Powershell is a shell written by programmers who have no understanding of what you want when administering a box. I remember when it surprised me the first time by being clever and inheriting the size of the console and automatically inserting a CR/LF into the lines of the files I was trying to process.... morons. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should, yes OO is a powerful construct but it just gets in the way of a simple scripting tool. Powershell is littered with little gems like this that make it absolutely useless. If you find yourself doing too much with a shell script rewrite it in a more powerful programming language like python, it should take you all of 30 minutes.
Cortana is the best example yet that Microsoft's management is really really dumb. When all else fails pull the only skirt from your games and hope that your client demographic is dumb enought to buy it. Microsoft is a technology company and should be able to come out with compelling technology, instead someone thinks that this is what Steve Jobs would come up with and its just a bit sad. There are a huge number of markets where microsoft should have a natural advantage where the returns are enormous, instead the company keeps tilting against corporate windmills, imagining that they're going to dominate market segments which they don't have a natural advantage which are dominated by players at the top of their game. For example phones are dominated by apple and android, apple have the high ground and Android has the low ground. Android doesn't make money on the phone platform, it role is a loss leader to support the Google ecosystem. So MS has two options, lose money trying to compete with Google or attempt a high market product to compete against Apple, both approaches don't make money for MS. I work in an environment where a group of ICT hopefuls keep trying to pitch MS phones at senior management. Management currently have iphones and keep torpedoing these initiatives so the hopefuls go back, regroup and try to serve up the same meal. Microsoft is not at the top of their game, they are a mature company with weak management dominated by an internal bureacracy. Better returns to shareholder could be garnered by breaking the company up and hoping that this exposes some management talent who can turn this bunch of capital and product around.
Python is simply a better choice for beginers, . It's indent based syntax indirectly teaches students what programs should look like instead of require the teacher to state how indentation improves readability. There are many other nice features however these have been covered elsewhere. I have worked in IT for 25 years and about a decade ago my sister who teaches senior high school students enquired about 'better" teaching languages. I suggested python and after more research and similar suggestions from IT staff in Sydney University she adopted it. The NSW department of education rates teachers based upon their performance based the performance of the students compared against their baseline performance and she has consistently performed in a top few percent. Python won't make a great educator however it is a tool that a good educator would choose.
Open source software is primarily about ego, and Lennart is pushing a viewpoint through his creations that he's a player in this space. By the same token he also believes that he's better than Linus, hence the critique and comment that you don't live up to my standards. On the flip side Lennart could make some consessions himself, the thing that blows my goat is binary logging in systemd, given that he's generally demonstrated that he refuses to compromise why should others listen to his complaints which essentially boils down to "I don't like your style". Lennart is essentially driving a view which has had an impact on the kernel and has been on the recieving end of some criticism and he finds this uncomfortable, the name calling is not the part of Linus' style that he finds most unsetting, its the direct nature of the outting relating to specific issues which have made Lennart complain about Linus's manners. ps I think that both individual have provided some great software and deserve kudos but I think that one of them may fall from grace
What is comes down to is agility and design. You don't control other peoples knowledge and communications to mitigate your flaws, you ensure that you have a process for managing them effectively if you care. If a service is that valueable to you ensure that you have two service delivery mechanisms. Yes its expensive but you've just said that this channel is that important to you. Or live with the risk and keep the cash, in both cases the ball is in your court. The whole censorship approach is created by anal retentive morons who don't understand risk, the mathematics of access control or the environment in which they're building systems.
This stull is not particularly inspiring and about I could have written this stuff when I was at high school. The reality of the situation is that any biological vector created will impact the poor and the 3rd world more than the Western world. Look at natural outbreaks such as HIV. Western world OK (not great butOK), 3rd world broken, Islamic world really broken because the can't discuss the problem openly. The 'cure' in this case might be to infect the region with something virulant and taboo, this may have already been done as apparently there's a couple of particularly virulent STD's making the rounds of ISIS.
There is a solution that does this, it called a mainframe, they're hideously expensive, cooked a motherboard recently 1.2 million, want a 10G network card $20000. Now you can buy an awful lot of commodity hardware for much cheaper so that you have excess resources, need a dedicated system for a database buy one, run the other applications on a shared resource, you'll still end up with spare change if you dump a mainframe contract. You can replace a mainframe with commodity items you just need to plan for it. The cost of this scheduling is more expensive than deploying a couple of dedicated components. The last time that I looked the number of cycles being performance on mainframes had been decreasing for over 25 years. ie there's not a great deal of market demand in this area and most of this market is with legacy systems. The other litmus test is to look at how many successful IT companies that have developed in the last 20 years use a mainframe. I suspect that it is zero. Do google, facebook amazon etc use mainframes? Scheduling and resource control on systems, is a bit like QoS, if you can buy fat pipes just buy fat pipes, it's a better solution and it makes all of the problems go away. Introduce scheduling and you'll be employing goons for now to enternity trying to sort out which application is king and performance still sucks.
In terms of economics, I'd prefer to trust dollars not mouths. All of the major players in ICT in the last 15 years have a base platform of linux, Google, Facebook etc. They didn't use linux because its more expensive, they did it because it's cheaper. The longer that others stay with high cost platforms the longer their competitive margin remains. IT staff cost pretty much the same regardless of the base platform unless you're doing something really esoteric, if you use centos or debian and pay for support not licences where you have a choice you have a chance of making savings. One of the problems with MS is that through a series of low risk choices you get herded into a higher cost solution. Think of the way that wild animal are herded down a funnel with weak barriers until the final half mile which turns into a killing field. Only a few animals make the correct decision of breaking away, the other like this goose try to justify a costly platform as cost effective. ps Mr Creese owns a Windows phone too. He thinks its great.;-)
General Aviation is dying, unless something changes it will dissappear completely. This may assist in reversing the trend, much as the commercial lobby may not like it. Unfortunately FAA has nannied the GA field into the ground, planes are too expensive to certify so the field is dominated by expensive dinsaurs, the average ages of GA planes is so old that if it were alive it would have flaps of loose skin and wrinkes. In short this is about user choice, be clear about the risks, let people provide reviews of the pilots skills and get on with it. I don't really think that the 15% margin is justified, 1% should cover costs here and another 4% for lobby expenses, the rest is greed.
As far as the commercial pilots saying this will fail, 1 You have a professional bias, get over it 2 FAA is under pressure to ensure that GA doesn't fail 3 If this is demonstrably "non-commercial" it should succeed
Passwords are keys, do you put your house and work keys in a mostly public pigeonhole on a regular basis? Then rail against people who are dishonest enough to collect keys from other peoples pidgeonhole? Yeah the key thief that was caught might be a bit of a dick however their a lot of other people who've already taken copies and sorted through your house while you weren't there. What the user doesn't say is that 1. She knew emaiing passwords was a bad idea. 2. She know that password complexity was a good thing but ignored it as its too hard
This is pure protectionism, effectively there are people elsewhere who will do the work cheaper of better. The way to compete against this is to lower your overheads rather than trying to get the government to be your friend. The problem is that people are too busy trying to create companies which create millionares rather than actually do work. Accept that fact that a VFX company doesn't really have much net worth beyond the capabilities of its employees and adjust margins accordingly.
The key problem with these networks is that there the system which keeps content secure however this content is created on ordinary windows PC and file shares. You create content with word and then you upload this into system X. System X is secure but there's a copy on the local network. Also when viewing content it is downloaded to be viewed in word or powerpoint. ie it goes outside the system into the MS world. The logging in windows is very obscure and rarely leveraged in a manner which audits read only access. From the results so far the following can be ascertained. 1. The windows logging wasn't up to the task and they have no idea what was taken 2. They don't want to move away from the present windows centric systems so poor system design isn't being highlighted 3 They don't use two factor authentication What they are trying to do is blame administrators when it's their system which is fundamentally broken and leaks like a sieve. Yes they have a safe but the valuables are being left on the outside.
Ban voice calls on planes, in airport lounges, subways, resturants and cinema. We need legislation so that the state and lawyer can become involved in the enforcement of manners. Also we need laws on the correct position of toilets seats, cutlery positions after meals and the poking and prodding of bodily orrifices in publice places. Conversations on planes should be banned as well as they annoy surrounding passengers as well as children, infants and movies..........Or we could just ensure that airlines provide earplugs on request.
Don't read this it's an advertisement. Short story buy brand X fast food using phone app to jump queue. You can save favourites. Doesn't require any new technology or systems As an aside, the current payment systems are insecure and cost too much. Show me something that is as cheap, convenient and anonymous as cash. Sure it doesn't make company X rich but that's not my job. Find me the visa replacement with lower margins and better security.
There are a couple key reasons for overvalueing management 1 Management key job is to make you do your job for the least amount of pay. This tends to make them avoid rockstars. 2 Management don't like indians being paid more than them. It happens but if you listen to their conversations behind the scenes they bitch madly about this behind the scenes. 3 Management overvalue themselves because they are managers.
Your response should be 1 I don't enjoy management, I enjoy development etc 2 With self motivated....... people like me your managers can manage larger teams allowing for a flatter management structure with larger teams.
If you though that I didn't understand what "packaging" was you're a clod. The discussion about if sets of packages can be aligned in rings whether multidimensional or not is "marketing" in the purest sense, they aren't and will never be rings, its an attractive term that you're familiar with that they are using to sell the concept. This is a top down approach to solving what could be and arguably should be a bottom up methodology. In essence its about control or more specifically a small group's vision of control about how releases should work. Once you have a classification model (rings) you need a classifier etc and suddenly there a layer of control where there was none before. But is was for your own good;-)
If you're concerned about packaging you're in marketing not software development, why not just spend hours talking about the colour of the box and be done with it. This is one of the reasons why debian is making inroads into the enterprise space. Less colour and more bang. Once many years ago I thought that Debian wasn't for business use and only redhat was a contender in this space and I fought hard to standardize on this supported model. Since then the packaging quality of debian has demonstrated its robustness and redhat has been focusing on other things.
Patents are not meant to be allowed for obvious things, ie to someone well versed in the art. Unfortunately, if you do read this patent it is obvious and a bit sad. Apple always likes to own the connector market to peel a few more shekles from devotees wallets.
It's "like" TLS, as in "its none dairy but it tastes just like milk". Google's reason for doing this is to lower their costs associated with better security. This creates a 3 way instead of a 5 way exchange for the security protocol setup. Fewer connections less load on their stuff and less stuff they have to buy.
The security landscape is littered with security implementations which tried improve existing protocols. Just type in the terms WAP and security for a story on how to take a secure starting point SSL and bugger it. Another is Microsoft's introduction of PKINIT for keberos, kerberos is a proveably security protocol which is limitied by the entropy in a users password, MS "fixed" this with PKINIT however they initroduced replay attach vectors precisely because they wanted fewer exchanges. BTW google seems to have done a better job in this regard +1 for google, -1 for MS.
H1Bs are not good for the US, they are good for a segment of the US population at least in the short term, those who own companies. H1Bs are used because they're cheaper and work longer hours and hence cut my company's overheads. I should no longer have to pay the overheads associated with training them so I pay fewer taxes to support training institutions such as Universities as most are trained overseas anyway. It really depends upon your perspective.
Stephen Conroy is an embarrassing idiot and as an Australian can hold my head a little bit higher as a result. Luckily his ineptitude protected the Australian public from his role a media industry stooge. His strategy in relation to the internet was as follows, get a magic filter in place under the guise of "protecting against bad stuff" and then block and stop people from downloading media content. In return provide me with a bit of positive spin in the traditional media space. Unfortunately (for him) he misjudged this Internet thing which unfortunately didn't have a point of ownership. Also as the minister for the Australian Broadband Network he has managed to completely cock this thing up so that the rollout is already far behind schedule, great idea appalling execution. It's a bit like expecting your florist to be able to sideline as a bridge engineer, a bit funny on the surface but underneath deeply tragic for all involved.
There were printers in areas with classifed documents which automatically used to do this. They worked with whitespace, fonts and punctuation. Photocopies of the documents could still be tracked. Great work guys you deserve a badge. Amazon will be able to close the loop by automatically downloading the books that you have on your kindle to "check" that you don't infringe and stomp on those badguys.
The guy is a free software developer and his ego is getting in the way. Essentially its "prima donna" syndrome where the reviews are only important when they bath the individual in glory. Yeah none of those reviewers know anything.... but you still read them;-) The short story is that ICT in general has more people with ego problems than most segments of industry. Poor social misfit is valued by the company/organisation ego blooms, man-boy finds himself isolated and lashes out, discovers others are stronger, fiercer etc. Shrinks back into shell butt filled with hurt and rage;-).. Writes a blog...
There are two things in play here. 1 Ethically questionable behavior on the part of the UK government which I suspect has drifted into a groupthink position of thinking that conventions and laws relating to privacy and decency doesn't exist and don't apply to them. Before you get upset contemplate if your government behaves in the same manner.
2 All of these 'exploits' rely on poor security practices on the part of the other delegates. Where is the two factor authentication, where are the secure channels, where is the choice of secure device vs Iphone. If you're typing you're logging onto a classified network from an Internet cafe you should lose your job.
The Reality is that these people have a different/special moral compass and thus it has always been. Secondly, fools are being trusted with significant privilege which they are treating in a cavilier manner.
In short your government should be providing you with a secure device, this is not a blackberry or an iphone as there are controlled by external parties. If you want a smartphone use something like to nexus 4, Roll your own (from a government perspective) image. Include smartcard support and require it for unlocking (via NFC). (Smartcards which meet Common Criteria targets are $10 each) Ensure that the device filesystems and message stores are encrypted, require smartcard to unlock Use VoIP back to a single IP address and tunnel this traffic through a VPN, make sure that you include a channel for random padding to stop volume based eavesdropping. Run something like Strongswan through your governments evaluation process and package this, it's going to be better than what the US sells you. (Guys you're G20 you can afford this)
Feel smug for a minute and then realise that they are still going to have camera and microphones on you at all times, carry a heshan sack around to cover your head when you're on the phone and learn how to sign over the video link;-)
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Powershell is a shell written by programmers who have no understanding of what you want when administering a box. I remember when it surprised me the first time by being clever and inheriting the size of the console and automatically inserting a CR/LF into the lines of the files I was trying to process.... morons. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should, yes OO is a powerful construct but it just gets in the way of a simple scripting tool. Powershell is littered with little gems like this that make it absolutely useless. If you find yourself doing too much with a shell script rewrite it in a more powerful programming language like python, it should take you all of 30 minutes.
Cortana is the best example yet that Microsoft's management is really really dumb. When all else fails pull the only skirt from your games and hope that your client demographic is dumb enought to buy it. Microsoft is a technology company and should be able to come out with compelling technology, instead someone thinks that this is what Steve Jobs would come up with and its just a bit sad.
There are a huge number of markets where microsoft should have a natural advantage where the returns are enormous, instead the company keeps tilting against corporate windmills, imagining that they're going to dominate market segments which they don't have a natural advantage which are dominated by players at the top of their game. For example phones are dominated by apple and android, apple have the high ground and Android has the low ground. Android doesn't make money on the phone platform, it role is a loss leader to support the Google ecosystem. So MS has two options, lose money trying to compete with Google or attempt a high market product to compete against Apple, both approaches don't make money for MS.
I work in an environment where a group of ICT hopefuls keep trying to pitch MS phones at senior management. Management currently have iphones and keep torpedoing these initiatives so the hopefuls go back, regroup and try to serve up the same meal.
Microsoft is not at the top of their game, they are a mature company with weak management dominated by an internal bureacracy. Better returns to shareholder could be garnered by breaking the company up and hoping that this exposes some management talent who can turn this bunch of capital and product around.
Python is simply a better choice for beginers, . It's indent based syntax indirectly teaches students what programs should look like instead of require the teacher to state how indentation improves readability. There are many other nice features however these have been covered elsewhere. I have worked in IT for 25 years and about a decade ago my sister who teaches senior high school students enquired about 'better" teaching languages. I suggested python and after more research and similar suggestions from IT staff in Sydney University she adopted it. The NSW department of education rates teachers based upon their performance based the performance of the students compared against their baseline performance and she has consistently performed in a top few percent. Python won't make a great educator however it is a tool that a good educator would choose.
Open source software is primarily about ego, and Lennart is pushing a viewpoint through his creations that he's a player in this space. By the same token he also believes that he's better than Linus, hence the critique and comment that you don't live up to my standards. On the flip side Lennart could make some consessions himself, the thing that blows my goat is binary logging in systemd, given that he's generally demonstrated that he refuses to compromise why should others listen to his complaints which essentially boils down to "I don't like your style".
Lennart is essentially driving a view which has had an impact on the kernel and has been on the recieving end of some criticism and he finds this uncomfortable, the name calling is not the part of Linus' style that he finds most unsetting, its the direct nature of the outting relating to specific issues which have made Lennart complain about Linus's manners.
ps I think that both individual have provided some great software and deserve kudos but I think that one of them may fall from grace
What is comes down to is agility and design. You don't control other peoples knowledge and communications to mitigate your flaws, you ensure that you have a process for managing them effectively if you care. If a service is that valueable to you ensure that you have two service delivery mechanisms. Yes its expensive but you've just said that this channel is that important to you. Or live with the risk and keep the cash, in both cases the ball is in your court.
The whole censorship approach is created by anal retentive morons who don't understand risk, the mathematics of access control or the environment in which they're building systems.
This stull is not particularly inspiring and about I could have written this stuff when I was at high school. The reality of the situation is that any biological vector created will impact the poor and the 3rd world more than the Western world. Look at natural outbreaks such as HIV. Western world OK (not great butOK), 3rd world broken, Islamic world really broken because the can't discuss the problem openly.
The 'cure' in this case might be to infect the region with something virulant and taboo, this may have already been done as apparently there's a couple of particularly virulent STD's making the rounds of ISIS.
There is a solution that does this, it called a mainframe, they're hideously expensive, cooked a motherboard recently 1.2 million, want a 10G network card $20000. Now you can buy an awful lot of commodity hardware for much cheaper so that you have excess resources, need a dedicated system for a database buy one, run the other applications on a shared resource, you'll still end up with spare change if you dump a mainframe contract. You can replace a mainframe with commodity items you just need to plan for it. The cost of this scheduling is more expensive than deploying a couple of dedicated components.
The last time that I looked the number of cycles being performance on mainframes had been decreasing for over 25 years. ie there's not a great deal of market demand in this area and most of this market is with legacy systems.
The other litmus test is to look at how many successful IT companies that have developed in the last 20 years use a mainframe. I suspect that it is zero. Do google, facebook amazon etc use mainframes?
Scheduling and resource control on systems, is a bit like QoS, if you can buy fat pipes just buy fat pipes, it's a better solution and it makes all of the problems go away. Introduce scheduling and you'll be employing goons for now to enternity trying to sort out which application is king and performance still sucks.
Make the top of the case clear so that the physical modifications are easy to see and encourage reflashing of images to checksumed versions.
In terms of economics, I'd prefer to trust dollars not mouths. All of the major players in ICT in the last 15 years have a base platform of linux, Google, Facebook etc. They didn't use linux because its more expensive, they did it because it's cheaper. The longer that others stay with high cost platforms the longer their competitive margin remains. ;-)
IT staff cost pretty much the same regardless of the base platform unless you're doing something really esoteric, if you use centos or debian and pay for support not licences where you have a choice you have a chance of making savings. One of the problems with MS is that through a series of low risk choices you get herded into a higher cost solution. Think of the way that wild animal are herded down a funnel with weak barriers until the final half mile which turns into a killing field. Only a few animals make the correct decision of breaking away, the other like this goose try to justify a costly platform as cost effective. ps Mr Creese owns a Windows phone too. He thinks its great.
General Aviation is dying, unless something changes it will dissappear completely. This may assist in reversing the trend, much as the commercial lobby may not like it. Unfortunately FAA has nannied the GA field into the ground, planes are too expensive to certify so the field is dominated by expensive dinsaurs, the average ages of GA planes is so old that if it were alive it would have flaps of loose skin and wrinkes.
In short this is about user choice, be clear about the risks, let people provide reviews of the pilots skills and get on with it.
I don't really think that the 15% margin is justified, 1% should cover costs here and another 4% for lobby expenses, the rest is greed.
As far as the commercial pilots saying this will fail,
1 You have a professional bias, get over it
2 FAA is under pressure to ensure that GA doesn't fail
3 If this is demonstrably "non-commercial" it should succeed
Passwords are keys, do you put your house and work keys in a mostly public pigeonhole on a regular basis? Then rail against people who are dishonest enough to collect keys from other peoples pidgeonhole? Yeah the key thief that was caught might be a bit of a dick however their a lot of other people who've already taken copies and sorted through your house while you weren't there.
What the user doesn't say is that
1. She knew emaiing passwords was a bad idea.
2. She know that password complexity was a good thing but ignored it as its too hard
This is pure protectionism, effectively there are people elsewhere who will do the work cheaper of better. The way to compete against this is to lower your overheads rather than trying to get the government to be your friend.
The problem is that people are too busy trying to create companies which create millionares rather than actually do work. Accept that fact that a VFX company doesn't really have much net worth beyond the capabilities of its employees and adjust margins accordingly.
The key problem with these networks is that there the system which keeps content secure however this content is created on ordinary windows PC and file shares. You create content with word and then you upload this into system X. System X is secure but there's a copy on the local network. Also when viewing content it is downloaded to be viewed in word or powerpoint. ie it goes outside the system into the MS world. The logging in windows is very obscure and rarely leveraged in a manner which audits read only access. From the results so far the following can be ascertained.
1. The windows logging wasn't up to the task and they have no idea what was taken
2. They don't want to move away from the present windows centric systems so poor system design isn't being highlighted
3 They don't use two factor authentication
What they are trying to do is blame administrators when it's their system which is fundamentally broken and leaks like a sieve. Yes they have a safe but the valuables are being left on the outside.
Ban voice calls on planes, in airport lounges, subways, resturants and cinema. We need legislation so that the state and lawyer can become involved in the enforcement of manners. Also we need laws on the correct position of toilets seats, cutlery positions after meals and the poking and prodding of bodily orrifices in publice places. Conversations on planes should be banned as well as they annoy surrounding passengers as well as children, infants and movies..........Or we could just ensure that airlines provide earplugs on request.
Don't read this it's an advertisement. Short story buy brand X fast food using phone app to jump queue. You can save favourites.
Doesn't require any new technology or systems
As an aside, the current payment systems are insecure and cost too much. Show me something that is as cheap, convenient and anonymous as cash. Sure it doesn't make company X rich but that's not my job. Find me the visa replacement with lower margins and better security.
There are a couple key reasons for overvalueing management
1 Management key job is to make you do your job for the least amount of pay. This tends to make them avoid rockstars.
2 Management don't like indians being paid more than them. It happens but if you listen to their conversations behind the scenes they bitch madly about this behind the scenes.
3 Management overvalue themselves because they are managers.
Your response should be ....... people like me your managers can manage larger teams allowing for a flatter management structure with larger teams.
1 I don't enjoy management, I enjoy development etc
2 With self motivated
If you though that I didn't understand what "packaging" was you're a clod. The discussion about if sets of packages can be aligned in rings whether multidimensional or not is "marketing" in the purest sense, they aren't and will never be rings, its an attractive term that you're familiar with that they are using to sell the concept. This is a top down approach to solving what could be and arguably should be a bottom up methodology. In essence its about control or more specifically a small group's vision of control about how releases should work. Once you have a classification model (rings) you need a classifier etc and suddenly there a layer of control where there was none before. But is was for your own good ;-)
If you're concerned about packaging you're in marketing not software development, why not just spend hours talking about the colour of the box and be done with it. This is one of the reasons why debian is making inroads into the enterprise space. Less colour and more bang. Once many years ago I thought that Debian wasn't for business use and only redhat was a contender in this space and I fought hard to standardize on this supported model. Since then the packaging quality of debian has demonstrated its robustness and redhat has been focusing on other things.
Patents are not meant to be allowed for obvious things, ie to someone well versed in the art.
Unfortunately, if you do read this patent it is obvious and a bit sad.
Apple always likes to own the connector market to peel a few more shekles from devotees wallets.
It's "like" TLS, as in "its none dairy but it tastes just like milk".
Google's reason for doing this is to lower their costs associated with better security. This creates a 3 way instead of a 5 way exchange for the security protocol setup. Fewer connections less load on their stuff and less stuff they have to buy.
The security landscape is littered with security implementations which tried improve existing protocols. Just type in the terms WAP and security for a story on how to take a secure starting point SSL and bugger it.
Another is Microsoft's introduction of PKINIT for keberos, kerberos is a proveably security protocol which is limitied by the entropy in a users password, MS "fixed" this with PKINIT however they initroduced replay attach vectors precisely because they wanted fewer exchanges. BTW google seems to have done a better job in this regard +1 for google, -1 for MS.
H1Bs are not good for the US, they are good for a segment of the US population at least in the short term, those who own companies. H1Bs are used because they're cheaper and work longer hours and hence cut my company's overheads. I should no longer have to pay the overheads associated with training them so I pay fewer taxes to support training institutions such as Universities as most are trained overseas anyway. It really depends upon your perspective.
Stephen Conroy is an embarrassing idiot and as an Australian can hold my head a little bit higher as a result. Luckily his ineptitude protected the Australian public from his role a media industry stooge. His strategy in relation to the internet was as follows, get a magic filter in place under the guise of "protecting against bad stuff" and then block and stop people from downloading media content. In return provide me with a bit of positive spin in the traditional media space.
Unfortunately (for him) he misjudged this Internet thing which unfortunately didn't have a point of ownership.
Also as the minister for the Australian Broadband Network he has managed to completely cock this thing up so that the rollout is already far behind schedule, great idea appalling execution. It's a bit like expecting your florist to be able to sideline as a bridge engineer, a bit funny on the surface but underneath deeply tragic for all involved.
There were printers in areas with classifed documents which automatically used to do this. They worked with whitespace, fonts and punctuation. Photocopies of the documents could still be tracked. Great work guys you deserve a badge.
Amazon will be able to close the loop by automatically downloading the books that you have on your kindle to "check" that you don't infringe and stomp on those badguys.
The guy is a free software developer and his ego is getting in the way. Essentially its "prima donna" syndrome where the reviews are only important when they bath the individual in glory. Yeah none of those reviewers know anything.... but you still read them ;-) ;-) .. Writes a blog...
The short story is that ICT in general has more people with ego problems than most segments of industry. Poor social misfit is valued by the company/organisation ego blooms, man-boy finds himself isolated and lashes out, discovers others are stronger, fiercer etc. Shrinks back into shell butt filled with hurt and rage
There are two things in play here.
1 Ethically questionable behavior on the part of the UK government which I suspect has drifted into a groupthink position of thinking that conventions and laws relating to privacy and decency doesn't exist and don't apply to them. Before you get upset contemplate if your government behaves in the same manner.
2 All of these 'exploits' rely on poor security practices on the part of the other delegates. Where is the two factor authentication, where are the secure channels, where is the choice of secure device vs Iphone. If you're typing you're logging onto a classified network from an Internet cafe you should lose your job.
The Reality is that these people have a different/special moral compass and thus it has always been. Secondly, fools are being trusted with significant privilege which they are treating in a cavilier manner.
In short your government should be providing you with a secure device, this is not a blackberry or an iphone as there are controlled by external parties. If you want a smartphone use something like to nexus 4, Roll your own (from a government perspective) image.
Include smartcard support and require it for unlocking (via NFC). (Smartcards which meet Common Criteria targets are $10 each)
Ensure that the device filesystems and message stores are encrypted, require smartcard to unlock
Use VoIP back to a single IP address and tunnel this traffic through a VPN, make sure that you include a channel for random padding to stop volume based eavesdropping.
Run something like Strongswan through your governments evaluation process and package this, it's going to be better than what the US sells you. (Guys you're G20 you can afford this)
Feel smug for a minute and then realise that they are still going to have camera and microphones on you at all times, carry a heshan sack around to cover your head when you're on the phone and learn how to sign over the video link ;-)