funny

years ago I had occasion to trace a keypress from the interrupt service routine that handled it all the way through DOS 2.2

It was several thousand instructions before it appeared to the application.

Some like keyboard mapping, were valid. Others appeared utterly arbitrary and left over from legacy code.

Re: This is why I love the bbc

Not hypocrites, just large and with various bits that dont talk to other bits

Re: Lewis' cognitive dissonance

Broadly speaking,. yes.

NOx is rare in the atmosphere because its highly reactive, and having it in the air is something we are not adapted to.

CO2 exists in small quantities because its not very reactive. Oxygen is reactive, but its always being produced.

Re: How to make your own valid arguments ignored

Greenpeace is led by very cynical men and funded by even more cynical interests.

Don't confuse te real hippies - like Patrick Moore who founded it - with the career environmentalists who are taking the corporate coin to lobby for overpriced monopoly supply of energy.

The Left infiltrated eco politics years ago, and were bought out post 1990 by serious corporate interest.

Eco politics is as corrupt as any other form.

Re: Well DUH! - petrol cars nowadays have catalytic converters.

Well yes they do, but the catalytic converters fitted to cars are not designed to pull nitrogen oxides out. They are deigned to pull out CO and hydrocarbons

Re: re: I still don't understand the irrational fear of nuclear power though.

I dont even understand that since the earth is fundamentally constructed of nuclear waste anyway.

Re: European testing

The statement appears to be a complete straw man.

It is irrelevant who does the testing, as long as the software knows its being tested.

Re: A much better power saving...

Nah, that doesn't stack up either., A modern jet cruising at 20k feet plus is silent on the ground. A train is not.

Its only takeoff power that is the problem near the airport.

Re: Does it add up?

Best acoustic horns are about 110dB at one meter per watt input.

So 100W can produce 130dB at a meter,

In practice most loudspeakers aren't that good, but a good 5KW PA can easily squish out 120-130dB at reasonable range.

And a good overdriven Marshall 100W is up at that level within a couple of meters.

Re: Spin your first sentence, as usual

Odd, because although Anthony watts has hosted many articles on the subject, none are by him that I can see, and most confirm that it is a valid problem

http://wattsupwiththat.com/tag/urban-heat-island/

So I'd be very interested in a link to the article that you mention.

If it exists at all.

Re: Unsurpringly...

Apparently glaciers advance and retreat in multidecadal timescales and always have done.

Many retreating glaciers reveal a landscape covered in old tree stumps and human artefacts.

What irks is the leaping on any and every change to 'prove global warming' when the summation of the data actually seems to say 'well stuff changes and always has done, irrespective of a bit of coal burning'

Evidence of warming is not evidence of AGW.

Or as a remarkably less intelligent than I thought person said to me 'Of course AGW is real, I've seen ice melting'

Re: record temperatures every year, who said it stopped and why the biased article title?

Of course one uses a thermometer.

Carefully sited at an airport in direct line of the apron where the big jets rev up.

How else are you gonna get 'global warming'

Without invoking a single tree ring from an obscure tree found only in outer mongolia.

Or measuring the intake water of ship engines travelling in shipping lanes behind other ships..

Re: Monopolies and scarce necessary resource markets are not free markets

I think you are right. Addicts are if not undeterred, certainly unable to abandon habits.

After oil and legal pharmaceuticals, aided by anti-drug legislation, illicit drugs are the worlds third biggest industry, I believe.

Employing millions and generating huge (largely untaxed) profits.

Re: But new -GOOD- products can be priced high

Nowadays it would probably be online, or I would ask on line

Monopolies and scarce necessary resource markets are not free markets

And that's where classical economics doesn't hold sway.

If the government nationalised the air we breathe and taxed us for breathing till the pips squeaked, the higher the tax the more the income until people start to commit suicide. It is somewhat that way with road fuel. There is an irreducible minimum of it that we need to get around and have a life at all. Below that high taxation will struggle to push us.

People need a house and will pay whatever they have to to obtain one.

These markets are characterised by the lack of discretionary choice.

In terms of consumer products we have HUGE discretionary choice.

Re: But new -GOOD- products can be priced high

I once bought a £55 book for one line alone.

It was an immensely complex instruction whose purpose was to set up a printer attached to a parallel port on a SUN Sparc station.

Since I had already wasted two days of time valued at at least £500 a day trying to get this to happen, £55 tax deductible was cheap at the price.

And yes, it worked!

Re:a different conclusion reached by an economist starting from a different viewpoint.

Of course. Deductive logic always starts from an assumption, and thereby in the end all logic that applies to the real world is inductive.

I aksed a socialist what he means by the term. "I think its all to do with how society treats its weakest members".

"Oh?" I queried. "Isn't that a bit unfair? Why not its strongest members, or the ones with red hair and perfect teeth?"

Re: But without unions, taxes, controls...

The irony is that who in the end are those massive corporations going to sell to, if there are no affluent classes to act as a market for their goods?

Yes, its possible to concieve of techno based neo feudalism, of a really nasty sort - more perhaps like Tsarist Russia or Communist Russia, where all the production is co-opted to make a few people very comfortable, and the rest just die.

But that's why we have a democracy.

Re: Not so much public ownership but public wealth creation

One wonders how the internet - never nationalised and never in public ownership, managed to bring IP data packets to everyone?

Its the myth that only centralised command and control can actually generate standards.

That is, pardon me, utter codswallop. People adhere to standards because that way they make more profits. In the end local grids would have adhere to common standards because that way the same electrical appliances could be sold. We have, worldwide, without a world government, broadly two electrical standards at the domestic level - 110V 60Hz and 230V 50Hz, plus minus.

Likewise train lines are standard world wide.

DVDS are standard, world wide, regional codes and DRM aside. Globalisation drives standards, not world government.

Re: how does a western services-based capitalist society survive..

...in a situation with a global oversupply of labour and improving skill sets up in Asia and Africa?"

By going massively hi-tech. And having the arms to defend its wealth against those who would seek to take it from them.

De Gaulle built the French Nuclear industry largely on the basis that he didn't want to be dictated to by OPEC.

If you want a nation to survive and prosper when global forces are turbulent, you isolate it, and make it as self sufficient as possible.

And throw money at real education, as opposed to political indoctrination, to assist the best and brightest to construct things that will make use of low resources and be very effective,

In that process sadly, the not so best and not so brightest will have to accept that they sadly didn't get the best education, and there are not necessarily the top jobs available.

However there are always the arts...and humanities, and so on.

As the old Jewish joke goes :

"This is my eldest son, and we are so proud, he is the finest concert pianist of the decade.

And this is my daughter. She is a writer and her books are acclaimed everywhere.

This is my youngest son. Sadly he is only a tailor.

But he feeds the whole family"

Re: A bit simplistic

The model that I find most attractive is that an economy is essentially a complex dynamic system and a very non linear one at that. Any attempt to 'control' it is useless as the only way to do that is to damp down its ability to respond to almost anything, so command and control economies are OK if nothing changes, but will be inefficient in times of rapid (technological?) growth.

Laissez faire capitalism doesn't attempt to control, it just follows.

And that may ultimately be the least worst of all approaches. In the absence of an external moral standard, one can only judge attempts to control economies on the moral standards of those who have imposed them. That is, for example, did the application of communism result in the sort of world those that espoused its principles wanted? I would say not.

In the UK 15 years of Labour has resulted in a less, not more, equal society.

And there I find myself poised on the horns of a dilemma. Those that espouse the sort of Corbynist policies are all good well meaning people for the most part: They see politics as a means of expressing ideals about the nation state, and ideals about human progress that are arguably laudable.

Those that decry them, do so on the grounds that such an idealistic approach is not only massively implausible, but, if implemented, would lead to in many cases the reverse of the 'ideal' solution.

We have in effect a battlefield between idealism and pragmatism in terms of the political map, and that strikes at the very heart of the matter, which is I believe expressed very simply: What, in the final analysis, is the point of government at all?

To the Left it would seem to be a moral instrument tasked with presenting a hope filled picture of human endeavour. To the pragmatic right, it is merely a necessary evil that should impinge upon the freedom of the individual only so far as to ensure some form of social stability and cohesion.

Pragmatists are more humble: They do not presume to know what the fate of Man should be, nor seek to dictate its terms. Merely that men do not routinely slaughter each other, steal from each other, and obey the minimal set of public codes that seem reasonable to the majority.

To me the flaw in the Left's model is that if people do not willingly follow its tenets, they insist on enforcing them, by diktat, legislation or deep moralising. In so doing they oppress the very class they claim to represent, because they 'know better' than the people themselves 'what is good for them'.

If we, the people , do not know what is good for us, why on earth do we have a vote at all?

And indeed, we can see that where Leftish power structures really rule, that democratic right becomes an irrelevance and a nuisance. As the standing joke goes:

"Democracy means one man, one vote. And I am that man" (attributed to a fictitious Robert Mugabe).

What ultimately do we expect a government to deliver in economic terms, and what ultimately is its scope?

The Assumptive Close of the Left has been to skip over the question of whether or not it is a valid thing for a government to engage in social and economic engineering at all, to move the agenda to the exact means by which it shall do it.

It may be time to challenge that assumption, because in times of rapid change and deep political instability and economic fragility, it is possible that government's role must needs change to simply ensure political stability at almost any price, or risk being swept aside by forces who have no intention of preserving social order, freedom or democracy, but imply using force of arms or naked economic power to dominate for the narrow interests of a very few.

Finally, in the context of economics, the real correlation of 20th century growth has been one single fact alone. Petroleum.

Lightweight independent machines to replace the sweat of the working man's brow (or his horse) , running on dirt cheap fuel, allowed a complete and total transformation of production and transport (and war)..

Electricity generation followed by cost reducing the application of that fuel. The devastating combination of fossil fuel and electrical energy means that anywhere any time you have a power source to do the 'heavy lifting' at far far less cost than human energy. Toss in computer technology and robotics, and that's another layer of white collar work that simply vanishes. Add expert systems to THAT and good bye to many skilled jobs as well - how much of e.g. general practice of doctors is matching a reported set of symptoms to an internalised database of disease knowledge and producing a diagnosis and a treatment plan? How hard is it to make a driverless train or car that is safer than a human driven one?

No, the reality of the 20th century was nothing to do with politics, or economic theory, and everything to do with the rapid exploitation of technology, especially power technology, and post WWII the IT revolution.

Nobody intended it to happen, no one designed it on ideological grounds: It happened because it could.

Ex of the sort of totalitarian systems that would e.g. Ban the Wheel in a hugely Luddite system that would 'restore the dignity of human labour' and keep peasants in their place forever we are stuck with a population level that can not be sustained without the application of massive amounts of energy and highly developed technology.

All those urban Greens who dream longingly of windmills and solar panels would be dead within a week if that was all we had to rely upon.

And that is the irony of politics. The urge to achieve idealised solutions, and the transformation of politics into a battlefield of morally inspired ideals, is ultimately the gross decadence of the West. Before you can go chasing ideals, first of all you need a society and infrastructure that actually works well enough to keep its population alive. And defend it from those who see it as nothing more than a morally decayed occupier of a bit of real estate that would be highly welcome to them.

Economic growth is more or less a symptom that you have such a system in place. Economic growth relies on a very few things, and none of them are ideals.

It relies on a sufficient resource base to draw upon, and sufficiently sophisticated population to understand and maintain the system that exploits those resources and just enough political authority to ensure that the fruits of that exploitation are distributed sufficiently to avoid major political instability, or, failing that, a sufficiently cynical 'peacekeeping' force that divides the world into those that shall have, and those that shall not, on pain of death.

Economics and economic theory is almost irrelevant in that picture. As are emotional ideals.

And the philosophy of Marxism, that drives the left, is almost utterly irrelevant in a world in which there are no human workers, only machines.