At a govt client site for Share point server, we needed CALs for about 15K laptops and 45K desktops. The total cost without discount would have been approx. $2000000. with the discount it came to about approx $420,000. I think this is common with private enterprises too.
Thing is that the CALs are purely a money making scheme in the first place.
Methanol is both highly toxic and highly flammable. That's what the authorities would call "dangerous" if they raided his lab (though they wouldn't blink at gasoline).
Even though methanol in the kind of quantities you'd often find gasoline is likely to be either a fuel or for some kind of "industrial chemistry". "Lab chemistry" tends to involve small quantities of reagents.
I'm guessing many of those salts are at least poisonous.
Even salts which are essential for biological processes are likely to be toxic in certain quantities. Even drinking too much water has been known to kill people.
We have regulations to stop people who are a few neurons shy of a full brain (probably from playing with too many chemicals) harming themselves or others. There are many responsible people who can tinker with chemicals but there are many irresponsible ones who would end up seriously harming themselves or others, accidentally or on purpose.
This might make sense except that restrictions on who can drive are a lot less restrictive. Even though you'd have to be manufacturing high explosives to get anywhere as dangerous as a car.
I make soap, partially for fun and partially due to allergies. I had a neighbor say "You're allowed to do that?" with total disbelief.
The obvious danger doing this is that sodium hydroxide can be nasty, especially if you are starting with it in solid form.
I also make bread (not on the same day), and had the same reaction.
How long before cookery books get treated like chemistry books. N.B. You'd better not tell anyone about the other kind of things you can make with the same fungus too.
The ONLY "ID card" that simply can't be faked is the person himself. In other words you don't issue ID cards at all. When the cop on the street wants to know who you are he takes some measurement of you, such as say a photo of your face and or asks you speak out loud into a microphone, to get a voice sample. Then this info gets compared to a database. Any other system can be faked.
How many criminals would then be "getting away with it" because all the cops were too busy checking IDs.
Re:Different, minimal cards for different purposes
on
U-Turn On UK ID Cards
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· Score: 1
On the other hand, there are people who really are looking forward to just being able to carry around one piece of plastic that serves as an all-purpose ID card. I think they're crazy, and I expect you do too, but I'm not sure it's my place to deny them the right to jeopardise their identity in that way.
Just because some people are foolish is no reason to demand that everyone acts like a fool. (Or for everyone to live in houses made of straw build using bricks would would be "discrimination against" those who think straw is a good building material.)
Re:Different, minimal cards for different purposes
on
U-Turn On UK ID Cards
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· Score: 1
It seems to me that much of the problems with any form of national ID card could be mitigated if you had different cards for different purposes. If I need to be able to assert that I'm old enough to buy something, all I need is a difficult-to-forge card that asserts that fact, and ties that fact to me (with my photograph perhaps). Such a card has no need for my name, my address, or any other facts about my identity. If you wanted to get fancy, you could digitize all of this information and have nothing appearing on the card at all.
This is the well known principle of avoiding putting all of your "eggs" in one basket.
Similarly, a license to drive should be based on my ability to drive. My identity doesn't matter, at least beyond what's needed to prove that I'm the rightful holder of the license. I might need to present some identification to the government when I obtain the license, but that doesn't need to remain with it. So you could have a separate card (or set of digital credentials) for that.
There's also a security advantage in that the only thing your driving document is good for is driving a vehicle where you have passed a test. It cannot be used to impersonate you in respect of anything unrelated to driving. Unlike the current situation where, especially in the US, what is really a "machine operator's permit" has been overloaded with all sorts of things which have absolutly nothing to do with driving a motor vehicle on the public highway.
It's the concentration of all of this into one card that makes that one card so valuable to thieves and a police state.
And risky for your if it is stolen or even compromised. It can even be used to do things you have no intention of doing in your name.
But for most of the uses of the various identity/license/payment/shopper cards, they need to know very little about me. Usually just an account number of some kind, a way to ensure authenticity (digital signature, watermark) and a way for people I present the card to to verify that I'm the rightful holder, if that even matters (like a photograph, or a hash of any kind of biometric data).
The problem is that "identity cards" actually address the wrong "problem". A bank dosn't need to know "who you are" so much as they need to know that you have legitimate access to an account, e.g. are you the same person who opened it? Indeed a bank accepting a document issued by a third party (or even fairly public knowlage about a customert) as proof that someone is their customer is a rather large security hole.
I applied for one of them when I was about 18. The ONE time I needed to actually prove my age (I very rarely get asked for ID, I have some stubble now), the bouncer's answer: sorry, we don't accept them as proof of age. Driving licence or passport.
In other words in order to prove your age a document specifically intended to prove your age isn't acceptable. However one granting you permission to drive on public roads or one to allow you to travel to foreign lands is...
And given the current high-level of protection that the UK gov't applies to the data and computers under it's control, how soon will these servers be repurposed by hackers for denial-of-service attacks (as they have most excellent tubes connected to the internets)?
It might be wiser to assume that this will be the case from the outset.
However, I am sure they will "catch" some idiot who sends out an email with "I'm so mad at this tax increase for this stupid new internet monitoring system, I want to bomb 11 Downing Street tomorrow at 9 AM".
Assuming that they are actually in the UK and not foreign spammer:)
This would have to get so expensive to do, and yet, only be able to catch the dumbest of terrorist (the ones that would text "Now, where do I set the bomb off again?").
Not that there appear to be any smart terrorists currently operating in the UK. Anyway even dumb ones are probably better tackled by proper police work, though there are other things the police should be concentrating on.
It probably should read more like
"Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database. It will subsequently be copied onto laptops, USB flash drives, portable hard drives and DVDs. Which will be left in random locations, including pub car parks, petrol stations, trains and taxis."
There are many antique 3rd part drivers for Linux for embedded devices and busses (COMEDI doesn't get updated often, DDC's Linux drivers for $1000+ aviation buses haven't been updated in years,
How often does this kind of hardware get "upgraded".
I flew Cathay Pacific recently, and they were using Linux for their in-flight entertainment too (my screen was stuck in standby at the start of the flight, so I got to see it reboot).
Probably because it's powered from the cabin bus, which is the dirtiest and least reliable power supply on the aircraft. It will also glitch by design when switched between external and internal power.
Current affairs programs in Australia are a joke. Literally, respected journalists make jokes about them. No-one cares what the fucktards at Today Tonight have to say.
Except the "respected journalists", so they can make fun of it and presumably the production crew, otherwise they wouldn't bother/reclassify it as comedy.
As long as the DRM continues to be broken quickly as this, we will be able to exercise the freedoms that it was designed to take away from us. Yes, it doesn't solve the problem, but it brings a relief, when the unpleasant possibility that the DRM scheme might actually work this time is crushed.
About the only reason for a DRM scheme not being "broken" quickly is if there is little or no content people are interested in using it. No matter how good the cryptography (ab)using encryption in this way is fundermentally flawed.
Why do so many American think that their government can be easily overthrown by a rabble with guns? If it all goes downhill, either the army will be on the people's side (meaning that it will be them providing the fire-power for any coup), it will be split (civilian militia would not likely do well against even half an army), or it will be on the government's side.
Or they could take no part at all. As has been known to happen.
'm not sure how deluded you'd have to be to think that an a couple of boom-sticks could take on armoured helicopters, tanks, bombs (both nuclear and regular), planes, sophisticated tactics and organisation, armoured vehicles, high explosives, heavy machine guns and snipers, but I can assure you that for all the good any civilian owned arms would do, you may as well have rocks and knives.
Militias won against the US in Vietnam; against the USSR in Afghanistan and against Israel in Lebanon (twice). Currently militias in Afghanistan and Iraq are attacking occupying armies. (The situation of one side having a powerful military with every weapon they could possibly want whilst the other has only rocks isn't to far away from the Israelis and Palestinians. Dispite this disparity the Palestinians havn't been wiped of the face of the planet.) Less recently French militia groups were supported by the Allies in WWII.
Even without the.22, said fuckwit still could kill with a little more than pulling a trigger--perhaps by stabbing with a kitchen knife, or setting a building on fire.
Or by driving a vehicle into them. Yet there is little support for regulating driving along with car ownership in anything like the way firearms are restricted. Even though the only parts of the world where guns kill more people than cars are warzones.
Violent crime is about hearts and minds, not weapons. When a person decides to take a human life, you shouldn't be looking in his hand to see where the problem is.
Also anyone who really wants a gun for criminal purposes can probably get one.
Which reminds me, the 5th of November also happens to be the day after the US presidential election. Remember, remember, the 5th of November.
The plot was actually due to take place on the 4th. But news took a while to travel in the early 17th century. No doubt also the authorities wanted to "keep a lid on things" until they were sure they had rounded up all the conspirators.
Guns exist and cannot be uninvented. Japan did actually manage to ban guns from the country for a time, but that wasn't too sucessful a policy. Most so called "gun control" is nothing like as comprehensive as the Japanese approach.
there is an old saying "an armed society is a polite society". perhaps this is why the streets are full of little thugs, because there is no danger of anyone fighting back and the cops are laughably under resourced.
What's to stop these "little thugs" joining the police force?
and no before you go off on some tangent about the wild west, it's not gun battles in the street that stop crimminals,
Which can happen between rival criminal gangs or criminal gangs and police.
the mere fact it MIGHT happen to be them that gets blown away that stops them.
Also where the public can carry concealed guns criminals have to look out for everyone. Not just police and rival gangs who are likely to be easily identifiable. I suspect thr risk of death is a powerful deterant to crime.
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At a govt client site for Share point server, we needed CALs for about 15K laptops and 45K desktops. The total cost without discount would have been approx. $2000000. with the discount it came to about approx $420,000. I think this is common with private enterprises too.
Thing is that the CALs are purely a money making scheme in the first place.
The government has no business agreeing the NDA's over public expenditure on software.
Does government have any business having NDAs with respect to anything?
Methanol is both highly toxic and highly flammable. That's what the authorities would call "dangerous" if they raided his lab (though they wouldn't blink at gasoline).
Even though methanol in the kind of quantities you'd often find gasoline is likely to be either a fuel or for some kind of "industrial chemistry". "Lab chemistry" tends to involve small quantities of reagents.
I'm guessing many of those salts are at least poisonous.
Even salts which are essential for biological processes are likely to be toxic in certain quantities. Even drinking too much water has been known to kill people.
We have regulations to stop people who are a few neurons shy of a full brain (probably from playing with too many chemicals) harming themselves or others. There are many responsible people who can tinker with chemicals but there are many irresponsible ones who would end up seriously harming themselves or others, accidentally or on purpose.
This might make sense except that restrictions on who can drive are a lot less restrictive. Even though you'd have to be manufacturing high explosives to get anywhere as dangerous as a car.
I make soap, partially for fun and partially due to allergies. I had a neighbor say "You're allowed to do that?" with total disbelief.
The obvious danger doing this is that sodium hydroxide can be nasty, especially if you are starting with it in solid form.
I also make bread (not on the same day), and had the same reaction.
How long before cookery books get treated like chemistry books. N.B. You'd better not tell anyone about the other kind of things you can make with the same fungus too.
The ONLY "ID card" that simply can't be faked is the person himself. In other words you don't issue ID cards at all. When the cop on the street wants to know who you are he takes some measurement of you, such as say a photo of your face and or asks you speak out loud into a microphone, to get a voice sample. Then this info gets compared to a database. Any other system can be faked.
How many criminals would then be "getting away with it" because all the cops were too busy checking IDs.
On the other hand, there are people who really are looking forward to just being able to carry around one piece of plastic that serves as an all-purpose ID card. I think they're crazy, and I expect you do too, but I'm not sure it's my place to deny them the right to jeopardise their identity in that way.
Just because some people are foolish is no reason to demand that everyone acts like a fool. (Or for everyone to live in houses made of straw build using bricks would would be "discrimination against" those who think straw is a good building material.)
It seems to me that much of the problems with any form of national ID card could be mitigated if you had different cards for different purposes. If I need to be able to assert that I'm old enough to buy something, all I need is a difficult-to-forge card that asserts that fact, and ties that fact to me (with my photograph perhaps). Such a card has no need for my name, my address, or any other facts about my identity. If you wanted to get fancy, you could digitize all of this information and have nothing appearing on the card at all.
This is the well known principle of avoiding putting all of your "eggs" in one basket.
Similarly, a license to drive should be based on my ability to drive. My identity doesn't matter, at least beyond what's needed to prove that I'm the rightful holder of the license. I might need to present some identification to the government when I obtain the license, but that doesn't need to remain with it. So you could have a separate card (or set of digital credentials) for that.
There's also a security advantage in that the only thing your driving document is good for is driving a vehicle where you have passed a test. It cannot be used to impersonate you in respect of anything unrelated to driving. Unlike the current situation where, especially in the US, what is really a "machine operator's permit" has been overloaded with all sorts of things which have absolutly nothing to do with driving a motor vehicle on the public highway.
It's the concentration of all of this into one card that makes that one card so valuable to thieves and a police state.
And risky for your if it is stolen or even compromised. It can even be used to do things you have no intention of doing in your name.
But for most of the uses of the various identity/license/payment/shopper cards, they need to know very little about me. Usually just an account number of some kind, a way to ensure authenticity (digital signature, watermark) and a way for people I present the card to to verify that I'm the rightful holder, if that even matters (like a photograph, or a hash of any kind of biometric data).
The problem is that "identity cards" actually address the wrong "problem". A bank dosn't need to know "who you are" so much as they need to know that you have legitimate access to an account, e.g. are you the same person who opened it? Indeed a bank accepting a document issued by a third party (or even fairly public knowlage about a customert) as proof that someone is their customer is a rather large security hole.
A driving licence is only an alternative if you can drive and at that point surely you would be paying for the licence anyway?
It's also a completly inappropriate document to use in respect of purchasing alcoholic beverages for immediate personal consumption.
I applied for one of them when I was about 18. The ONE time I needed to actually prove my age (I very rarely get asked for ID, I have some stubble now), the bouncer's answer: sorry, we don't accept them as proof of age. Driving licence or passport.
In other words in order to prove your age a document specifically intended to prove your age isn't acceptable. However one granting you permission to drive on public roads or one to allow you to travel to foreign lands is...
And given the current high-level of protection that the UK gov't applies to the data and computers under it's control, how soon will these servers be repurposed by hackers for denial-of-service attacks (as they have most excellent tubes connected to the internets)?
:)
It might be wiser to assume that this will be the case from the outset.
However, I am sure they will "catch" some idiot who sends out an email with "I'm so mad at this tax increase for this stupid new internet monitoring system, I want to bomb 11 Downing Street tomorrow at 9 AM".
Assuming that they are actually in the UK and not foreign spammer
This would have to get so expensive to do, and yet, only be able to catch the dumbest of terrorist (the ones that would text "Now, where do I set the bomb off again?").
Not that there appear to be any smart terrorists currently operating in the UK. Anyway even dumb ones are probably better tackled by proper police work, though there are other things the police should be concentrating on.
It probably should read more like "Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database. It will subsequently be copied onto laptops, USB flash drives, portable hard drives and DVDs. Which will be left in random locations, including pub car parks, petrol stations, trains and taxis."
There are many antique 3rd part drivers for Linux for embedded devices and busses (COMEDI doesn't get updated often, DDC's Linux drivers for $1000+ aviation buses haven't been updated in years,
How often does this kind of hardware get "upgraded".
I flew Cathay Pacific recently, and they were using Linux for their in-flight entertainment too (my screen was stuck in standby at the start of the flight, so I got to see it reboot).
Probably because it's powered from the cabin bus, which is the dirtiest and least reliable power supply on the aircraft. It will also glitch by design when switched between external and internal power.
Passing a law against What everyone does is a risky affair.
Especially anywhere which wants to be considered "democratic". Though similar things happen in respect of drug prohibition.
Sure, legislators have to go along with the concept that recorded media is property.
Actually they don't, since the whole idea of "intellectual property" is a creation of legislation on the first place.
Current affairs programs in Australia are a joke. Literally, respected journalists make jokes about them. No-one cares what the fucktards at Today Tonight have to say.
Except the "respected journalists", so they can make fun of it and presumably the production crew, otherwise they wouldn't bother/reclassify it as comedy.
As long as the DRM continues to be broken quickly as this, we will be able to exercise the freedoms that it was designed to take away from us. Yes, it doesn't solve the problem, but it brings a relief, when the unpleasant possibility that the DRM scheme might actually work this time is crushed.
About the only reason for a DRM scheme not being "broken" quickly is if there is little or no content people are interested in using it. No matter how good the cryptography (ab)using encryption in this way is fundermentally flawed.
Why do so many American think that their government can be easily overthrown by a rabble with guns? If it all goes downhill, either the army will be on the people's side (meaning that it will be them providing the fire-power for any coup), it will be split (civilian militia would not likely do well against even half an army), or it will be on the government's side.
Or they could take no part at all. As has been known to happen.
'm not sure how deluded you'd have to be to think that an a couple of boom-sticks could take on armoured helicopters, tanks, bombs (both nuclear and regular), planes, sophisticated tactics and organisation, armoured vehicles, high explosives, heavy machine guns and snipers, but I can assure you that for all the good any civilian owned arms would do, you may as well have rocks and knives.
Militias won against the US in Vietnam; against the USSR in Afghanistan and against Israel in Lebanon (twice). Currently militias in Afghanistan and Iraq are attacking occupying armies. (The situation of one side having a powerful military with every weapon they could possibly want whilst the other has only rocks isn't to far away from the Israelis and Palestinians. Dispite this disparity the Palestinians havn't been wiped of the face of the planet.) Less recently French militia groups were supported by the Allies in WWII.
Even without the .22, said fuckwit still could kill with a little more than pulling a trigger--perhaps by stabbing with a kitchen knife, or setting a building on fire.
Or by driving a vehicle into them. Yet there is little support for regulating driving along with car ownership in anything like the way firearms are restricted. Even though the only parts of the world where guns kill more people than cars are warzones.
Violent crime is about hearts and minds, not weapons. When a person decides to take a human life, you shouldn't be looking in his hand to see where the problem is.
Also anyone who really wants a gun for criminal purposes can probably get one.
Which reminds me, the 5th of November also happens to be the day after the US presidential election. Remember, remember, the 5th of November.
The plot was actually due to take place on the 4th. But news took a while to travel in the early 17th century. No doubt also the authorities wanted to "keep a lid on things" until they were sure they had rounded up all the conspirators.
tends to work much better when there are no guns
Guns exist and cannot be uninvented. Japan did actually manage to ban guns from the country for a time, but that wasn't too sucessful a policy.
Most so called "gun control" is nothing like as comprehensive as the Japanese approach.
there is an old saying "an armed society is a polite society". perhaps this is why the streets are full of little thugs, because there is no danger of anyone fighting back and the cops are laughably under resourced.
What's to stop these "little thugs" joining the police force?
and no before you go off on some tangent about the wild west, it's not gun battles in the street that stop crimminals,
Which can happen between rival criminal gangs or criminal gangs and police.
the mere fact it MIGHT happen to be them that gets blown away that stops them.
Also where the public can carry concealed guns criminals have to look out for everyone. Not just police and rival gangs who are likely to be easily identifiable. I suspect thr risk of death is a powerful deterant to crime.
It's those views that really harm shooting as a sport, and I know people who want all firearms in the country banned except for police.
Why should the police be an exception here?
I don't believe that a DNS blacklist is the proposal. More a blacklist + on-the-fly content analysis.
Analysis by machines which are not that smart in the first place...
The slowdowns and false positives are the technical argument.
There are also likely to be all sorts of false negatives. Especially once people find out how to deliberatly trigger them.
Time to put up a few spycams in EVERY MP's bedroom and car
:)
Please don't stop with Aussie MPs
plus spycams in the dingo house called parliment
I hope there are no dingos (or domestic dogs) with lawyers. They are going to be highly insulted being compared with MPs.
and to broadcast it 24x7 on the 'net.
As well as scope for some "reality shows".
After all if i have nothing to hide why worry is their argument, so apply it to them!
Once a few MPs are SPitzer'ed then the law will be gone.
Unless Australian MPs are very well behaved it probably wouldn't last a month.