I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but vehicles with such vulnerabilities have already been compromised on public roads in at least one controversial demonstration. This is not a hypothetical threat. Vehicles vulnerable to this sort of attack are on the roads today, yet so far governments their regulators either don't understand the dangers or don't seem to be willing to act on them.
I appreciate your smiley, this is actually a serious security issue. The trouble is, it's not even an insurgent on the far side of the world driving a remote controlled weapon that is the biggest concern. It's an insurgent on the far side of the world turning your own car into a remote controlled weapon while you and your family are driving home in it from a shopping trip, along with many other cars at the same time.
I disapprove of fear-mongering over terrorism as much as the next guy, but objectively, the reason 9/11 was so devastating was that it turned an everyday facility that many of us take for granted into a weapon, unexpectedly. And the reason the botnet that took down several major websites a little while back was so devastating was that it co-opted the insecure connected devices of numerous otherwise innocent third parties to do its dirty work. The parallels with what could happen with insecure remote communications and software control systems in modern cars are disturbing, and there have already been plenty of demonstrations showing how insecure many of these systems really are today.
The thing that worries me is that pretty soon, you won't be able to buy any car that doesn't include a whole bunch of electronic remote communications, whether you want it or not, and regardless of whether you consider it a security and/or privacy risk.
Here in the UK insurers routinely demand that a recognised tracker device be installed in faster/higher-end vehicles as an anti-theft measure before they will provide cover. Moreover, I don't know myself where the tracker is installed in my own vehicle, because no-one except the person who actually did the installation does; apparently the people who do it won't even tell the dealers or allow anyone else in the room while they're working. I have some reservations about that already given the obvious privacy implications and the legal requirement to have insurance to use the car. But at least that is a separate system, operated by a private company whose contract is with me and whose reputation would be on the line if it came out they were activating the tracking for any reason other than my calling them and asking them to.
With modern cars that come with the likes of OnStar as standard, or with the new European eCall system that will be mandatory for all new cars sold in Europe within the next couple of years, you're talking about an electronic system that is intimately connected into the operational systems on the car and has remote communications capabilities. Given the notorious lack of security within a typical car's software environment, these systems seem potentially very dangerous to me, despite being well-intentioned and presumably being beneficial if you really are in a serious accident.
That's a legitimate and significant concern, certainly. While there is scope for such deliberate abuse and I agree we should always be cautious there, I suspect the greater risk in the real world is of damage caused either through negligence or not being sufficiently private and secure against third parties.
Government authorities are ultimately real people, and I don't doubt that most working in the police and security services are sincerely trying to do the right thing. However, they're also only human, and making a mistake with adverse consequences for the victim is all too conceivable here.
Also, one of the worst parts of this law is going to create possibly the most comprehensive blackmail database in the history of the world, and it's going to be held by non-government organisations whose priority is their commercial interests. We're going to be one capable hacker away from millions of people having their privacy and security compromised.
And of course, there is the perennial risk of scope creep. Once you've got a database of who's visited which sites, with the implicit assumption that an IP address and visiting a site is evidence of a specific individual being interested in whatever that site is for, it's not exactly a big jump to things like mass prosecutions over alleged copyright infringement by big media groups, or insurance and other financial services companies coming to some understanding with the government over profiling their customers.
Unfortunately, there is so little public awareness of what's going on here -- it's barely been reported in the press, with all the Brexit and Trump news filling the front pages lately -- that something very bad will probably have to happen to lots of people before we collectively wake up. And in the meantime, very bad things will probably be happening very quietly to a few people, and what is going to protect them?
Perhaps the most depressing thing is that this isn't even mentioned on major news outlets like the BBC today.
The second most depressing thing is that Labour wanted it as well and basically allowed the Tories to wave it through as soon as they were no longer hampered by being in coalition. If you look at the Parliamentary speeches, a lot of MPs seem to genuinely believe this is a good and necessary law.
Most of the public don't want it, once they know about it and understand what it is. Most of the smaller political parties don't support it either. Legal challenges about violating the right to a private life and so on are inevitable. But the reality is, both big parties love this authoritarian measure, so it's going to be an uphill struggle -- and probably a Sisyphean one -- to rein it in.
Brexit is certainly controversial, but I think a lot of what you're suggesting there is unrealistic. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing presumably depends on which side of the debate you come down on.
There is little evidence of appetite for another independence referendum in Scotland, and little evidence that if one were held then it would give a different result to last time. I know polling data is not exactly held in high regard right now, but on any recent polls from the main sources, it hasn't even been close.
It's also highly unlikely that the government won't trigger Article 50, probably as close as it can to Theresa May's stated target of March next year given the limitations caused by legal challenge. That legal mess will sort itself out, and sooner or later things will get to a vote in Parliament, at which point a fairly large majority of MPs would be risking their positions by not supporting moves to leave against the wishes of their constituents. We might see three line whips in the Commons and even the invocation of the Parliament Acts to overcome objections in the Lords, and that might delay things up to a point, but the May administration basically loses all credibility if it can't push this one through now.
Hard or soft Brexit is the big real question today, and this is complicated by the fact that we know neither how reasonable the EU will be in any future negotiations nor why those who voted to leave actually did so (or anything that those who voted to remain accepted but reluctantly, for that matter). The current EU leadership seem to be going out of their way to be unconstructive so far, but that may change with time and/or the results of major elections in other EU member states next year. And a lot of leave voters might prefer a harder Brexit anyway, since as you point out there's no realistic prospect of remaining a member of the single market but also achieving some of the major goals of leaving such as control of immigration or the ability to make deals with other trading partners independently.
So all in all, I doubt the US result would have been heavily influenced against Trump even if the UK had been doing all this a bit earlier. I suspect the greatest fear in the minds of many establishment figures, in the US and particularly in the EU, is that these anti-establishment movements will win and then not fail horribly, thus demonstrating that the establishment and maintaining status quo isn't actually as essential as they would like the public to think. So far in the UK there's a lot of doom-saying and some real and significant problems caused by the uncertainty alone, but there's also relatively little sign of the sky falling now or being likely to fall catastrophically even when Brexit actually happens. Only time will tell whether the leavers were right.
It does happen, rarely. But there's not much point making a show of force that no-one can see, so in this case it's likely that everyone (including the Russians) knew exactly where everyone else was.
The thing is, military technology is now so powerful that everything you said would still be true with a fraction of the investment. As the saying goes, we don't know exactly what weapons a third world war would be fought with, but if there is a fourth it will be fought with spears and slingshots.
My guess is that they are hoping the US will continue to pick up the slack since the US wildly over spends on it's military. Not sure how long that will go on with the new idiot about to enter the White House.
In fairness, a policy of expecting everyone else to honour their commitments and invest in their own national defence at the agreed levels is one of the few relatively sane things he's come up with. It's not good for the US that it is effectively subsidising the defence of many other nations, but it's also not good for those other nations to be so dependent on the good will of a sovereign foreign power for their own protection.
But I agree that it makes little sense for a maritime nation like the UK to have a second rate navy.
Well, you have to see this in context. It's about having ships with no missiles now so we can afford aircraft carriers with no planes later.:-)
Please note that I didn't say it was common. I was just pointing out that not all networking gear can be taken over by a new admin team as simply as sticking a paperclip into a little hole for a few seconds, and sometimes this is a deliberate choice by the purchaser.
As for the questions in your other posts, I'd say the kind of place that does want the heavy security version of deployment is exactly the kind of place where only a relatively small number of people ever have access credentials. Fortunately, in our current context, those people also tend to be carefully vetted and often formally security checked, and they tend to be pretty well respected and well compensated as the industry goes, so a mass walk-out seems unlikely in that kind of organisation.
If they did ever screw up badly enough to trigger one, I imagine that results really would be pretty catastrophic, though. Some organisations lose an almost unbelievable amount of money per minute of downtime. Think of big online retailers, or manufacturing organisations that order in resources for their production lines in near real time with very little kept in stock. Some organisations can get into serious trouble in the event of a security or privacy breach and worse trouble the longer the breach is not contained. I'm sure you're aware that these kinds of organisations typically have automatic failovers to hot standby systems, support people on call 24/7 with provisions for remote access in emergencies, service level agreements with everyone you depend on, and so on. But remember we were talking about a business deciding to lay off hundreds of its IT staff at once here, and imagine that everyone who even knew about any of those contingency arrangements, never mind actually being part of them, was suddenly unavailable. It's not that much of a stretch to believe that some large organisations would not be very resilient in the face of that situation.
Sure you can, though if you're on Windows 10 you may have other things to worry about. On older versions, you can disable or remove all the dubious phone-home behaviours, or just install something like Spybot Anti-Beacon and let it turn everything off for you, and then Microsoft will be none the wiser whichever browser (including IE) you choose to use.
It looks like we agree on much of this. I'm a little disappointed with what seems like an unnecessarily negative response by the academic community, but it's hard to be too critical of their cautious reaction. After all, it's their careers that are going to take a hit if things don't work out.
One of the things I've had difficulty understanding myself is how much of what we've been seeing is a "real" consequence of any likely form of Brexit, how much is a rational response to Brexit-related uncertainty but might be expected to stabilise as more details are known, and how much is in the mysterious third category of "things that weren't great anyway but Brexit is a perfect scapegoat". When it comes to issues like the value of the pound or the support for younger scientists, I'm pretty sure there are elements of all three in there, but I find it hard to separate them in any objective way.
I reached a similar conclusion to you about Brexit as a whole. Economically, it will almost certainly cause harm in the short term, from the uncertainty if nothing else. Maybe we'll be worse off in the medium term as well, depending on any deal that is done as part of Brexit. If we get one of the harder variations of Brexit, then our future prosperity is likely to be influenced at least as much by how any opportunities for developing relationships outside the EU play out, and I don't think anyone really knows for sure whether that could leave us better off than being in the EU.
No passwords? Physical access and boot media solves that.
It depends on the systems, though. I've worked on projects writing control software for some high-end network security devices, and we tended to have two very different types of customer: those who wanted a perfect factory reset, where physical presence was enough to restore the hardware completely to its original state, and those who wanted a total lock down, so anyone who didn't have the right credentials literally couldn't do anything to access the box and if passwords were lost it became a $100,000 paperweight. Without getting into tedious details, the latter policy did actually make sense given the nature of these particular devices in some highly secured deployments, but if you suddenly lost all the relevant admins in that scenario, it wouldn't have mattered how many contractors you hired to fix it. You'd need totally new hardware, and your comms would be down until someone rewired everything to remove the previous security devices from the equation and deploy any replacements.
I don't understand what drives C level officers to H1B folks. It almost never, ever turns out well.
If they were leading a previously failing organisation, and yet they managed to reduce or reverse losses for a few successive quarters by cutting those costs, their performance looks good while they're searching for somewhere else to go next, while the negative consequences probably won't be felt until some time after they've moved on.
You jest (maybe?) but it would be fascinating to see what would happen if the entire IT department at one of these places really did resign en masse and literally just pick up their things and walk out the door.
If they've already been told they're being laid off, would they typically lose out on any benefits or protections other than pay for whatever handover period was involved, under the rules in the relevant US state(s)?
Even if would, there's a union-style element of taking one for the team that might appeal to experienced workers who are getting screwed to a large degree anyway. After the first major company failed within weeks because it was no longer operationally viable, others might be inclined to treat their staff with a little more respect.
I live in Cambridge, and I've heard a lot of this discussed in person by those on the sharp end. Cambridge University is one of the biggest beneficiaries in terms of funding from the likes of Horizon 2020, as well as the European Research Council. Concern is understandable.
If we look at the facts, the UK government, right up to the Chancellor himself, has already given some assurances about honouring funding agreements made with the EU even if they extend beyond Brexit. However, there is also the supporting infrastructure to deal with, some of it also receiving funding from the EU, and there is collaboration with academic partners from elsewhere in the EU to consider, just to highlight two other prominent issues of concern. And there is always the question of what happens after any assurances given so far run out. There has been much less commitment from the government so far in these related areas.
It does at least appear that the government realises this is a significant issue and is willing to intervene to protect the UK academic and research community. Although it's still early days in terms of figuring out the future relationship between the UK and EU, there already appears to be support for funding potentially as far away as the mid 2020s, assuming a Brexit in 2019, which if you think about it is actually quite remarkable within a few months of the surprising result and before we've even had the new Chancellor's first Budget.
So I'm a little disappointed in some of my academic peers, because you would have hoped that they of all people could have offered a measured and proportionate response to changing circumstances. Most of all, you would hope they would base that response on the evidence more than the fear, and consider that it's going to take time to work through these issues, just like everything else around Brexit. So far, unfortunately, that considered approach mostly seems to have been overcome by the fear and uncertainty, and that is doing more damage than any real changes so far. Hopefully things will improve over the months to come as the picture becomes clearer.
The pound is down 18% already and nothing has even happened yet. The irony is most of the older (50+) people who voted leave have just shot themselves in the foot as by the time they retire their pensions will be quite literally, fucked.
That is debatable. For those whose pensions are using funds traded in Sterling but invested in foreign assets, the weakening of the pound is a huge boost. Have you looked at the FTSE 100 lately? It's strongly negatively correlated with the value of the pound.
More generally, I wish people understood that changes in the exchange rate aren't necessarily a bad thing. Although Brexit has surely been a catalyst and exacerbated the recent fall in the value of Sterling, many economists had been arguing that it was somewhat overvalued and due for a correction since well before Brexit was an issue. The recent drop will make going abroad or investing in foreign assets more expensive for Brits in the future, but on the other hand, it also helps our tourism industry, our creative industry, our exporters, and our savers who had already invested in foreign assets, to give a few examples.
FYI, they are also releasing a security-only patch each month, but it's not being advertised or distributed via the usual Windows Update mechanism now. (This is probably a blessing anyway, given how hopelessly slow and unreliable Windows Update has been in recent months.)
Instead, you have to go to the Microsoft Update Catalog and look it up manually. Search for something like "October 2016" and look for the monthly update or rollup for your version of the OS under the "Security Updates" classification. Download the relevant update, and then install it using WUSA.
There's a stunning irony that it doesn't currently seem to be possible to verify the integrity of that download against any published checksums or the like, while the Update Catalog itself isn't served over HTTPS, so it's basically impossible to obtain the security-only updates securely. However, if you're willing to trust the path between your systems and Microsoft's server, this does at least get you the security patches without anything else you might not want on your systems running pre-10 Windows versions.
they may still trade, but they no longer get the benefits of being an EU member.
benefits that include easier, simpler, and cheaper trade.
When trading with the EU or those the EU has a favourable existing trade deal with, yes, and that's going to be a significant loss if we wind up with one of the harder options for Brexit.
On the other hand, being outside the EU customs union would give more options for the UK to make its own trade deals with partners outside the EU, and it would immediately lift EU-imposed barriers that currently exist when trading with nations the EU does not currently have a deal with, such as the US and much of Asia.
Being outside the customs union would also mean that UK businesses wouldn't have to comply with EU rules even if they weren't actually exporting to the EU, which could have significant benefits both for those businesses primarily serving the home market and for those exporting outside the EU.
The big difficulty at the moment is that no-one knows whether those potential benefits from being outside the customs union would outweigh the potentially heavy losses on the EU side in the longer term, hence all the debate about hard vs. soft Brexit.
or the economic opportunity afforded by EU citizenship, the ability to easily take a job in another country than they now will be able; that economic opportunity, and economic mobility conferred by it, is now lost.
That seems pessimistic. UK citizens go to work in other countries around the world all the time, and we have immigrants coming to live and work here from all over the world as well. Outside the EU, depending on any deal that gets done, it might not be as easy for people to move in either direction. But again, we don't know yet what the EU-UK relationship will be post-Brexit, and no-one knows yet what any system for immigration into the UK from the EU or for emigrating to the EU from the UK will look like.
Essentially you want Windows 7 with longer support, but can Microsoft honestly charge hundreds of dollars for that?
Actually, I wish they had done something very much like that. They would have a commercially viable way to continue support for a good product indefinitely, and the rest of us wouldn't have to put up with either fighting them to keep our systems working the way we want or switching to an alternative that for some reason we consider worse than what we had before.
For critical software like an OS, I think it's reasonable to expect a certain amount of support (say, bug fixes plus security updates for the realistic working lifetime of the hardware it runs on) to be included with the purchase. However, offering some sort of optional and reasonably priced subscription to fund those updates beyond that pre-determined cut-off point and to maintain compatibility with newer equipment and standards that are released after the original OS seems like a win-win deal for everyone.
.. in (large) part because it has easy access to the EU.
In part, sure. How much is debatable. The UK has been a global hub since long before the EU existed, and it still has the advantages I mentioned before whether it remains in the EU or not.
Many businesses are already working out plans to move operations to Amsterdam and/or Frankfurt ( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07... ).
Says the article from just after the surprise result, like a lot of other articles from just after the surprise result. But talk is cheap, and in this case talk is also leverage for big businesses over a government on the back foot, so actions speak louder than words.
p>Remember that the UK has always had the most special deals and exemptions in the EU, mainly attained by being obstructive.
That and being a relatively valuable and powerful member, which gave enough influence to win concessions.
As for the rest of your last paragraph, you are describing exactly the sort of petulance I meant. It does not make sense, economically speaking or for long-term relations in other areas, for the remaining EU member states to be harsh on a Brexiting UK. It makes sense for all concerned to look for an alternative arrangement that is still of mutual benefit and is acceptable to all involved.
Unfortunately, so far, the attitude of some of the other political leaders in the EU, and in particular of Juncker and Tusk, seems far less constructive than it could be. Their behaviour since the result, as well as some of the other potential changes in EU direction post-Brexit that have been mooted by senior politicians from other member states, are enough to make some of us wonder whether the Leavers might have been right all along.
Ironically, your post is exactly what I'm talking about. It contains no factual information, because we don't know the facts yet. It contains dubious assumptions, because a lot of what is happening in the business and finance worlds right now is based on little more than anonymous comments ("sentiment") since they don't know the facts yet either. However, you've apparently concluded that the sky will inevitably fall. You even threw in some profanity, just to help the rest of us understand.
As I've been saying all along, there are real and serious concerns about what happens next. There will be a lot of things that could go wrong. But there will also be some opportunities. Sometimes a change may be both of those things, but to different people. My point is that it's far too early to know the final result here, and in the meantime, uncertainty is causing more damage than anything else, and adopting some generic "sky is falling" position just pours oil on that fire.
Yes, this is one of the most frustrating things since the result. About 17 million people voted Leave, apparently for quite a wide range of reasons. And yet since that time, a disturbing number of normally reasonable and intelligent people seem determined to dismiss the entire Leave group as some sort of extremist, racist and/or xenophobic savages, obviously too stupid or ignorant to listen to. It's a complicated issue, but there are people on each side who don't seem to want to do more than hurl playground insults at each other, which isn't exactly moving the debate forward or helping to find the best outcome from where we now find ourselves. Ironically, the incessant negative comments might be doing more to create damaging fear and uncertainty today than any of the real issues.
I mean, this claim I'm making is fucking quantifiable.
It's also irrelevant. Those 60+ million people buy products and services from sources outside the EU today, and they still will tomorrow. For that matter, they'll still be able to buy from sources inside the EU too, even if it's a hard Brexit with no immediate trade deal.
If you want to talk about quantifiable, the UK has roughly as many people in its market as the smallest half of the other EU member states combined, and those in the UK have on average a lot more money to spend.
As for the likelihood of a UK-EU trade deal that overcomes the potential trade barriers raised by Brexit, the EU just spent huge amounts of time and resources setting up a trade deal with Canada, which is roughly half the size of the UK in population and quite similar in most cultural and development respects. The EU has a deal with EFTA, which was essentially founded to represent states who didn't want to be full members of the then-EEC but did want some integration for mutual benefit, and EFTA's members combined have about a quarter of the population of the population of the UK and again broadly similar cultural standards and development. For all the doom and gloom from some quarters, the UK is and will surely remain a huge market for many other EU member states, including some of the most influential ones, and sooner or later some sensible deal will be done even if the doom-sayers and politicos on either or both sides screw up Brexit itself and we get a complete break at first.
I wonder how many of these "well-educated people", "world class academicians and researchers", and others agreed by voting for Brexit.
A minority, though a lot more than some on the Remain side like to acknowledge. According to the Lord Ashcroft poll shortly after the vote:
The AB social group (broadly speaking, professionals and managers) were the only social group among whom a majority voted to remain (57%). C1s divided fairly evenly; nearly two thirds of C2DEs (64%) voted to leave the EU.
Of course, this probably isn't just down to having a better understanding of the issues, as there's surely a large dose of enlightened self-interest at work too. Those with higher education and skill levels and those running large businesses benefit much more from what the EU offers than those doing manual jobs or running small businesses, for example, and many academics are funded via EU-based projects and grants.
In short, more senior professionals and government figures favoured Remain, but there were still plenty of experienced lawyers, economists, diplomats, military officers and business people, including some at the very highest levels, who came down on the Leave side.
A scary number of people on both sides of the Brexit debate have strongly held opinions based on objectively incorrect information and/or obvious logical inconsistencies. So far in this thread, and in the public commentary since the referendum more generally, my impression is that the Remain side is actually even worse for this than the Leave side, but apparently there's enough nonsense going around for everyone to have their fill.:-(
The sad thing is that much of this could probably have been avoided if the official campaigns had tried to make positive arguments and educate the public, instead of just dropping to gutter politics and character assassination almost immediately, which seemed to be all that most of the prominent politicians on either side knew how to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but vehicles with such vulnerabilities have already been compromised on public roads in at least one controversial demonstration. This is not a hypothetical threat. Vehicles vulnerable to this sort of attack are on the roads today, yet so far governments their regulators either don't understand the dangers or don't seem to be willing to act on them.
I appreciate your smiley, this is actually a serious security issue. The trouble is, it's not even an insurgent on the far side of the world driving a remote controlled weapon that is the biggest concern. It's an insurgent on the far side of the world turning your own car into a remote controlled weapon while you and your family are driving home in it from a shopping trip, along with many other cars at the same time.
I disapprove of fear-mongering over terrorism as much as the next guy, but objectively, the reason 9/11 was so devastating was that it turned an everyday facility that many of us take for granted into a weapon, unexpectedly. And the reason the botnet that took down several major websites a little while back was so devastating was that it co-opted the insecure connected devices of numerous otherwise innocent third parties to do its dirty work. The parallels with what could happen with insecure remote communications and software control systems in modern cars are disturbing, and there have already been plenty of demonstrations showing how insecure many of these systems really are today.
The thing that worries me is that pretty soon, you won't be able to buy any car that doesn't include a whole bunch of electronic remote communications, whether you want it or not, and regardless of whether you consider it a security and/or privacy risk.
Here in the UK insurers routinely demand that a recognised tracker device be installed in faster/higher-end vehicles as an anti-theft measure before they will provide cover. Moreover, I don't know myself where the tracker is installed in my own vehicle, because no-one except the person who actually did the installation does; apparently the people who do it won't even tell the dealers or allow anyone else in the room while they're working. I have some reservations about that already given the obvious privacy implications and the legal requirement to have insurance to use the car. But at least that is a separate system, operated by a private company whose contract is with me and whose reputation would be on the line if it came out they were activating the tracking for any reason other than my calling them and asking them to.
With modern cars that come with the likes of OnStar as standard, or with the new European eCall system that will be mandatory for all new cars sold in Europe within the next couple of years, you're talking about an electronic system that is intimately connected into the operational systems on the car and has remote communications capabilities. Given the notorious lack of security within a typical car's software environment, these systems seem potentially very dangerous to me, despite being well-intentioned and presumably being beneficial if you really are in a serious accident.
That's a legitimate and significant concern, certainly. While there is scope for such deliberate abuse and I agree we should always be cautious there, I suspect the greater risk in the real world is of damage caused either through negligence or not being sufficiently private and secure against third parties.
Government authorities are ultimately real people, and I don't doubt that most working in the police and security services are sincerely trying to do the right thing. However, they're also only human, and making a mistake with adverse consequences for the victim is all too conceivable here.
Also, one of the worst parts of this law is going to create possibly the most comprehensive blackmail database in the history of the world, and it's going to be held by non-government organisations whose priority is their commercial interests. We're going to be one capable hacker away from millions of people having their privacy and security compromised.
And of course, there is the perennial risk of scope creep. Once you've got a database of who's visited which sites, with the implicit assumption that an IP address and visiting a site is evidence of a specific individual being interested in whatever that site is for, it's not exactly a big jump to things like mass prosecutions over alleged copyright infringement by big media groups, or insurance and other financial services companies coming to some understanding with the government over profiling their customers.
Unfortunately, there is so little public awareness of what's going on here -- it's barely been reported in the press, with all the Brexit and Trump news filling the front pages lately -- that something very bad will probably have to happen to lots of people before we collectively wake up. And in the meantime, very bad things will probably be happening very quietly to a few people, and what is going to protect them?
Perhaps the most depressing thing is that this isn't even mentioned on major news outlets like the BBC today.
The second most depressing thing is that Labour wanted it as well and basically allowed the Tories to wave it through as soon as they were no longer hampered by being in coalition. If you look at the Parliamentary speeches, a lot of MPs seem to genuinely believe this is a good and necessary law.
Most of the public don't want it, once they know about it and understand what it is. Most of the smaller political parties don't support it either. Legal challenges about violating the right to a private life and so on are inevitable. But the reality is, both big parties love this authoritarian measure, so it's going to be an uphill struggle -- and probably a Sisyphean one -- to rein it in.
Brexit is certainly controversial, but I think a lot of what you're suggesting there is unrealistic. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing presumably depends on which side of the debate you come down on.
There is little evidence of appetite for another independence referendum in Scotland, and little evidence that if one were held then it would give a different result to last time. I know polling data is not exactly held in high regard right now, but on any recent polls from the main sources, it hasn't even been close.
It's also highly unlikely that the government won't trigger Article 50, probably as close as it can to Theresa May's stated target of March next year given the limitations caused by legal challenge. That legal mess will sort itself out, and sooner or later things will get to a vote in Parliament, at which point a fairly large majority of MPs would be risking their positions by not supporting moves to leave against the wishes of their constituents. We might see three line whips in the Commons and even the invocation of the Parliament Acts to overcome objections in the Lords, and that might delay things up to a point, but the May administration basically loses all credibility if it can't push this one through now.
Hard or soft Brexit is the big real question today, and this is complicated by the fact that we know neither how reasonable the EU will be in any future negotiations nor why those who voted to leave actually did so (or anything that those who voted to remain accepted but reluctantly, for that matter). The current EU leadership seem to be going out of their way to be unconstructive so far, but that may change with time and/or the results of major elections in other EU member states next year. And a lot of leave voters might prefer a harder Brexit anyway, since as you point out there's no realistic prospect of remaining a member of the single market but also achieving some of the major goals of leaving such as control of immigration or the ability to make deals with other trading partners independently.
So all in all, I doubt the US result would have been heavily influenced against Trump even if the UK had been doing all this a bit earlier. I suspect the greatest fear in the minds of many establishment figures, in the US and particularly in the EU, is that these anti-establishment movements will win and then not fail horribly, thus demonstrating that the establishment and maintaining status quo isn't actually as essential as they would like the public to think. So far in the UK there's a lot of doom-saying and some real and significant problems caused by the uncertainty alone, but there's also relatively little sign of the sky falling now or being likely to fall catastrophically even when Brexit actually happens. Only time will tell whether the leavers were right.
It does happen, rarely. But there's not much point making a show of force that no-one can see, so in this case it's likely that everyone (including the Russians) knew exactly where everyone else was.
The thing is, military technology is now so powerful that everything you said would still be true with a fraction of the investment. As the saying goes, we don't know exactly what weapons a third world war would be fought with, but if there is a fourth it will be fought with spears and slingshots.
My guess is that they are hoping the US will continue to pick up the slack since the US wildly over spends on it's military. Not sure how long that will go on with the new idiot about to enter the White House.
In fairness, a policy of expecting everyone else to honour their commitments and invest in their own national defence at the agreed levels is one of the few relatively sane things he's come up with. It's not good for the US that it is effectively subsidising the defence of many other nations, but it's also not good for those other nations to be so dependent on the good will of a sovereign foreign power for their own protection.
But I agree that it makes little sense for a maritime nation like the UK to have a second rate navy.
Well, you have to see this in context. It's about having ships with no missiles now so we can afford aircraft carriers with no planes later. :-)
Please note that I didn't say it was common. I was just pointing out that not all networking gear can be taken over by a new admin team as simply as sticking a paperclip into a little hole for a few seconds, and sometimes this is a deliberate choice by the purchaser.
As for the questions in your other posts, I'd say the kind of place that does want the heavy security version of deployment is exactly the kind of place where only a relatively small number of people ever have access credentials. Fortunately, in our current context, those people also tend to be carefully vetted and often formally security checked, and they tend to be pretty well respected and well compensated as the industry goes, so a mass walk-out seems unlikely in that kind of organisation.
If they did ever screw up badly enough to trigger one, I imagine that results really would be pretty catastrophic, though. Some organisations lose an almost unbelievable amount of money per minute of downtime. Think of big online retailers, or manufacturing organisations that order in resources for their production lines in near real time with very little kept in stock. Some organisations can get into serious trouble in the event of a security or privacy breach and worse trouble the longer the breach is not contained. I'm sure you're aware that these kinds of organisations typically have automatic failovers to hot standby systems, support people on call 24/7 with provisions for remote access in emergencies, service level agreements with everyone you depend on, and so on. But remember we were talking about a business deciding to lay off hundreds of its IT staff at once here, and imagine that everyone who even knew about any of those contingency arrangements, never mind actually being part of them, was suddenly unavailable. It's not that much of a stretch to believe that some large organisations would not be very resilient in the face of that situation.
Sure you can, though if you're on Windows 10 you may have other things to worry about. On older versions, you can disable or remove all the dubious phone-home behaviours, or just install something like Spybot Anti-Beacon and let it turn everything off for you, and then Microsoft will be none the wiser whichever browser (including IE) you choose to use.
It looks like we agree on much of this. I'm a little disappointed with what seems like an unnecessarily negative response by the academic community, but it's hard to be too critical of their cautious reaction. After all, it's their careers that are going to take a hit if things don't work out.
One of the things I've had difficulty understanding myself is how much of what we've been seeing is a "real" consequence of any likely form of Brexit, how much is a rational response to Brexit-related uncertainty but might be expected to stabilise as more details are known, and how much is in the mysterious third category of "things that weren't great anyway but Brexit is a perfect scapegoat". When it comes to issues like the value of the pound or the support for younger scientists, I'm pretty sure there are elements of all three in there, but I find it hard to separate them in any objective way.
I reached a similar conclusion to you about Brexit as a whole. Economically, it will almost certainly cause harm in the short term, from the uncertainty if nothing else. Maybe we'll be worse off in the medium term as well, depending on any deal that is done as part of Brexit. If we get one of the harder variations of Brexit, then our future prosperity is likely to be influenced at least as much by how any opportunities for developing relationships outside the EU play out, and I don't think anyone really knows for sure whether that could leave us better off than being in the EU.
No passwords? Physical access and boot media solves that.
It depends on the systems, though. I've worked on projects writing control software for some high-end network security devices, and we tended to have two very different types of customer: those who wanted a perfect factory reset, where physical presence was enough to restore the hardware completely to its original state, and those who wanted a total lock down, so anyone who didn't have the right credentials literally couldn't do anything to access the box and if passwords were lost it became a $100,000 paperweight. Without getting into tedious details, the latter policy did actually make sense given the nature of these particular devices in some highly secured deployments, but if you suddenly lost all the relevant admins in that scenario, it wouldn't have mattered how many contractors you hired to fix it. You'd need totally new hardware, and your comms would be down until someone rewired everything to remove the previous security devices from the equation and deploy any replacements.
I don't understand what drives C level officers to H1B folks. It almost never, ever turns out well.
If they were leading a previously failing organisation, and yet they managed to reduce or reverse losses for a few successive quarters by cutting those costs, their performance looks good while they're searching for somewhere else to go next, while the negative consequences probably won't be felt until some time after they've moved on.
You jest (maybe?) but it would be fascinating to see what would happen if the entire IT department at one of these places really did resign en masse and literally just pick up their things and walk out the door.
If they've already been told they're being laid off, would they typically lose out on any benefits or protections other than pay for whatever handover period was involved, under the rules in the relevant US state(s)?
Even if would, there's a union-style element of taking one for the team that might appeal to experienced workers who are getting screwed to a large degree anyway. After the first major company failed within weeks because it was no longer operationally viable, others might be inclined to treat their staff with a little more respect.
I live in Cambridge, and I've heard a lot of this discussed in person by those on the sharp end. Cambridge University is one of the biggest beneficiaries in terms of funding from the likes of Horizon 2020, as well as the European Research Council. Concern is understandable.
If we look at the facts, the UK government, right up to the Chancellor himself, has already given some assurances about honouring funding agreements made with the EU even if they extend beyond Brexit. However, there is also the supporting infrastructure to deal with, some of it also receiving funding from the EU, and there is collaboration with academic partners from elsewhere in the EU to consider, just to highlight two other prominent issues of concern. And there is always the question of what happens after any assurances given so far run out. There has been much less commitment from the government so far in these related areas.
It does at least appear that the government realises this is a significant issue and is willing to intervene to protect the UK academic and research community. Although it's still early days in terms of figuring out the future relationship between the UK and EU, there already appears to be support for funding potentially as far away as the mid 2020s, assuming a Brexit in 2019, which if you think about it is actually quite remarkable within a few months of the surprising result and before we've even had the new Chancellor's first Budget.
So I'm a little disappointed in some of my academic peers, because you would have hoped that they of all people could have offered a measured and proportionate response to changing circumstances. Most of all, you would hope they would base that response on the evidence more than the fear, and consider that it's going to take time to work through these issues, just like everything else around Brexit. So far, unfortunately, that considered approach mostly seems to have been overcome by the fear and uncertainty, and that is doing more damage than any real changes so far. Hopefully things will improve over the months to come as the picture becomes clearer.
The pound is down 18% already and nothing has even happened yet. The irony is most of the older (50+) people who voted leave have just shot themselves in the foot as by the time they retire their pensions will be quite literally, fucked.
That is debatable. For those whose pensions are using funds traded in Sterling but invested in foreign assets, the weakening of the pound is a huge boost. Have you looked at the FTSE 100 lately? It's strongly negatively correlated with the value of the pound.
More generally, I wish people understood that changes in the exchange rate aren't necessarily a bad thing. Although Brexit has surely been a catalyst and exacerbated the recent fall in the value of Sterling, many economists had been arguing that it was somewhat overvalued and due for a correction since well before Brexit was an issue. The recent drop will make going abroad or investing in foreign assets more expensive for Brits in the future, but on the other hand, it also helps our tourism industry, our creative industry, our exporters, and our savers who had already invested in foreign assets, to give a few examples.
FYI, they are also releasing a security-only patch each month, but it's not being advertised or distributed via the usual Windows Update mechanism now. (This is probably a blessing anyway, given how hopelessly slow and unreliable Windows Update has been in recent months.)
Instead, you have to go to the Microsoft Update Catalog and look it up manually. Search for something like "October 2016" and look for the monthly update or rollup for your version of the OS under the "Security Updates" classification. Download the relevant update, and then install it using WUSA.
There's a stunning irony that it doesn't currently seem to be possible to verify the integrity of that download against any published checksums or the like, while the Update Catalog itself isn't served over HTTPS, so it's basically impossible to obtain the security-only updates securely. However, if you're willing to trust the path between your systems and Microsoft's server, this does at least get you the security patches without anything else you might not want on your systems running pre-10 Windows versions.
they may still trade, but they no longer get the benefits of being an EU member.
benefits that include easier, simpler, and cheaper trade.
When trading with the EU or those the EU has a favourable existing trade deal with, yes, and that's going to be a significant loss if we wind up with one of the harder options for Brexit.
On the other hand, being outside the EU customs union would give more options for the UK to make its own trade deals with partners outside the EU, and it would immediately lift EU-imposed barriers that currently exist when trading with nations the EU does not currently have a deal with, such as the US and much of Asia.
Being outside the customs union would also mean that UK businesses wouldn't have to comply with EU rules even if they weren't actually exporting to the EU, which could have significant benefits both for those businesses primarily serving the home market and for those exporting outside the EU.
The big difficulty at the moment is that no-one knows whether those potential benefits from being outside the customs union would outweigh the potentially heavy losses on the EU side in the longer term, hence all the debate about hard vs. soft Brexit.
or the economic opportunity afforded by EU citizenship, the ability to easily take a job in another country than they now will be able; that economic opportunity, and economic mobility conferred by it, is now lost.
That seems pessimistic. UK citizens go to work in other countries around the world all the time, and we have immigrants coming to live and work here from all over the world as well. Outside the EU, depending on any deal that gets done, it might not be as easy for people to move in either direction. But again, we don't know yet what the EU-UK relationship will be post-Brexit, and no-one knows yet what any system for immigration into the UK from the EU or for emigrating to the EU from the UK will look like.
Essentially you want Windows 7 with longer support, but can Microsoft honestly charge hundreds of dollars for that?
Actually, I wish they had done something very much like that. They would have a commercially viable way to continue support for a good product indefinitely, and the rest of us wouldn't have to put up with either fighting them to keep our systems working the way we want or switching to an alternative that for some reason we consider worse than what we had before.
For critical software like an OS, I think it's reasonable to expect a certain amount of support (say, bug fixes plus security updates for the realistic working lifetime of the hardware it runs on) to be included with the purchase. However, offering some sort of optional and reasonably priced subscription to fund those updates beyond that pre-determined cut-off point and to maintain compatibility with newer equipment and standards that are released after the original OS seems like a win-win deal for everyone.
.. in (large) part because it has easy access to the EU.
In part, sure. How much is debatable. The UK has been a global hub since long before the EU existed, and it still has the advantages I mentioned before whether it remains in the EU or not.
Many businesses are already working out plans to move operations to Amsterdam and/or Frankfurt ( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07... ).
Says the article from just after the surprise result, like a lot of other articles from just after the surprise result. But talk is cheap, and in this case talk is also leverage for big businesses over a government on the back foot, so actions speak louder than words.
p>Remember that the UK has always had the most special deals and exemptions in the EU, mainly attained by being obstructive.
That and being a relatively valuable and powerful member, which gave enough influence to win concessions.
As for the rest of your last paragraph, you are describing exactly the sort of petulance I meant. It does not make sense, economically speaking or for long-term relations in other areas, for the remaining EU member states to be harsh on a Brexiting UK. It makes sense for all concerned to look for an alternative arrangement that is still of mutual benefit and is acceptable to all involved.
Unfortunately, so far, the attitude of some of the other political leaders in the EU, and in particular of Juncker and Tusk, seems far less constructive than it could be. Their behaviour since the result, as well as some of the other potential changes in EU direction post-Brexit that have been mooted by senior politicians from other member states, are enough to make some of us wonder whether the Leavers might have been right all along.
Ironically, your post is exactly what I'm talking about. It contains no factual information, because we don't know the facts yet. It contains dubious assumptions, because a lot of what is happening in the business and finance worlds right now is based on little more than anonymous comments ("sentiment") since they don't know the facts yet either. However, you've apparently concluded that the sky will inevitably fall. You even threw in some profanity, just to help the rest of us understand.
As I've been saying all along, there are real and serious concerns about what happens next. There will be a lot of things that could go wrong. But there will also be some opportunities. Sometimes a change may be both of those things, but to different people. My point is that it's far too early to know the final result here, and in the meantime, uncertainty is causing more damage than anything else, and adopting some generic "sky is falling" position just pours oil on that fire.
Yes, this is one of the most frustrating things since the result. About 17 million people voted Leave, apparently for quite a wide range of reasons. And yet since that time, a disturbing number of normally reasonable and intelligent people seem determined to dismiss the entire Leave group as some sort of extremist, racist and/or xenophobic savages, obviously too stupid or ignorant to listen to. It's a complicated issue, but there are people on each side who don't seem to want to do more than hurl playground insults at each other, which isn't exactly moving the debate forward or helping to find the best outcome from where we now find ourselves. Ironically, the incessant negative comments might be doing more to create damaging fear and uncertainty today than any of the real issues.
I mean, this claim I'm making is fucking quantifiable.
It's also irrelevant. Those 60+ million people buy products and services from sources outside the EU today, and they still will tomorrow. For that matter, they'll still be able to buy from sources inside the EU too, even if it's a hard Brexit with no immediate trade deal.
If you want to talk about quantifiable, the UK has roughly as many people in its market as the smallest half of the other EU member states combined, and those in the UK have on average a lot more money to spend.
As for the likelihood of a UK-EU trade deal that overcomes the potential trade barriers raised by Brexit, the EU just spent huge amounts of time and resources setting up a trade deal with Canada, which is roughly half the size of the UK in population and quite similar in most cultural and development respects. The EU has a deal with EFTA, which was essentially founded to represent states who didn't want to be full members of the then-EEC but did want some integration for mutual benefit, and EFTA's members combined have about a quarter of the population of the population of the UK and again broadly similar cultural standards and development. For all the doom and gloom from some quarters, the UK is and will surely remain a huge market for many other EU member states, including some of the most influential ones, and sooner or later some sensible deal will be done even if the doom-sayers and politicos on either or both sides screw up Brexit itself and we get a complete break at first.
I wonder how many of these "well-educated people", "world class academicians and researchers", and others agreed by voting for Brexit.
A minority, though a lot more than some on the Remain side like to acknowledge. According to the Lord Ashcroft poll shortly after the vote:
The AB social group (broadly speaking, professionals and managers) were the only social group among whom a majority voted to remain (57%). C1s divided fairly evenly; nearly two thirds of C2DEs (64%) voted to leave the EU.
Of course, this probably isn't just down to having a better understanding of the issues, as there's surely a large dose of enlightened self-interest at work too. Those with higher education and skill levels and those running large businesses benefit much more from what the EU offers than those doing manual jobs or running small businesses, for example, and many academics are funded via EU-based projects and grants.
In short, more senior professionals and government figures favoured Remain, but there were still plenty of experienced lawyers, economists, diplomats, military officers and business people, including some at the very highest levels, who came down on the Leave side.
A scary number of people on both sides of the Brexit debate have strongly held opinions based on objectively incorrect information and/or obvious logical inconsistencies. So far in this thread, and in the public commentary since the referendum more generally, my impression is that the Remain side is actually even worse for this than the Leave side, but apparently there's enough nonsense going around for everyone to have their fill. :-(
The sad thing is that much of this could probably have been avoided if the official campaigns had tried to make positive arguments and educate the public, instead of just dropping to gutter politics and character assassination almost immediately, which seemed to be all that most of the prominent politicians on either side knew how to do.