Posts by Nick Kew 977 posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
Teacher's Pensions ...
Why should anyone there care if they get defrauded? It's public-sector, so the taxpayer will pick up the tab.
I expect they periodically get some bright young thing proposing to fix it. Lesson in life - and not rocking the boat - when they get shown the door.
I used to keep unimportant passwords in a file called README.TXT on the assumption that nobody is ever going to read it.
:-)
My practice has kind-of evolved over the decades, from a few passwords barely better than PASSWORD1 to many passwords I have to keep in a special directory called passwords. All my stuff there, from unimportant things like my login at El Reg, to others like my bank, stockbroker, and HMRC.
Lots of files there you really couldn't mistake if you were looking. Like, for instance, "theregister.gpg".
Reality illustrates the mash or the mash illustrates the reality: the punchline
Upvote for that link, but disappointed that it misses Ruth wossname, the scottish Tory who is still a bit of a darling of the Chattering Classes.
Talking of which, does anyone else think the commentariat have been missing the point in Boris's latest masterwork? I don't think it's a leadership bid (he wants May there long enough to take the blame), rather he's rattled at the media attention on Rees-Mogg, and wants to reclaim his place as Prime Toffoon[1].
[1] Toff/Buffoon. Wodehouse's characters might realistically have been in parliament (was Lord Emsworth an exaggeration?), but could even he have seen them as candidates for Prime Minister?
And for her next trick, let's have ISPs filter out all spam fully automatically: get your \/|@gra past those filters. And telcos, of course. And the Post Office. The poor old spammers will have to take evasive measures like using envelopes that impersonate a legitimate letter!
As I said when it was The Liar driving online censorship, I expect the first casualty to be that most ultra-violent work of hate, massacre and genocide, the Old Testament of the Bible. Not to mention the sizeable chunk of western culture derived from those bloodthirsty stories.
A fox may steal your hens, sir,
A whore your health and pence, sir,
Your daughter rob your chest, sir,
Your wife may steal your rest, sir,
A thief your goods and plate.
But this is all but picking,
With rest, pence, chest and chicken;
It ever was decreed, sir,
If lawyer's hand is fee'd, sir,
He steals your whole estate.
I know that very well.
The point I meant to make is that it's no more than another skin on a well-known issue of manipulating elections. Something that's come a long way since the eponymous Gerry. Or indeed before him, though I don't know if the Romans had a word for it.
What greater gerrymander for our times than Cameron reneging on his 2015 manifesto commitment to enfranchise Brits longer-term abroad? The very ones who might expect to lose most from brexit.
*perhaps less obviously criminal than the Russians, but most fortunes have at root some dodgy shit
The Russian Oligarchs made their fortunes recently - from the big Yeltsin giveaway of state assets. It's the passing of time that turns later generations from Oligarchs to Aristocrats.
The UK has its relatively-modern oligarchy. From the big housing giveaway of the post-war era. From the high-profile gangsters like Rachmann or Hoogstraaten to the beneficiaries of council house giveaway, we have a modern-day oligarchy in a country where property counts for more than production.
Damn, we'll need a dreadful new word for this dreadful new phenomenon.
How about Gerrymandering?
Along with bankstering, weapons are the UK's long-term great export strength. That's why we, usually with the US, have mongered so many regional wars since the end of the Cold War threatened a decline in the sector. They're trade fairs for a great export industry!
as the drone he is condemned to ride for eternity passes overhead.
Heh. The original Flying Dutchman wasn't literally airborne.
I'll don't see how you can force someone to take possession of something, nor how you can do that without their consent just by having an opt-out.
There commonly isn't an opt-out. Like when Virgin raise their charges yet again, and throw in something you never asked for and will never want.
Dammit, even the notorious Microsoft Tax has long been an annoyance for many.
You know what goes on.
Yeah. All kinds of stories, some of them worth reading. And a commentariat whose relatively-light censorship usually permits a moan, at no greater risk than being downvoted. I don't need no Doctor Syntax: give me Dr Grumpy instead.
Clearly a ****. But that's not a reason to bang him up. It obviously wasn't a call to rid anyone of some turbulent priest like the Lord AbsoluteA***" case.
But in the text it turns out he wasn't banged up for being an **** online. The story is just about bail being revoked, and the bail was in connection with real crimes. Shame on the Reg for such misleading clickbait over a non-story.
"I've never met a noun that can't be verbed"
Yes, but what does it mean? Can you be arsed to think it through?
And please, don't think of verbing my name. That would look like theft.
The best you can hope for with comments in source code is that they don't contradict the source code...
On the contrary. When they contradict the source code, they offer valuable clues as to how the code has evolved, and useful hooks for searching the change control archives.
Or into the thought processes of the developer, if they are contemporaneous.
I remember one case where it surely did not, it said "abominable hack" and it was!
Don't think that's me, but if the adjective had been, say, "ugly" or "hideous" I could be a candidate. Though I'd probably accompany it with some more suggestion: why it's necessary, how it might be improved when I or anyone have time.
"Did you google with yahoo or altavista back then?"
I seem to recollect googling with infoseek before altavista existed.
No, wait, googling didn't exist back then. The nearest was probably giggling.
"personal data" to include IP addresses, internet cookies and DNA.
Erm, where to begin? Damn, not here, I'd be preaching to the choir (probably at length).
I hope that quote is a journalistic simplification, because that would leave scope for having consulted someone who knows what (s)he is talking about, and a law whose detail makes a bit more sense.
Likewise. Only ever shower earlier if I've been doing something that particularly demands it. Like gardening.
Happy to say I'm in pyjamas right now. And but for the fact that I have to go out in a few minutes, I'd still be in them at lunchtime.
The key trick is to have some kind of clothes convenient, and be able to pull them on in a few seconds if someone appears at the door. Like the lady who came to read the electricity meter at about 8:20 yesterday morning.
@Dave C
Your post is a lot more specific than most in this discussion.
Did you visit the daily stormer website to inform yourself? Or are you posting allegations (whether your own or a third-party) that may or may not bear any relationship to reality?
It seems to me this discussion confuses different arguments:
1. Basic free speech. Should Daily Stormer have it at all?
2. Corporate decisions about providing a platform for free speech.
3. Actions against free speech.
I'm with Voltaire on Daily Stormer having a voice (not that I want to listen to them[1]). I'm also with corporations having the right to say "not on our platform", though I'll cry Hypocrisy if those corporations also make claims about universality or about being champions of free speech.
What is much more sinister is if, as hinted here, corporations are being intimidated into denying free speech. Even to real Nazis (if indeed they really are both nationalist and socialist). Yet we know that kind of thing does happen, much more widely. I was first aware of it back in my schooldays, when the news carried semi-regular stories of peaceful marches by one political faction being disrupted by violence from another, and then banned for fear of that violence.
[1] Unless in the context of this story itself: if I post here, I should really take a look so I know what I'm talking about. Better do that from the relative anonymity of public wifi, if the Great Firewall will let me.
You're not trusting "the Russians" or "the Americans". You're trusting one private company over another. Which seems an entirely reasonable thing to do, regardless of your politics.
"Under Russian laws ...
Note the weasel words. You're meant to conclude that the Russian government has the power to require Kaspersky to spy on its users.
OK, the company is required to assist the spy agency in its operations - well, that sounds plausible and also fair: the security services might call on Kaspersky to help with protecting vital infrastructure from a stuxnet. Or maybe the powers are more sweeping and they might be called on to help with analysing a seized 'puter for kiddie porn, or a 419-ers activities, or other such things. Noone is telling us how far those powers do or don't go.
But - Russian law requires telecommunications service providers such as Kaspersky Lab ...? Really? So antivirus is a telecoms service? Or could it rather be language designed to mislead by conflating different issues (and projecting a politician's wet dreams)?
Perhaps it's a skirmish in a battle between AV vendors and US security? Destination: US vendors required to install spyware; non-US vendors choose install spyware or be banned.
We're told it puts Github content at risk. Wouldn't that basically just mean Github having to locate infrastructure outside the jurisdiction of such nonsense? Or might it lead to Github admins being arrested - like security researchers in the US? Sounds mildly far-fetched.
Github content (at least, content that matters) is source code, which is text. If that's affected, it would seem to imply some kind of fingerprinting on text. That really would lead to all kinds of nonsense, though it might be a Hollywood wet dream to make a film of a Shakespeare play and then catch copies of the original in its copyright net!
Is that the same case that Watson brought together with David Davis, until the latter became a government minister and dropped his part in the case against said government?
Whatever data equifax hold on most of us is self-evidently not secret or private: it's assembled from publicly-available information. And is the kind of thing that regularly leaks in bulk: here's from ten years ago.
If this leak can help convince companies to stop misusing such public information as proof of identity, then it's done the world a favour.
If I read and accepted the T&C's of Firefox's ancestor twenty years ago, how many times should I have read it thereafter? I don't recollect aptitude thrusting them in my face when it updates Firefox for me, nor even when I run a new install on a new machine.
Are you saying something has materially changed this century? Without ever generating an alert? Damn, this smells of lawyer-fodder.
Whose drone was it you recently reported on doing battle with Asian hornets?
So what does 5G have to offer?
More speed? More capacity? 4G is more than ample, thankyouverymuch.
More coverage? Now that would be a worthwhile improvement. In fact, if you offered me universal coverage, I'd take 3G speeds as a tradeoff.
It's a business expense for the telcos, so they get to offset it against tax. That happens over several years.
In the case of Vodafone, it gives them a name for "tax avoidance". The others probably only escape the same fate by virtue of being foreign-owned and thus having less visible UK tax affairs.
So in a sense they pay twice over. Once in money, and a second time in reputation.
Bah. Electrification of two perfectly good railway lines? Luxury!
Our railway line isn't merely not electrified, it periodically disappears under water or gets washed out to sea, leaving us nothing. And they won't stump up a few quid to re-open the alternative line running inland!
Someone on an investor board once asked if Micro Focus (MCRO) was like a cheaper Autonomy. How prescient! Though MCRO's share price has quadrupled since then, it's still a lot cheaper than Autonomy was at the time HP swallowed it.
MCRO seems to be quite indecently successful at swallowing up once-great names - from Borland to Novell - and making a successful business of it. My pension fund hopes they make a big success of this latest acquisition. At least it looks more promising than HP swallowing EDS and Autonomy in a vain effort to play MeToo with IBM and Oracle.
There's a Dilbert for that. But I'm not going to go looking for it.
What you describe looks like a classic case of prejudice.
The simulation is obviously of limited value, though it demonstrates a system working in principle. And you describe the work with real data as including pre-filtering to identify the signal from the noise. An application of precisely the kind of prejudice you describe. Except, here it's objective.
Humans learn their prejudice through statistics and Big Data.
That sounds more like postjudice than prejudice.
Or am I old-fashioned, taking the word to say what it means?
It's more than just political funding, it's economic imperialism.
US companies lead the world in (extremely) dodgy patents, and are aided by the legal system in asserting those, particularly against non-US companies. Look at how NTP effectively destroyed RIM[1] before those patents were finally invalidated: once that case was sucking its lifeblood, the one-time leading-edge innovator was drained externally by having to pay the pirates, and (I speculate) internally by a culture whose emphasis had been turned from innovation to litigation.
[1] The Canadian company that brought us the blackberry phone.
Thinking back to the reporting of a much bigger and more celebrated IP case, SCO refused for a very long time to be specific about its claims and identify the IP of which it alleged violation.
This time, they specified "US Patent nnnnn", which would seem to make it a lot easier (and thus cheaper and less painful) to defend. Not that I'd wish even that on an honest business.
I'll second those who say skip the first two (very much lesser) works.
After those, they fall into different periods. The earlier ones (the Witches, and the Rincewind ones) are the most directly funny, tending to thoughtful slapstick. My own startingpoint was the witches. Later he gets more humanistic and a bit darker: the peak of that would be Night Watch. And he did go downhill towards the end as the alzheimers set in.
Note that there are *lot* of literary and cultural references: if you're not English, you may get less out of them (but don't let that put you off). And allusions: the Pork Futures Warehouse described the financial crisis before it happened, while "Interesting Times" (published 1994) could have been about "9/11" in almost the same sense as Arthur Miller's Crucible was about McCarthyism.
Memorable real-life first line of a computer-written tale encountered in my student days, early '80s (tale probably dating back to the '70s: the printout looked old).
By then they also had 'puters composing original music.
c.f. WayForward Technologies. Though Dirk Gently was a generation on in the 1980s, and they had apple macs.
Undermanaged is not a term I'd associate with the NHS.
It's must be a strong candidate for the world's prime example of this management style.
There could be some kind of crowd pleaser over free movement such as not providing social security for the first couple of years. It's naive to expect more than that.
Under normal EU rules, freedom of movement doesn't entitle anyone to another country's benefits. At least, not until you've been there legally for five years, when you become eligible to apply for permanent residence and then citizenship. Indeed, if you move to another country for more than three months, you have to demonstrate both the means to support yourself and health insurance, so you won't be a burden on your new country.
The UK has an unholy combination of a monstrously ridiculous benefits system and a determination to manufacture problems with it. Labour did it because they wanted more immigration, the Tories because they wanted to whip up anti-EU hatred.
Yep. Of course.
5% of their trade is with us; 50% of our trade is with them (in ballpark terms). And we're more dependent on trade than most, except perhaps the Dutch. Even the big manufacturing nations - like Germany and Italy - have only a tiny fraction of what we have at stake.
Not saying it will happen but the EU seem hell bent on putting as many obsticles[sic] in the way just to make sure that no other country even thinks about leaving in the future.
I think the EU right now are sitting back and watching the UK government self-destruct in a shower of incoherent nonsense. No intervention from the EU required to deter anyone else from trying to follow!
To be fair to the British courts, I think they'd have thrown out the Home Office case in this instance, too.
But ICBW.
EU response: You can stay with us on data protection so long as you commit to accepting the ECJ's supremacy on matters of data protection. And you can appoint a non-voting representative to the panel.
Any more concessions than that would seem very odd, and one would have to question what price had been paid behind the scenes.
@ Potemkine!
Upvote for the laugh, but I can't help thinking I've said more to clients about colleagues than vice versa.
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