
It's precisely because they won't use Huawei that they had the backdoored infrastructure.
1976 posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
There was a story floating around in the 1970s about a consignment of luminous watches that was due to be disposed of at Windscale/Sellafield, before someone pointed out that the radiation levels were higher than they could legally handle. They had to be sent to Aldermaston instead.
Around that time my schoolboy self inherited a luminous watch from my grandfather. On dark nights, it could be the brightest thing around, and occasionally served as a torch on the country lanes where for a mad year or two I used to jog.
Have you read the actual Amazon figures? I haven't: I've only read the story here.
El Reg clearly call the number a profit. The one use of the words "net income" is very loose, and I wouldn't read anything into it unless I had some external reason to suppose it was not in fact a profit as reported.
As for investing sufficient to avoid tax, I've done that myself for quite a few years. Not on Amazon's scale of course, but I've had some big tax rebates (the biggest in five figures UK£) and my tax-free dividend income roughly speaking pays the rent.
I'm not an accountant, but I thought I had some idea of the definition of profit. Isn't it basically the difference between income and expenditure? The latter includes investment, so a reported profit of $11.2bn would be after accounting for investment.
Who is being misleading here?
... not to mention the kneejerk reaction seen here that Amazon should be funding Trump.
What the tax-efficient multinationals have shown is that corporation tax is not fit for purpose. Governments are making noise about it and discussing idiocies, but at the same time they're also (more quietly) Doing Something. Here in Blighty that's taken the form of reducing corporation tax while introducing new taxes on dividends instead. Time will tell how that turns out.
Seems to me that what is at issue here is that the liberal elite are getting all huffed up that somebody other than their political organisations might be able to influence.
Agreed, this is democratisation they're worrying about. Echoes of the Establishment reaction to Gutenberg, and many other historic events.
But I'm not convinced by your describing the likes of Rupert Murdoch as a "Liberal" elite!
Must've been a cray for help?
Sorry. Like other commentards, I'm sure I've read this story at on-call (or maybe who-me) too recently before. Mine's the one with ... oh, they all are.
Edit to add: Here's a much more dramatic rendition.
Bugs can lurk.
But would you try to slip something deliberate in to an open codebase where every commit goes out immediately to a bunch of active developers, as well as of course being on public display to security researchers and AI tools? That's an altogether different proposition!
Compare the amount of (hostile) scrutiny Huawei is getting to any of its rivals, and tell us which is the safer bet?
With (say) Cisco, you have all the same risks as Huawei, plus the additional risk that someone is smuggling in a backdoor (NSA made them an offer they can't refuse) invisible to anyone outside a small team within the company. That makes the hurdles to finding it thousands of times higher: you need a Snowden instead.
Evidence previously reported on El Reg tells us at least two existing-or-former HP directors were among those to say the deal was mad and vastly overpriced.
As did others, like Oracle.
I think I said at the time, this looks like an ill-judged MeToo from HP, trying to play with IBM and Oracle (who had recently acquired hardware capability in the form of Sun) in high-end enterprise stuff.
Who decides what is 'terrorist' ...
Well, if they view the material to make that decision, then they won't want to incriminate themselves. So they'll have to make it in complete ignorance.
Unless we outsource it outside plod's jurisdiction? Have Kim Jong Trump's minions decide?
Terrorist organisation? Sounds more like a 14-year-old who doesn't get out enough.
But why a browser hijack? A simple spam run would catch loads of users whose mailers make it a faff to delete messages unread. I wonder if companies like Apple might be indicted as accomplices in that?
Indeed, but being cut off from (one imagines) a big part of the team would surely hurt. They'd no doubt make ruexit provisions - probably without even the kind of fiasco we've seen with non-ferry-companies or lorry parks - but that might not be how a sufficiently-bitter divorcee thinks about it.
Other Russian-centred projects - like nginx - are of course heavily reliant on connectivity, as much as Russian users of worldwide stuff.
Is the lady in charge still on speaking terms with her ex, or does she utterly loathe him?
We need to know whether anything she does might be motivated by revenge there! Disconnecting would of course do huge damage to Russian companies whose legitimate business has an online component.
What purpose does a week count actually serve in computing a position? I'm old enough to remember pre-GPS times[1], and we already had 32-bit timestamps. Is that final week purely coincidental with other silly traditions and tragically stupid one-off events, or might this be made a scapegoat for something?
[1] In fact I even spent some time in the 1980s working on a pre-GPS tracking and positioning system for vehicles, where fitting the entire onboard software into a 128k ROM was one of the issues we had to deal with.
By assaulting a sales office when support is bad, you are punishing the wrong people.
Up to a point, Lord Copper.
You're also putting pressure on the company, by what may be the only means available to you. Especially when a company has gone to great lengths to make it impossible to contact support.
They're under huge pressure from governments and media to Do Something. But that "something" is horribly undefined, and we know very well that the kind of things they have to do can't be reliably automated. Nor even reliably assigned to human judgement. Where there are huge grey areas, a US court and a German court might order them to do diametrically opposite things.
This is Doing Something. On a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't basis.
If it kills off a lot of small biz, it's kind-of closing off a zero-investment business model that's pretty rare outside the 'net. At least it isn't the many-millions cost of getting anything licenced in a safety-critical biz like medicines.
And it probably does reduce the risk of a Big Bad Scandal, by reducing the pool of places from which a Big Bad Scandal could come. So from the point of view of Protecting The Children (etc) it's probably a Good Thing. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater[1] might be seen as a side-effect but is kind-of what they're being told to do.
Maybe a logical next step would be to create a discipline of Auditor for sensitive APIs, and a specific qualification for it. Then you get your app independently audited and signed off in the same way as your accounts. Except we kind-of know how ineffectual that process is from the number of companies going bust with big holes in their accounts after a clean audit.
[1] Does that expression go beyond Blighty, or does it look a bit weird to international readers?
You may have a point. But noone forces you to use windoze 10: indeed, I haven't used any windoze since about 2000.
What I meant with Utterly Evil was their actions that blighted the 'net as a whole, not just their own users. As in, breaking MIME, thus releasing the first wave of email viruses (Melissa, Lovebug) on their own users, but also breaking standards-compliant systems and stifling innovation on the 'net.
One casualty of that was my own web-based office software (think google docs for the idea), that relied on MIME standards and broke in MSIE. Mail-by-web where MSIE would do its own random thing with attachments, and miscellaneous documents that MSIE might try to load in $random-app.
Details, man. Look at the Big Picture instead!
To be fair, the name appears to come from the Linux Foundation. So in a comments thread that's mostly bitching about Microsoft[1], your comment should perhaps be caveated as different.
[1] ... and a lot of it still looking at the utterly evil corporation MS was 20 years ago, rather than the reformed MS of today.
Article 11: The link 'previews' that are usually generated on the 'aggregators' are set by the publisher in their web page meta tags.
Where does that come from?
I included that feature in the original WebÞing back in 1995. A couple of years later, spam started to become a problem, and it became clear that it was only fit for a closed system whose participants shared a reasonable level of mutual trust. A general-purpose search engine like google would just be handing itself to spammers if it used those.
If that nonsense ever became true, google would die rapidly as people stopped using it.
Even half true. Or 5% true.
Except in the sense that Google know very well that the reason they have advertising revenue in the first place is because their search engine works for users, so we choose to use it. From memory, google's search results were no better than altavista, but I switched to google simply because they didn't burden me with deezyner pages that took forever to load.
"... putting his Lycra-moulded bollocks at direct eye level."
Now there's an opportunity for you.
Sorry. Mine's the grubby mac.
A story of unnoticed expiry for the "Who, me" column.
Taking the story at face value (no laughing at the back), does this make an interesting crypto-busting test case for the kind of folks who did the FBI Iphone?
In 30 days I expect they'll be throwing whatever they can find at it, from brute force to experts. Could be an interesting scenario if some TLA does know how to break it but isn't prepared to reveal that they know ...
As for entrusting your money to one man with no fallback ... erm, 'nuff said. Maybe if it's laundered money you just accept there will be attrition, but who else?
@LDS - It's a long time since I had a phone with an Italian SIM (and telco), but I imagine any significant operator, like Vodafone, there as here will offer a choice of different deals. A contract costing several € per minute to phone abroad is for people who don't anticipate phoning such countries.
Making their own units under their own name is one thing: Lenovo has done that for years.
Could it be that Huawei's crime is to ship products that are not merely competitive with, but ahead of, their Western counterparts. Especially Cisco.
We can be matter-of-fact about IoT being in a race-to-the-bottom at the expense of security/etc.
Um, calm down!
Bob puts forward a hypothetical, which I don't think we're supposed to read as serious advice, just a mildly amusing thought. And we know this anonymous Hungarian isn't the first to be threatened with severe punishment for Doing the Right Thing.
Your experiences are broadly comparable to mine, and I expect that applies to most of us. But the fact that neither of us has been murdered doesn't mean it never happens.
Gah. Must correct myself.
Larry's soundtrack was just a melodic beep, but bearing in mind that limitation, it was probably as great a soundtrack as any game has ever had. And entirely appropriate to the character of the game.
Much more memorable than the green-on-black (as I saw it) graphics.
Back in the days before soundcards and external speakers were a thing
Ah yes. The PC establishing its credentials as a serious machine for business by not supporting sound beyond basic beeps, and by implication not being a games machine.
Ironic that it then became the main games machine, and that you needed an additional sound card. Though even before the soundcard, a game could have a memorable (if ugly) soundtrack: anyone else remember Leisure Suit Larry?