This is pretty much the size of it. The NK political situation is quite simple really, it is a rather unusual medieval-style monarchy, with generals substituting for barons. Poor, pampered Kim just got made king, and all of a sudden he goes from being nobody much to this guy whom everyone wants dead.
The generals however didn't know who else to make king, and Kim is currently trying to keep them too busy to decide. Hence the state of war; not aggression, more make work.
To be honest, the main arbiter of what happens now will be China. China is the local large power, with ambitions to be the local super-power which it will be by default if the Americans can only be persuaded that setting up more of a presence in the neighbourhood is a waste of money. North Korea, which was long kept as a sort of pet of many Chinese administrations as it was vaguely Communist as long as you didn't look too hard, has just done the pet equivalent of crapping on the carpet after being repeatedly told not to.
North Korea isn't a Communist state. Communist states strictly separate the military from the political, and make sure the military is subordinate. Communist states also don't have much trouble retaining power in the ruling group when the original boss-man dies or is deposed, but this is a problem in North Korea. The best political model for North Korea is a feudal Royal one, where an usurper has taken power a while ago and only now are his descendents approaching a steady state of power.
The net political effect in NK now is that everything is unstable. The new king isn't secure; his barons who control the armed forces are restless and uncertain as to how much they think of the new king but nobody wants to break ranks and rebel in case everyone else attacks the rebel to cement their reputation as loyal followers of the king. North Korea right now is a Game of Thrones in a modern world.
This is what the nuclear test was all about: this was partly a show of strength and partly a provocation, so the new king can demonstrate to his barons that the entire world is out to get them, so unity is the only option. Only problem here is, the barons ain't completely daft and probably don't buy it, but as the only real alternative is inviting in China and spending one's retirement in a cell somewhere, they ain't complaining.
Like I said before, China is the arbiter here. If the NK leadership has any brains at all, this will be the last nuclear test (and the last ballistic missile test) for a very, very long time. If they carry on raising the pressure, they're going to get invaded by China simply to get rid of America's main excuse for being in that area, and also for international brownie points for removing a known mad dictator from power. The only thing is, I have grave doubts as to the intelligence and indeed the sanity of the current NK leadership; I am not at all certain that they know just how close to an invasion they are pushing China.
Raising fuel prices to insane levels is EXACTLY what the UK Government has done. As a result, fuel consumption has dropped dramatically, leaving the Government considerably puzzled as to where all that lovely tax revenue just went to. One outcome of this is that the old road-pricing black box idea is being raised yet again, despite universal unpopularity.
Lunatic fuel prices notwithstanding, reading the comments of mostly American commentors is, for a UK resident such as I, really rather hilarious. As has been repeatedly proven over the last few years, especially with vehicles like the Subaru Impreza, Mitsubishi Evo X and similar types, it can be very quickly and easily proven that a 4-cylinder engine plus a turbo can give a scarily quick machine that is also tough, and extremely agile. Our roads police use these vehicles since they are about the only thing on four wheels that can catch a speeding Jap motorbike. Woe betide the fool who tries racing one of these with a US-made V8 vehicle; the first couple of bends will sort that one out.
Even down at more sensible levels, European and Japanese designs are still far, far ahead of US domestic car designs. I drive a Toyota Avensis diesel; universally regarded as staid, boring and not especially quick. However, driven correctly this car will accelerate to 60 in about 10 seconds and carry on to over 100 in similar times, will cruise quietly and easily at 70 and still return close to 50 MPG. This isn't using strange, alien technology; just a 4-pot direct-injection turbodiesel and a 6-gear manual gearbox. This is a 2008 model; the latest variant will do over 60 MPG on a combined cycle, again without needing to use hybrid technology.
It isn't difficult to achieve this sort of economy. It isn't even difficult to do it and still have quite hefty vehicles that accelerate very sharply when asked properly, and you don't even need to be driving a plastic box to do it.
To be honest it sounds to me a lot like the kid's major existence was on assorted social networking sites, and much of his social self-worth was about getting reactions from other people in these social networks. There're only a few ways of consistently getting such reactions; always posting wise and apposite comments (which I manage maybe 30% of the time, try though I might), posting jokes or humourous cat photos, and posting attacks which attract the schardenfreude tendency of others.
However, I think that social media must have become pretty much ALL of this kid's socialisation and social life; like all teens he is mentally driven to socialise as much as possible, but he's not actually meeting people face to face much so isn't getting the all-important slaps in the face for being rude, aggressive or basically just a jerk.
The cure is to limit his access to social media and try get him socialising face to face a good deal more. He simply hasn't learned the rules, and won't do either, not if socialising is confined to texting on a smartphone or somesuch.
I am rather tempted to suggest a novel solution here which relies upon Darwinian natural selection.
Firstly, select an area of completely worthless land somewhere that the majority of Arabs can get to fairly easily. Afganistan would be a good choice, somewhere where there are no easily-exploited minerals and which is too far from a major river to be worth irrigating and living on.
Secondly, build a spider-web of basic roads leading out from the chosen area.
Thirdly, set up a very large military base there, complete with runway for resupply/maintainence. Put around this a good, strong fence, several ditch and bank defences and a minefield. Inside this place an over-abundance of automated machineguns, set to fire on anything moving into the base. Set up all equipment so it can be left unattended for long periods, and so that maintainence can be performed as safely as possible otherwise; under normal operating conditions this base will be unmanned.
Finally, signpost the base lavishly, on the lines of "This way to extremely well fortified Infidel base of certain death".
At this point, you will have given all the loons who want to martyr themselves fighting the infidel the perfect place where they can go do it without inconveniencing normal folks, although flying a large variety of flags over the base might also be a good idea, just in case the martyr-loons are fussy about which particular nationality of base they want to kill themselves on (flying a few completely fictional flags is also a good idea).
Usually this is done by hanging a car or truck tyre around the camera, and setting this alight with kerosene or something similar. Once alight, tyres burn a long time and burn very hot; this frys the internals of the camera.
This isn't the only trick used; in the north of England someone has taken to disabling the cameras using rock-blasting explosives; spray-painting the camera windows is common, as is rotating the entire camera body by force to point away from the road. Cutting the supporting arm, smashing the entire unit with earth-moving equipment and so on; there's almost no destructive technique you can think of which has not been tried.
In Britain, it was found that whilst it is possible to operate a laser speed measuring device at night, the associated camera to record vehicle licence plates doesn't get a picture at all. So, over here if one speeds during the day when the traffic camera (Talivans, they are nicknamed) units are out one risks a fine. However at night, feel free to drive like an utter loon as you have only the rather over-stretched police force to worry about.
It is also the case that these cameras rely upon the car licence plate being correct, and the registration being up to date and registered to a person who can be traced. As it is quite possible to buy a legal-looking show plate without showing ID or car registration documents, then the obvious happens quite often: criminal goes out looking for a car that is the same make, model and colour as his vehicle, notes down the licence plate, gets a pair of show plates of this number made up and puts them on his car. Police checks will simply come back with the car looking like it is the correct make, model etc and much of the time police won't take it further, as long as the driver looks safe and sane.
However, someone else is getting all this moron's tickets and likely having the very devil of a job proving his innocence (and yes, it does now come down to proving innocence as opposed to forcing the prosecution to prove guilt).
Actually, there is one major componentthat is not trivial to machine or otherwise fabricate: primers.
About twenty-odd years ago, Britain was engaged in a low-level counter-insurgency fight with Irish nationalist terrorists. These people liked bombing things, but had a problem producing all their bomb components. They did try to make their own primer devices but eventually gave up in disgust being unable to fabricate explosives detonators which could be relied upon to work every single time without premature detonation or not working at all. This is a known fact: primers for ammunition and detonators for explosives (much the same thing in terms of design) are very, very difficult to reliably manufacture.
So, whilst it will be possible to make 3D-printed guns, manufacturing conventional ammunition will be an on-going headache for anyone doing so. Most countries are not like the USA, remember; few are as paranoid as the UK but most restrict the sale of critical components like primers to officially-authorised personnel and most once again tend to get very interested in anyone trying to purchase the chemical precursors for primers.
The only way around this would be to copy and update the 60s Gyrojet pistol designs, which were essentially miniaturised rocket launchers rather than conventional firearms. Suitable updates here would be electrical ignition of the ammunition (which replaces a complex firing mechanism with a couple of switches) and increasing the calibre to a couple of centimetres or thereabouts; the "gun" thus produced would work very effectively indeed without needing conventional primers to ignite the charge. The exact composition of the rocket fuel might be a difficulty, however, but it is an easily surmountable one.
Forgive me for seeming stupid, but have we not invented things better than this twice over?
Britain invented hovercraft (perfected by America and Russia) and the former USSR invented the Ekranoplan or skimmer.
Both work on the principle of having as little contact with water as possible. Hovercraft in particular are fairly simple to build and are very difficult for torpedoes to target, as well as being most useful for navigating in shallow coastal waters or even on mudflats (also rather good over sand in deserts). This system is incredibly noisy underwater, to the extent that any marginally aware enemy would detect its presence rapidly and at the very least send out aircraft for a look to see what was there. As other posters have pointed out, it may be able to out-run conventional surface ships, but cannot outrun cannon fire from an aircraft.
More to the point, the fact that they are securely wiping the infection files of the net-connected machines, but seem not to have a means of wiping the files on infected but isolated machines (relatively easy to do; make the thing periodically phone home and suicide if it cannot do this) means one of two things.
1) They're incompetent and didn't think of doing this. Unlikely; I'm not much of a programmer but I thought of it.
2) The infection files they are wiping contain information lifted from the infected machine and/or other important info, and the virus authors do not wish to gift anyone investigating the infection with this information. The authors either don't care, or don't want to take the trouble to try to prevent the virus code falling into the hands of whitehat investigators.
I side with the latter; if a person doesn't know a machine has been compromised then this is the best outcome for the blackhats. If the victim susses they've been infected but doesn't know what has been stolen though, they have to assume the worst and the panicked arse-covering and re-assessment of security and procedures etc. is going to be almost as much use in disrupting the enemy than the conpromised information would have been. A military-industrial complex which knows it has been infiltrated but does not know to what extent usually becomes paranoid. The "bolting the stable door after the horse has gone" syndrome kicks in, blame gets shared out as selfishly as possible, careers get terminated and security gets so tight that nothing can be done without covertly circumventing it.
Iran, if this was the target, would be a perfect target for this sort of attack. Iran is a military-religious dictatorship, and the top people in such regimes are not usually the very brightest in the world, merely the most devious backstabbing ones. Perpetrating a hack like this would cause such dismay and confusion that this might well have been the plan all along, with the possibility of stealing information a distant second priority.
This is interesting because it may finally set limits as to how aggressively a company may collect and utilise data on users. Up to now Facebook has been a private company and hasn't needed to exploit the vast treasure trove of user data it has. The IPO changes everything now; I do wonder why on earth they did it, as they surely didn't need the money, but now Facebook will be in thrall to its shareholders.
From now on, the shareholders will want to maximise profits. The one thing Facebook has that it can exploit is the user data. Up to now, they haven't really maximised the earning potential of this data; when they do they'll be treading a very, very fine line between profit and annoying users and worse still will not easily be able to tell when they've gone too far. I would wager that they're going to overdo it, and force the state to step in and set legal limits on them.
Actually the now happily defunct ISP Supanet had just such an offering, called "Supananny" and indeed they did get quite a few takers for it. In this respect they were ahead of the game, though as a company they were horrific slave-drivers to work for, and eventually got taken over just before they went bust.
However, there is one salient point to remember about offering a 'net censorship service: if you filter content for users, you lose Common Carrier Immunity.
Common Carrier Immunity over here works thusly: the ISP is the medium by which a message is received and is not and cannot be held accountable for the actual message its self. Thus if user #1 rants in a highly offensive way at user #2 and user #2 complains about it, the ISP cannot be held accountable for user #2 seeing user #1's ravings and thus both users are kindly told to go away and sort it out without involving the ISP. The way this usually plays out is that the ISP then warns the ranting loon under the Terms & Conditions and kicks them off the service if further trouble occurs, since nobody much wants the hassle from trolls.
The Government porn filter will be different, though. It won't be an opt-in limited-by-contract sort of service but obligatory for all users unless they opt out. The entity responsible for the censor-list will therefore be opening themselves up to an awful lot of legal shit from all directions. If the ban-list is too stringent (and believe me, default-deny ultra-stringent is the only safe way to go) then the censors get heckled and pressured to open it up. If too lenient, they get heckled to do the opposite (and this will happen simultaneously all the damn time). Note also that evading the censorware will become the stated aim of pretty much all teenagers in the country, and will also become the sport of the Anonymous hackers, and also of 4chan. Given the propensity of 4chan for Rickrolling, I'd not be surprised if both activities get combined.
Whichever company, agency or public body gets suckered with the task of actually operating the censorship system is therefore going to be helping themselves to opprobium from all sides, barracking from every crypto-Puritan in the country and heckling from just about everyone else. It'll be an utterly thankless job, made infinitely worse by bloody script kiddies trying to foist Rick Astley porn onto absolutely everything as well...
You can tell that most of the comments on this posting are from outside the UK, because they all assume that the net filter will be effective. It will not. The UK has a long track record of egregious and laughable failure wherever any form of computing device is involved in government. The previous government spend twelve billion pounds (roughly $18 000 000 000 US) on a healthcare computer system which to date has not delivered ANY working product. Indeed this NHS computer system was so dire, so doomed to failure that one of the participant companies recently bought their way out of the original contract.
UK ministers are computer-illiterate morons almost to a man. They are also utterly incapable of running a project successfully, and the companies which prey upon these dullards know this, expect it and exploit it. Any normal project will run via one of the many project management organisational systems, going from initiation through problem capture, solution design, build and implementation phases. Once out of problem capture phases, any good project manager will tell any interfering PHB that amendments to the project will be added to the wishlist for Project 2.0 and will not be acted upon at that time.
This does not happen with most UK Government IT projects; ministerial interference is expected (and indeed hoped for) since it gives the outsourcing companies a very good excuse for why the project is not functioning and producing the expected deliverable. Interference also allows them to push up costs and milk the boondoggle for all it is worth before it gets canned. To summarise, there are companies in the UK which make a point of getting paid for not producing working results.
To date in this parliament we have already had a proposal to build a vast Internet spying system to try to incriminate as many UK citizens as possible, whilst conspicuously ignoring such minor and unimportant inventions as Tor Onion routing and VPNs to neutral countries. Now we're getting another similar internet control scheme, once again conceived by utter morons and to be implemented by exploitative outsourcers. All this in the current economic climate, too.
At present the UK has a structural deficit. It is spending more money per year than it can find in taxes, and is borrowing the remainder by selling bonds and by magicking more money into existence with quantitative easing. The main bank interest rate is being held at 0.5% to try to force people to spend rather than save, and none of these supposed remedies are working. The government is also deeply wedded to the EU project, despite this entity's slow and inevitable fiscal collapse, and seems to want to carry on feeding this beast too. The aforementioned spying projects can therefore be viewed as the actions of scared fools trying to do something, because they don't know how to solve the looming crisis that is about to hit them.
Even if they do have such a tool, it is still effectively useless. By analogy, during World War 2 the allies had broken the German ENIGMA codes, yet had to work very hard to pretend that the code was still secure, to prevent the Germans copping wise to the fact that their codes were useless and devising something better. The same applies here: if the NSA have broken AES, then they cannot use this hack for anything save national security, and must also work hard to prevent the merest suspicion of the hack getting out.
The best thing we could do would be to club together to fund a bounty for information on how to break AES without using brute-force computing, so that we'd know if it could not be trusted (we already know that no government can be trusted to act other than as a self-interested parasite).
For the last year or so, the M66 motorway north of Manchester has not had lighting on it at all. The change in driver behaviour was not particularly marked; a general decrease in speeds of cars is about all (I commute daily on this road) although a small minority of people are seemingly very poor at driving at night.
Perhaps compulsary vision testing (including low-light vision) for drivers every couple of decades might be a good idea?
Way back then, they were the government and they were the only government that mattered. Now the European Union has slithered into power and is dictating much of UK policy by remote control, so the politicians are doing this to try for one last time to appear important.
The only thing that scares our politicians more than being unimportant idiots would, it seems, the thought of seizing back their surrendered power and once again being masters of their own destiny; one quick referendum on continued EU membership and the predictable "Get us out of here!" result, and Britain would once again stand alone and proud. And, in the case of the political infants we now have, proud, alone and really shit-scared.
I now work in a large open-plan office and find this is exactly true. Moreover it only takes one realtively immature, noisy individual to induce most of the rest of the room to be similarly noisy and distracting. Noise-cancelling headphones are a most wonderful invention in such circumstances, I find.
Mr Keen is talking bollocks here. To cite a real world example, look at telecoms in Britain before and after the privatisation and deregulation of the telephone sector. Beforehand, it took months to get a phone line put in, and you had to rent the handset from the monopoly provider. You had a choice of about half a dozen, equally dire handsets.
After the monopoly was lifted, you could get a phone line put into a building in days, and use whatever standards compliant handset you chose; you were also free to put in internal extension lines. I remember 1970s Britain; littered with huge, inefficient nationalised monopolies. Huge, slow, expensive monopolies; life is so much better without them, and it is notable that for all that left-wing pseudo-socialists denounce the right wing politicians who did this here in Britain, no left wing politician has ever been stupid enough to reinstate these monopolies.
The real problem they have is that to shift the usual mindset of "oh look, Microsoft product. It'll be garbage unless you pay way more than the competition, and then it'll be merely mediocre". In fairness to them, they are slowly, infinitesimally getting a vague clue about security on Windows, and the user interface is merely poor now, instead of dire as was. They do produce workmanlike applications now, having started off poorly, briefly called in at total crap, learned a hard lesson and improved.
However, Microsoft does not have a track record of excellence, but one of mediocrity on first release followed by slow, incremental improvements. The first version of anything new from Microsoft will be crap so don't buy it. The new super phone will follow this pattern, so it'll be late 2013 before we see the iPhone-beater in its full, iPhone beating form.
The major lethality of WW I was not down to artillery at all, but was attributable to barbed wire and machine guns. Prior to this war, infantry was vulnerable to cavalry and artillery wasn't much use except on fixed targets. Barbed wire changed all that; cavalry cannot move at all through barbed wire emplacements, and infantry is very greatly slowed down. Machine guns are the other major innovation which made cavalry charges lethal to cavalry, and made cutting barbed wire deadly dangerous. Artillery duels and trench warfare were effectively the result of both sides' military command realising that the old tactics didn't work, and collectively saying "Dur, what do we do now?". Shelling trenches drove men mad, and massed assaults slaughtered thousands, but were both tactics born of lack of ideas.
Development of Babbage computers wouldn't have altered the lethality of this sort of war. What changes this sort of war to WW II styles is the development of better internal combustion engines, which allows armour and air power.
The easy way to do this is to simply write the customer's username and password onto paper (paper tape, for ease of use) along with a timestamp whenever the user changes their password. All you do then is store the paper copy securely somewhere, and use the hashed version in the computers as normal.
The law very likely doesn't say that the information be easily available, merely that it be available. Handing out the non-hashed data to any authority, then telling them "If you need the password, it is on this paper roll somewhere" ought to be sufficient.
Actually you try a spoofing trick a certain youth cafe in London did, back in the 1960s. The cafe owner knew that the police were monitoring the payphone in the cafe, because the place was a known hang-out of youth gangs, and he didn't much like it. So he devised a cunning plan to defeat the problem. Everyone who visited the cafe was, on leaving, given 10 pence and asked to phone the cafe payphone back, to ask when and where the demonstration would be (but NOT to go). A few dozen such calls had the local law absolutely convinced of massed rioting in a local park on a certain day.
On that day, hundreds of police turned out to quell the expected rioting and crowds, which turned out to consist of one pensioner and his equally elderly dog, out for a morning stroll.
Basically the real problem here is the growth of "equality for all" and "everyone's voice is of equal weight" movements, also known as "listening to idiots". We all know what happens in computing projects if you have idiots involved in the process; the same is true when you start working on big, grown-up projects like supplying energy to a nation. California is a prime example of what happens when you let idiots in on the decision-making process for big, important projects; you get shortsighted views predominating until the entire system digs its self into a hole, then carries on digging.
China is ahead of the game here since their political system recruits mostly from engineers and scientists. It lacks a fluffy, warm edge to it but gains instead cold, ruthless pragmatism instead. This is why the Chinese are actively trying to halt their population expansion, are busily expanding mining operations in third-world hell-holes like Zimbabwe, and are researching Thorium reactors; they look ahead for future problems and try to pre-emptively solve them.
We used to do this thinking ahead, but then we started listening to idiots.
To understand what is going on here, you have to understand the UK telecoms market. It all started with a publicly owned conglomerate which did post and telephony rather badly. This got split up, and the telephony sector privatised together with some very special rules to force it to play fair and not exploit its monopoly position. This leaves us with the situation where British Telecom (BT) owns most of the telephone wiring from exchange to end user, yet is forced to share this with assorted other operators and is legally compelled to play them fair. With few exceptions, there is no difference between the copper you're talking over for BT ADSL, Talktalk ADSL or whatever.
The only real competitor in the market is the conglomeration nominally owned by Virginmedia, which is primarily a cable TV outfit which does internet on the side. Pretty much all their cabling dates from the initial build, and covers only those areas initially identified as really good prospects for selling cable TV to (primarily poorer areas, higher density housing, lovers of pay-for football etc). Mobile internet, wide area wifi and so on are minor players and can be discounted.
What this leaves you with is a price war, and a race to the bottom. Virginmedia can supply super-good internet, but only to cabled areas. Niche ISPs can supply good ADSL that is as good as the BT copper can support, and the likes of Talktalk are left slugging it out, trying to cut corners wherever they can to push the price ever lower. This is why we're seeing this crude blackmail attempt; these bargain basement ISPs are struggling to make any margin at all since pretty much every cost and corner that can be cut has been cut, from El Cheapo ADSL modems to call centres outsourced to Elbonian idiots (and the call centre numbers are usually premium rate numbers, to scrape a bit back there too).
None of this is going to change until BT upgrades the copper to the end user (which it is doing, with the Fibre To The Cabinet upgrading programme), and even that is going to take a while since there isn't any real incentive for BT to break any records doing the upgrade. It is a constrained monopoly operator, and is obliged to share any upgrades it makes with its direct competitors, so why bother fussing with upgrades? All BT needs to do is idle along doing the bare minimum, and wait for the competition to cut each others' throats for it.
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This is pretty much the size of it. The NK political situation is quite simple really, it is a rather unusual medieval-style monarchy, with generals substituting for barons. Poor, pampered Kim just got made king, and all of a sudden he goes from being nobody much to this guy whom everyone wants dead.
The generals however didn't know who else to make king, and Kim is currently trying to keep them too busy to decide. Hence the state of war; not aggression, more make work.
To be honest, the main arbiter of what happens now will be China. China is the local large power, with ambitions to be the local super-power which it will be by default if the Americans can only be persuaded that setting up more of a presence in the neighbourhood is a waste of money. North Korea, which was long kept as a sort of pet of many Chinese administrations as it was vaguely Communist as long as you didn't look too hard, has just done the pet equivalent of crapping on the carpet after being repeatedly told not to.
North Korea isn't a Communist state. Communist states strictly separate the military from the political, and make sure the military is subordinate. Communist states also don't have much trouble retaining power in the ruling group when the original boss-man dies or is deposed, but this is a problem in North Korea. The best political model for North Korea is a feudal Royal one, where an usurper has taken power a while ago and only now are his descendents approaching a steady state of power.
The net political effect in NK now is that everything is unstable. The new king isn't secure; his barons who control the armed forces are restless and uncertain as to how much they think of the new king but nobody wants to break ranks and rebel in case everyone else attacks the rebel to cement their reputation as loyal followers of the king. North Korea right now is a Game of Thrones in a modern world.
This is what the nuclear test was all about: this was partly a show of strength and partly a provocation, so the new king can demonstrate to his barons that the entire world is out to get them, so unity is the only option. Only problem here is, the barons ain't completely daft and probably don't buy it, but as the only real alternative is inviting in China and spending one's retirement in a cell somewhere, they ain't complaining.
Like I said before, China is the arbiter here. If the NK leadership has any brains at all, this will be the last nuclear test (and the last ballistic missile test) for a very, very long time. If they carry on raising the pressure, they're going to get invaded by China simply to get rid of America's main excuse for being in that area, and also for international brownie points for removing a known mad dictator from power. The only thing is, I have grave doubts as to the intelligence and indeed the sanity of the current NK leadership; I am not at all certain that they know just how close to an invasion they are pushing China.
Raising fuel prices to insane levels is EXACTLY what the UK Government has done. As a result, fuel consumption has dropped dramatically, leaving the Government considerably puzzled as to where all that lovely tax revenue just went to. One outcome of this is that the old road-pricing black box idea is being raised yet again, despite universal unpopularity.
Lunatic fuel prices notwithstanding, reading the comments of mostly American commentors is, for a UK resident such as I, really rather hilarious. As has been repeatedly proven over the last few years, especially with vehicles like the Subaru Impreza, Mitsubishi Evo X and similar types, it can be very quickly and easily proven that a 4-cylinder engine plus a turbo can give a scarily quick machine that is also tough, and extremely agile. Our roads police use these vehicles since they are about the only thing on four wheels that can catch a speeding Jap motorbike. Woe betide the fool who tries racing one of these with a US-made V8 vehicle; the first couple of bends will sort that one out.
Even down at more sensible levels, European and Japanese designs are still far, far ahead of US domestic car designs. I drive a Toyota Avensis diesel; universally regarded as staid, boring and not especially quick. However, driven correctly this car will accelerate to 60 in about 10 seconds and carry on to over 100 in similar times, will cruise quietly and easily at 70 and still return close to 50 MPG. This isn't using strange, alien technology; just a 4-pot direct-injection turbodiesel and a 6-gear manual gearbox. This is a 2008 model; the latest variant will do over 60 MPG on a combined cycle, again without needing to use hybrid technology.
It isn't difficult to achieve this sort of economy. It isn't even difficult to do it and still have quite hefty vehicles that accelerate very sharply when asked properly, and you don't even need to be driving a plastic box to do it.
To be honest it sounds to me a lot like the kid's major existence was on assorted social networking sites, and much of his social self-worth was about getting reactions from other people in these social networks. There're only a few ways of consistently getting such reactions; always posting wise and apposite comments (which I manage maybe 30% of the time, try though I might), posting jokes or humourous cat photos, and posting attacks which attract the schardenfreude tendency of others.
However, I think that social media must have become pretty much ALL of this kid's socialisation and social life; like all teens he is mentally driven to socialise as much as possible, but he's not actually meeting people face to face much so isn't getting the all-important slaps in the face for being rude, aggressive or basically just a jerk.
The cure is to limit his access to social media and try get him socialising face to face a good deal more. He simply hasn't learned the rules, and won't do either, not if socialising is confined to texting on a smartphone or somesuch.
I am rather tempted to suggest a novel solution here which relies upon Darwinian natural selection.
Firstly, select an area of completely worthless land somewhere that the majority of Arabs can get to fairly easily. Afganistan would be a good choice, somewhere where there are no easily-exploited minerals and which is too far from a major river to be worth irrigating and living on.
Secondly, build a spider-web of basic roads leading out from the chosen area.
Thirdly, set up a very large military base there, complete with runway for resupply/maintainence. Put around this a good, strong fence, several ditch and bank defences and a minefield. Inside this place an over-abundance of automated machineguns, set to fire on anything moving into the base. Set up all equipment so it can be left unattended for long periods, and so that maintainence can be performed as safely as possible otherwise; under normal operating conditions this base will be unmanned.
Finally, signpost the base lavishly, on the lines of "This way to extremely well fortified Infidel base of certain death".
At this point, you will have given all the loons who want to martyr themselves fighting the infidel the perfect place where they can go do it without inconveniencing normal folks, although flying a large variety of flags over the base might also be a good idea, just in case the martyr-loons are fussy about which particular nationality of base they want to kill themselves on (flying a few completely fictional flags is also a good idea).
Usually this is done by hanging a car or truck tyre around the camera, and setting this alight with kerosene or something similar. Once alight, tyres burn a long time and burn very hot; this frys the internals of the camera.
This isn't the only trick used; in the north of England someone has taken to disabling the cameras using rock-blasting explosives; spray-painting the camera windows is common, as is rotating the entire camera body by force to point away from the road. Cutting the supporting arm, smashing the entire unit with earth-moving equipment and so on; there's almost no destructive technique you can think of which has not been tried.
In Britain, it was found that whilst it is possible to operate a laser speed measuring device at night, the associated camera to record vehicle licence plates doesn't get a picture at all. So, over here if one speeds during the day when the traffic camera (Talivans, they are nicknamed) units are out one risks a fine. However at night, feel free to drive like an utter loon as you have only the rather over-stretched police force to worry about.
It is also the case that these cameras rely upon the car licence plate being correct, and the registration being up to date and registered to a person who can be traced. As it is quite possible to buy a legal-looking show plate without showing ID or car registration documents, then the obvious happens quite often: criminal goes out looking for a car that is the same make, model and colour as his vehicle, notes down the licence plate, gets a pair of show plates of this number made up and puts them on his car. Police checks will simply come back with the car looking like it is the correct make, model etc and much of the time police won't take it further, as long as the driver looks safe and sane.
However, someone else is getting all this moron's tickets and likely having the very devil of a job proving his innocence (and yes, it does now come down to proving innocence as opposed to forcing the prosecution to prove guilt).
Actually, there is one major componentthat is not trivial to machine or otherwise fabricate: primers.
About twenty-odd years ago, Britain was engaged in a low-level counter-insurgency fight with Irish nationalist terrorists. These people liked bombing things, but had a problem producing all their bomb components. They did try to make their own primer devices but eventually gave up in disgust being unable to fabricate explosives detonators which could be relied upon to work every single time without premature detonation or not working at all. This is a known fact: primers for ammunition and detonators for explosives (much the same thing in terms of design) are very, very difficult to reliably manufacture.
So, whilst it will be possible to make 3D-printed guns, manufacturing conventional ammunition will be an on-going headache for anyone doing so. Most countries are not like the USA, remember; few are as paranoid as the UK but most restrict the sale of critical components like primers to officially-authorised personnel and most once again tend to get very interested in anyone trying to purchase the chemical precursors for primers.
The only way around this would be to copy and update the 60s Gyrojet pistol designs, which were essentially miniaturised rocket launchers rather than conventional firearms. Suitable updates here would be electrical ignition of the ammunition (which replaces a complex firing mechanism with a couple of switches) and increasing the calibre to a couple of centimetres or thereabouts; the "gun" thus produced would work very effectively indeed without needing conventional primers to ignite the charge. The exact composition of the rocket fuel might be a difficulty, however, but it is an easily surmountable one.
Forgive me for seeming stupid, but have we not invented things better than this twice over?
Britain invented hovercraft (perfected by America and Russia) and the former USSR invented the Ekranoplan or skimmer.
Both work on the principle of having as little contact with water as possible. Hovercraft in particular are fairly simple to build and are very difficult for torpedoes to target, as well as being most useful for navigating in shallow coastal waters or even on mudflats (also rather good over sand in deserts). This system is incredibly noisy underwater, to the extent that any marginally aware enemy would detect its presence rapidly and at the very least send out aircraft for a look to see what was there. As other posters have pointed out, it may be able to out-run conventional surface ships, but cannot outrun cannon fire from an aircraft.
More to the point, the fact that they are securely wiping the infection files of the net-connected machines, but seem not to have a means of wiping the files on infected but isolated machines (relatively easy to do; make the thing periodically phone home and suicide if it cannot do this) means one of two things.
1) They're incompetent and didn't think of doing this. Unlikely; I'm not much of a programmer but I thought of it.
2) The infection files they are wiping contain information lifted from the infected machine and/or other important info, and the virus authors do not wish to gift anyone investigating the infection with this information. The authors either don't care, or don't want to take the trouble to try to prevent the virus code falling into the hands of whitehat investigators.
I side with the latter; if a person doesn't know a machine has been compromised then this is the best outcome for the blackhats. If the victim susses they've been infected but doesn't know what has been stolen though, they have to assume the worst and the panicked arse-covering and re-assessment of security and procedures etc. is going to be almost as much use in disrupting the enemy than the conpromised information would have been. A military-industrial complex which knows it has been infiltrated but does not know to what extent usually becomes paranoid. The "bolting the stable door after the horse has gone" syndrome kicks in, blame gets shared out as selfishly as possible, careers get terminated and security gets so tight that nothing can be done without covertly circumventing it.
Iran, if this was the target, would be a perfect target for this sort of attack. Iran is a military-religious dictatorship, and the top people in such regimes are not usually the very brightest in the world, merely the most devious backstabbing ones. Perpetrating a hack like this would cause such dismay and confusion that this might well have been the plan all along, with the possibility of stealing information a distant second priority.
This is interesting because it may finally set limits as to how aggressively a company may collect and utilise data on users. Up to now Facebook has been a private company and hasn't needed to exploit the vast treasure trove of user data it has. The IPO changes everything now; I do wonder why on earth they did it, as they surely didn't need the money, but now Facebook will be in thrall to its shareholders.
From now on, the shareholders will want to maximise profits. The one thing Facebook has that it can exploit is the user data. Up to now, they haven't really maximised the earning potential of this data; when they do they'll be treading a very, very fine line between profit and annoying users and worse still will not easily be able to tell when they've gone too far. I would wager that they're going to overdo it, and force the state to step in and set legal limits on them.
Actually the now happily defunct ISP Supanet had just such an offering, called "Supananny" and indeed they did get quite a few takers for it. In this respect they were ahead of the game, though as a company they were horrific slave-drivers to work for, and eventually got taken over just before they went bust.
However, there is one salient point to remember about offering a 'net censorship service: if you filter content for users, you lose Common Carrier Immunity.
Common Carrier Immunity over here works thusly: the ISP is the medium by which a message is received and is not and cannot be held accountable for the actual message its self. Thus if user #1 rants in a highly offensive way at user #2 and user #2 complains about it, the ISP cannot be held accountable for user #2 seeing user #1's ravings and thus both users are kindly told to go away and sort it out without involving the ISP. The way this usually plays out is that the ISP then warns the ranting loon under the Terms & Conditions and kicks them off the service if further trouble occurs, since nobody much wants the hassle from trolls.
The Government porn filter will be different, though. It won't be an opt-in limited-by-contract sort of service but obligatory for all users unless they opt out. The entity responsible for the censor-list will therefore be opening themselves up to an awful lot of legal shit from all directions. If the ban-list is too stringent (and believe me, default-deny ultra-stringent is the only safe way to go) then the censors get heckled and pressured to open it up. If too lenient, they get heckled to do the opposite (and this will happen simultaneously all the damn time). Note also that evading the censorware will become the stated aim of pretty much all teenagers in the country, and will also become the sport of the Anonymous hackers, and also of 4chan. Given the propensity of 4chan for Rickrolling, I'd not be surprised if both activities get combined.
Whichever company, agency or public body gets suckered with the task of actually operating the censorship system is therefore going to be helping themselves to opprobium from all sides, barracking from every crypto-Puritan in the country and heckling from just about everyone else. It'll be an utterly thankless job, made infinitely worse by bloody script kiddies trying to foist Rick Astley porn onto absolutely everything as well...
You can tell that most of the comments on this posting are from outside the UK, because they all assume that the net filter will be effective. It will not. The UK has a long track record of egregious and laughable failure wherever any form of computing device is involved in government. The previous government spend twelve billion pounds (roughly $18 000 000 000 US) on a healthcare computer system which to date has not delivered ANY working product. Indeed this NHS computer system was so dire, so doomed to failure that one of the participant companies recently bought their way out of the original contract.
UK ministers are computer-illiterate morons almost to a man. They are also utterly incapable of running a project successfully, and the companies which prey upon these dullards know this, expect it and exploit it. Any normal project will run via one of the many project management organisational systems, going from initiation through problem capture, solution design, build and implementation phases. Once out of problem capture phases, any good project manager will tell any interfering PHB that amendments to the project will be added to the wishlist for Project 2.0 and will not be acted upon at that time.
This does not happen with most UK Government IT projects; ministerial interference is expected (and indeed hoped for) since it gives the outsourcing companies a very good excuse for why the project is not functioning and producing the expected deliverable. Interference also allows them to push up costs and milk the boondoggle for all it is worth before it gets canned. To summarise, there are companies in the UK which make a point of getting paid for not producing working results.
To date in this parliament we have already had a proposal to build a vast Internet spying system to try to incriminate as many UK citizens as possible, whilst conspicuously ignoring such minor and unimportant inventions as Tor Onion routing and VPNs to neutral countries. Now we're getting another similar internet control scheme, once again conceived by utter morons and to be implemented by exploitative outsourcers. All this in the current economic climate, too.
At present the UK has a structural deficit. It is spending more money per year than it can find in taxes, and is borrowing the remainder by selling bonds and by magicking more money into existence with quantitative easing. The main bank interest rate is being held at 0.5% to try to force people to spend rather than save, and none of these supposed remedies are working. The government is also deeply wedded to the EU project, despite this entity's slow and inevitable fiscal collapse, and seems to want to carry on feeding this beast too. The aforementioned spying projects can therefore be viewed as the actions of scared fools trying to do something, because they don't know how to solve the looming crisis that is about to hit them.
Even if they do have such a tool, it is still effectively useless. By analogy, during World War 2 the allies had broken the German ENIGMA codes, yet had to work very hard to pretend that the code was still secure, to prevent the Germans copping wise to the fact that their codes were useless and devising something better. The same applies here: if the NSA have broken AES, then they cannot use this hack for anything save national security, and must also work hard to prevent the merest suspicion of the hack getting out.
The best thing we could do would be to club together to fund a bounty for information on how to break AES without using brute-force computing, so that we'd know if it could not be trusted (we already know that no government can be trusted to act other than as a self-interested parasite).
For the last year or so, the M66 motorway north of Manchester has not had lighting on it at all. The change in driver behaviour was not particularly marked; a general decrease in speeds of cars is about all (I commute daily on this road) although a small minority of people are seemingly very poor at driving at night.
Perhaps compulsary vision testing (including low-light vision) for drivers every couple of decades might be a good idea?
Way back then, they were the government and they were the only government that mattered. Now the European Union has slithered into power and is dictating much of UK policy by remote control, so the politicians are doing this to try for one last time to appear important.
The only thing that scares our politicians more than being unimportant idiots would, it seems, the thought of seizing back their surrendered power and once again being masters of their own destiny; one quick referendum on continued EU membership and the predictable "Get us out of here!" result, and Britain would once again stand alone and proud. And, in the case of the political infants we now have, proud, alone and really shit-scared.
I now work in a large open-plan office and find this is exactly true. Moreover it only takes one realtively immature, noisy individual to induce most of the rest of the room to be similarly noisy and distracting. Noise-cancelling headphones are a most wonderful invention in such circumstances, I find.
Mr Keen is talking bollocks here. To cite a real world example, look at telecoms in Britain before and after the privatisation and deregulation of the telephone sector. Beforehand, it took months to get a phone line put in, and you had to rent the handset from the monopoly provider. You had a choice of about half a dozen, equally dire handsets.
After the monopoly was lifted, you could get a phone line put into a building in days, and use whatever standards compliant handset you chose; you were also free to put in internal extension lines. I remember 1970s Britain; littered with huge, inefficient nationalised monopolies. Huge, slow, expensive monopolies; life is so much better without them, and it is notable that for all that left-wing pseudo-socialists denounce the right wing politicians who did this here in Britain, no left wing politician has ever been stupid enough to reinstate these monopolies.
The real problem they have is that to shift the usual mindset of "oh look, Microsoft product. It'll be garbage unless you pay way more than the competition, and then it'll be merely mediocre". In fairness to them, they are slowly, infinitesimally getting a vague clue about security on Windows, and the user interface is merely poor now, instead of dire as was. They do produce workmanlike applications now, having started off poorly, briefly called in at total crap, learned a hard lesson and improved.
However, Microsoft does not have a track record of excellence, but one of mediocrity on first release followed by slow, incremental improvements. The first version of anything new from Microsoft will be crap so don't buy it. The new super phone will follow this pattern, so it'll be late 2013 before we see the iPhone-beater in its full, iPhone beating form.
The major lethality of WW I was not down to artillery at all, but was attributable to barbed wire and machine guns. Prior to this war, infantry was vulnerable to cavalry and artillery wasn't much use except on fixed targets. Barbed wire changed all that; cavalry cannot move at all through barbed wire emplacements, and infantry is very greatly slowed down. Machine guns are the other major innovation which made cavalry charges lethal to cavalry, and made cutting barbed wire deadly dangerous. Artillery duels and trench warfare were effectively the result of both sides' military command realising that the old tactics didn't work, and collectively saying "Dur, what do we do now?". Shelling trenches drove men mad, and massed assaults slaughtered thousands, but were both tactics born of lack of ideas.
Development of Babbage computers wouldn't have altered the lethality of this sort of war. What changes this sort of war to WW II styles is the development of better internal combustion engines, which allows armour and air power.
The easy way to do this is to simply write the customer's username and password onto paper (paper tape, for ease of use) along with a timestamp whenever the user changes their password. All you do then is store the paper copy securely somewhere, and use the hashed version in the computers as normal.
The law very likely doesn't say that the information be easily available, merely that it be available. Handing out the non-hashed data to any authority, then telling them "If you need the password, it is on this paper roll somewhere" ought to be sufficient.
Actually you try a spoofing trick a certain youth cafe in London did, back in the 1960s. The cafe owner knew that the police were monitoring the payphone in the cafe, because the place was a known hang-out of youth gangs, and he didn't much like it. So he devised a cunning plan to defeat the problem. Everyone who visited the cafe was, on leaving, given 10 pence and asked to phone the cafe payphone back, to ask when and where the demonstration would be (but NOT to go). A few dozen such calls had the local law absolutely convinced of massed rioting in a local park on a certain day.
On that day, hundreds of police turned out to quell the expected rioting and crowds, which turned out to consist of one pensioner and his equally elderly dog, out for a morning stroll.
The phone tap was abandoned soon afterwards.
Why don't we let them do the research on this then simply buy the tech from them?
Basically the real problem here is the growth of "equality for all" and "everyone's voice is of equal weight" movements, also known as "listening to idiots". We all know what happens in computing projects if you have idiots involved in the process; the same is true when you start working on big, grown-up projects like supplying energy to a nation. California is a prime example of what happens when you let idiots in on the decision-making process for big, important projects; you get shortsighted views predominating until the entire system digs its self into a hole, then carries on digging.
China is ahead of the game here since their political system recruits mostly from engineers and scientists. It lacks a fluffy, warm edge to it but gains instead cold, ruthless pragmatism instead. This is why the Chinese are actively trying to halt their population expansion, are busily expanding mining operations in third-world hell-holes like Zimbabwe, and are researching Thorium reactors; they look ahead for future problems and try to pre-emptively solve them.
We used to do this thinking ahead, but then we started listening to idiots.
To understand what is going on here, you have to understand the UK telecoms market. It all started with a publicly owned conglomerate which did post and telephony rather badly. This got split up, and the telephony sector privatised together with some very special rules to force it to play fair and not exploit its monopoly position. This leaves us with the situation where British Telecom (BT) owns most of the telephone wiring from exchange to end user, yet is forced to share this with assorted other operators and is legally compelled to play them fair. With few exceptions, there is no difference between the copper you're talking over for BT ADSL, Talktalk ADSL or whatever.
The only real competitor in the market is the conglomeration nominally owned by Virginmedia, which is primarily a cable TV outfit which does internet on the side. Pretty much all their cabling dates from the initial build, and covers only those areas initially identified as really good prospects for selling cable TV to (primarily poorer areas, higher density housing, lovers of pay-for football etc). Mobile internet, wide area wifi and so on are minor players and can be discounted.
What this leaves you with is a price war, and a race to the bottom. Virginmedia can supply super-good internet, but only to cabled areas. Niche ISPs can supply good ADSL that is as good as the BT copper can support, and the likes of Talktalk are left slugging it out, trying to cut corners wherever they can to push the price ever lower. This is why we're seeing this crude blackmail attempt; these bargain basement ISPs are struggling to make any margin at all since pretty much every cost and corner that can be cut has been cut, from El Cheapo ADSL modems to call centres outsourced to Elbonian idiots (and the call centre numbers are usually premium rate numbers, to scrape a bit back there too).
None of this is going to change until BT upgrades the copper to the end user (which it is doing, with the Fibre To The Cabinet upgrading programme), and even that is going to take a while since there isn't any real incentive for BT to break any records doing the upgrade. It is a constrained monopoly operator, and is obliged to share any upgrades it makes with its direct competitors, so why bother fussing with upgrades? All BT needs to do is idle along doing the bare minimum, and wait for the competition to cut each others' throats for it.