our local OWASP chapter had a great demo from a Cambridge university (UK) researcher who could effectively jam GPS signals and make the GPS receiver believe it was somewhere else. Very cool tech, using GNU-radio and a whole lot of talent. The basic theme was that the GPS protocols are not trustable and todays society places way too much trust in the system.
This also coincides with a major naval exercise off the north coast of Scotland (where extensive GPS jamming was taking place) which ended up with a fishing vessel unable to make a distress call using the automated "big red button". The exercise was hastily stopped as islanders services stopped working (including internet) - it turns out that a lot of civil infrastructure relies on GPS.
With a foreign power in control of GPS, the EU had to respond. The USA is not the closest allie to European countries (including the UK) as you would think. The USA stood by for 2 years whilst france & belgium were invaded and also stayed neutral when the UK administered Falkland islands (Islas malvinas) were invaded in 1981 by the argentians.
England is a country that shares a border to the south of Scotland. Scotland has an entirely different legal system. A lot of people get confused by this (recently seen during the release of Al-Meghrahi).
It's worth noting that the union between the four countries of England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland is been the source of much turmoil in politics as the country of England has a much higher population than the other countries. The current government in Scotland is a pro-nationalist (i.e. would like separation from the union) and is set to take the country to vote in 2012 about whether to remain in the union, change the balance of devolved powers or indeed leave union completely. The Scottish government currently has limited devolved powers that include the judicial system and policing. They have to balance their books from budgets assigned by Westminter (unlike England, that can publicly borrow)
e.g. the latest Police and Criminal Justice act was passed by Holyrood, but not by westminster. The Human Rights act was passed by Scotland, but not in England & Wales until many years later.
I did a stint on the milkround interviewing for Logica many years ago and did 100's of interviews of grads and grad+1's. You need to sell yourself; too many grads came in with what they thought were great CS degrees but were actually terribly theoretical and not practical for software development. We also kept stats on how grads did at the company and which degree courses they were on. It was well known in the sector that Oxford and Cambridge grads did poorly against grads who had come from more hands on courses.
So, my view is that if you have open source software development experience - and can demonstrate it (i.e. not just a few crappy bug fixes, but thought leadership, delivering results etc - then apply for the grad+1 jobs and make your case that you produced software in a highly competitive environment and was able to achieve results even though you were doing this on a shoestring;/late nights etc.
more anecdotal evidence - my kindle 3 broke down on the first day of holiday (the e-ink screen went haywire); so I was forced to speak to my wife and child and had to endure holiday activities together. it's been a while since I've had a catastrophic failure of a book.
I wonder if Germany will extradite, or detain whilst on holiday, Facebook's directors to face trial in Germany for their crimes? (in the same manner as European gambling websites directors have been extradited to the USA). If not, then it's just yet more hot air designed to look good in media soundbites.
according to the ocean-explorer website, they found bottles of cognac, champagne - which aligns to the sinking of the Jönköping by U22 on 26 October 1916. The last known position was around 12 nautical miles SW of Raumo (Aland islands) which is a pinch point in the Baltic ocean between Finland and Sweden (an obvious place for a UBoat captain to wait)
googlemaps only goes about 1 to 2km off the coast in high definition from the Aland islands; and anyway, the sea is too reflective and too deep at 300m to see anything.
or not. just let them get on with it. If the work was really clever and complicated then they'll fail eventually because they haven't got the original contributor on board. One other idea is to take a non-aggressive stance and say to them that you've heard that they are doing this and if they ever need any help then you'll be glad to help out (for a price & understanding of conditions, of course).
However, perhaps I'm exposing a regional difference in attitude - If this is a USA originated problem then "getting a lawyer" seems to be the default approach to everything rather than actually solving the problem.
I switched the other way (to android) last year. I owned a palm pre for a year and absolutely hated it. Yes, the OS is nice and I liked the cards user interface however, the actual "phone" capability was shocking and the phone system would shut down and I'd only realise some hours later when no calls had come through. it wouldn't switch between 3G, HSPDA and 2G cleanly, often failing completely (even during a call in good signal area) and rebooting (which is a nightware where I live in a hilly area because the signal strength fluctuates as cell towers come into line of sight.)
whilst the touchstone was cool, you'd be using it a lot since the battery would last 6 to 8 hours and if you charged it directly using the micro usb then the little plastic cap would eventually fall off. Often, after charging, the data storage would not be accessible.
the webos "market" is different for each region and had a lot more carrier influence than android market and itunes store. The community did sort this out by offering homebrew solutions, but it took time and a lot of patience.
If you look at the O2 UK palm pre forum when they came out - you'll see endless customers venting their frustrations at a system with such poor quality hardware that it really didn't matter how technically good the OS was. Also, O2 Uk made a bit of a cockup with the support of this phone, see the Reg article about unlocking sims
opensignalmaps is also a worldwide operation. Sounds like a better proposition. The good news is that TFA does credit opensignalmaps in the comments. It would be very nice if the publicly funded BBC donated the data to opensignalmaps.
this is just not true. The barnet formula and the financial restrictions on the scottish government mean that scotland HAS to balance its budget every year - whereas england can continue to borrow at the expense of the UK (which ironically includes Scotland). Luckily (for us Scots), the Scots government didn't go PFI crazy and now runs at a lower cost per capita then the UK/england government allowing Scots to have better medical care and many benefits that the English do not get.
I, like an increasing number of Scots, hope that Scotland leaves the union. I pretty sure the UK government will do all it can using dirty tricks in the divorce process.
it's called "draff" and is more commonly used as cattle feed. There is only about 1 tonne per mash process (usually 2 a day) for your average 2-still distillery so not quite enough to use for bio mass generation unless you are a pretty big distiller (glenlivit et al).
IAASALIS. (I am actually scots and live in scotland)
In the UK - "Hoover" became very concerned in the 70's that their vacuum cleaning products and those of other manufacturers were being called by their trademark - i.e. the term "hoover" had entered the english language - because, as soon as it does that - it cannot be trademarked anymore.
"To google" has done the same thing to the Google trademark in the UK.
(this could be a nuance of the UK trademark system)
I think the Wells/Chapman case is going to be the biggest problem for News of The World because it was phone evidence that was used by the police to eventually determine that they never left the vicinity of the school - the murderer didn't switch off the phones, instead leaving them to run out of battery. The police enquiry was quite confused at this time and I am now wondering whether, armed with the geoloc data from the phones cell phone signal (pinpointing them both together near the school) and the voice mail being read that the police thought they were still alive in the early stages of the investigation???
a pal of mine was a BBC reporter at the time had a TV interview setup on the pavement near the school. They had previously arranged with the police that two interviews would take place almost side by side. As Ian Huntly was being miked up ready for a live interview; the chief inspector was already on camera speaking of a major breakthrough. Ian Huntly was being counted down for the live interview at the time and totally panicked, took the mic off and walked away.
The second thing was that the schools heating system was on full blast during the summer holiday - they apparently had a sweltering press conference in the school hall.
And the harsh reality is that, since we started the "get tough on crime" attitude in the U.S. back in the early 80's, violent crime has seen a steady decline.
1. Citation needed.
discussed at great length in the easy-to-read pop-sci book "freakonomics"
"They cleaned it out. Can you imagine what's on Osama bin Laden's hard drive?"
it turns out that Osama Bin laden is... Anonymous Coward. hard drives are therefore useless and have been sold on ebay. There's the repayments on that helicopter you see.
I'd suspect that it was more about economics and the fact that the console import duty for the EU is at 0% now.
In the UK, even the PS2 had a disk included in the original box that allowed the owner to code in BASIC in an attempt to be classified as a computer (import duty 0%) and not a games console (import duty 2.2%). HOWEVER, the UK HMRC looked in detail when SONY tried to get £50m in tax rebates and decided (not surprisingly!) that it was a sham and charged them 2.2% import levy anyway). The same negotiation happened with the PS3 - SONY really thought they could avoid import duty.
in the EU, the import levy varied over the years from 0.6% to 2.2%. Of course, local VAT was compounded on top of those rates. Today, the import duty from Japan to the UK is 0% (i.e.no incentive for even trying with OtherOS)
next time you're out, lift the bonnet/hood of your car and look at the various belts that drive the water pump, alternator etc. I had a belt driven proflex mountain bike once that used the belt from an MGF sports car. It would way outlast a chain - but it does have it's problems. They are not so good in wet muddy conditions and need to be under quite a lot of tension (compared to chain) and that's why they haven't really taken off on bikes.
here in Scotland, where I live, on the winter solstice dawn will be at 0943hrs whereas Londoners see the sunrise a whole 40mins earlier. Twilight will last longer the farther north one is as well so it won't be fully light until around 1000Hrs.
If Scotland does vote not to adopt the new timezone - all computer systems will have to be changed to reflect the new TZ data. It still pisses me off that Fedora Linux does not recognise "Edinburgh" as a capital when selecting the TZ during installation but it does recognise USA state capitals.
Linux users who use the U220 etc from day to day (like I do) might find knemo has been updated to monitor ppp0 and warn on configurable data usage limits.
I currently pay 25GBP/month for a few of these sticks on an old web'nwalk plan (used as backup connections for draytek vigor routers etc) - so you should simply buy 4x Pay As You Go and use a different stick every week up to its limit and it's still cheaper than some of the contracts out there.
PS: since I started reading this slashdot article; my normally 'blue' tmobile service (i.e. for the last two years at this desk) has gone down to green... hmmm.
many people bought the Huawei U220 USB data modems a couple of years ago and use the T-Mobile service just for data. These were sold as "broadband replacement" services and cost GBP25/month on contract. There's no way I'm paying that much for 500Mb pcm. My data volumes usually are in the 1.5Gb per month for work and the odd yum -y update that sneaks by unnoticed.
I have one plugged into my Draytek Vigor home office router as a backup for when the broadband service goes down - it has a Solwise high gain antenna attached to it. I also have one plugged into my work Linux laptop ("it just works" with network manager).
TFA referenced in the TFA says: "Browsing means looking at websites and checking email, but not watching videos, downloading files or playing games."
WTF? I was sold "mobile broadband" - it's a data service, nothing is mentioned about browsing at all.
Slashdot Mirror
our local OWASP chapter had a great demo from a Cambridge university (UK) researcher who could effectively jam GPS signals and make the GPS receiver believe it was somewhere else. Very cool tech, using GNU-radio and a whole lot of talent. The basic theme was that the GPS protocols are not trustable and todays society places way too much trust in the system.
This also coincides with a major naval exercise off the north coast of Scotland (where extensive GPS jamming was taking place) which ended up with a fishing vessel unable to make a distress call using the automated "big red button". The exercise was hastily stopped as islanders services stopped working (including internet) - it turns out that a lot of civil infrastructure relies on GPS.
With a foreign power in control of GPS, the EU had to respond. The USA is not the closest allie to European countries (including the UK) as you would think. The USA stood by for 2 years whilst france & belgium were invaded and also stayed neutral when the UK administered Falkland islands (Islas malvinas) were invaded in 1981 by the argentians.
next job: Internet.
England is a country that shares a border to the south of Scotland. Scotland has an entirely different legal system. A lot of people get confused by this (recently seen during the release of Al-Meghrahi).
It's worth noting that the union between the four countries of England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland is been the source of much turmoil in politics as the country of England has a much higher population than the other countries. The current government in Scotland is a pro-nationalist (i.e. would like separation from the union) and is set to take the country to vote in 2012 about whether to remain in the union, change the balance of devolved powers or indeed leave union completely. The Scottish government currently has limited devolved powers that include the judicial system and policing. They have to balance their books from budgets assigned by Westminter (unlike England, that can publicly borrow)
e.g. the latest Police and Criminal Justice act was passed by Holyrood, but not by westminster. The Human Rights act was passed by Scotland, but not in England & Wales until many years later.
I did a stint on the milkround interviewing for Logica many years ago and did 100's of interviews of grads and grad+1's. You need to sell yourself; too many grads came in with what they thought were great CS degrees but were actually terribly theoretical and not practical for software development. We also kept stats on how grads did at the company and which degree courses they were on. It was well known in the sector that Oxford and Cambridge grads did poorly against grads who had come from more hands on courses.
So, my view is that if you have open source software development experience - and can demonstrate it (i.e. not just a few crappy bug fixes, but thought leadership, delivering results etc - then apply for the grad+1 jobs and make your case that you produced software in a highly competitive environment and was able to achieve results even though you were doing this on a shoestring;/late nights etc.
SELL YOURSELF.
more anecdotal evidence - my kindle 3 broke down on the first day of holiday (the e-ink screen went haywire); so I was forced to speak to my wife and child and had to endure holiday activities together. it's been a while since I've had a catastrophic failure of a book.
24 hr clock (GMT), but the UK is 1 hour ahead (BST) so it was probably 2125Hrs (9.25pm)
I wonder if Germany will extradite, or detain whilst on holiday, Facebook's directors to face trial in Germany for their crimes? (in the same manner as European gambling websites directors have been extradited to the USA). If not, then it's just yet more hot air designed to look good in media soundbites.
according to the ocean-explorer website, they found bottles of cognac, champagne - which aligns to the sinking of the Jönköping by U22 on 26 October 1916. The last known position was around 12 nautical miles SW of Raumo (Aland islands) which is a pinch point in the Baltic ocean between Finland and Sweden (an obvious place for a UBoat captain to wait)
googlemaps only goes about 1 to 2km off the coast in high definition from the Aland islands; and anyway, the sea is too reflective and too deep at 300m to see anything.
Get one.
or not. just let them get on with it. If the work was really clever and complicated then they'll fail eventually because they haven't got the original contributor on board. One other idea is to take a non-aggressive stance and say to them that you've heard that they are doing this and if they ever need any help then you'll be glad to help out (for a price & understanding of conditions, of course).
However, perhaps I'm exposing a regional difference in attitude - If this is a USA originated problem then "getting a lawyer" seems to be the default approach to everything rather than actually solving the problem.
I switched the other way (to android) last year. I owned a palm pre for a year and absolutely hated it. Yes, the OS is nice and I liked the cards user interface however, the actual "phone" capability was shocking and the phone system would shut down and I'd only realise some hours later when no calls had come through. it wouldn't switch between 3G, HSPDA and 2G cleanly, often failing completely (even during a call in good signal area) and rebooting (which is a nightware where I live in a hilly area because the signal strength fluctuates as cell towers come into line of sight.)
whilst the touchstone was cool, you'd be using it a lot since the battery would last 6 to 8 hours and if you charged it directly using the micro usb then the little plastic cap would eventually fall off. Often, after charging, the data storage would not be accessible.
the webos "market" is different for each region and had a lot more carrier influence than android market and itunes store. The community did sort this out by offering homebrew solutions, but it took time and a lot of patience.
If you look at the O2 UK palm pre forum when they came out - you'll see endless customers venting their frustrations at a system with such poor quality hardware that it really didn't matter how technically good the OS was. Also, O2 Uk made a bit of a cockup with the support of this phone, see the Reg article about unlocking sims
community service for a org like cisco should be to open source its software assets
opensignalmaps is also a worldwide operation. Sounds like a better proposition. The good news is that TFA does credit opensignalmaps in the comments. It would be very nice if the publicly funded BBC donated the data to opensignalmaps.
this is just not true. The barnet formula and the financial restrictions on the scottish government mean that scotland HAS to balance its budget every year - whereas england can continue to borrow at the expense of the UK (which ironically includes Scotland). Luckily (for us Scots), the Scots government didn't go PFI crazy and now runs at a lower cost per capita then the UK/england government allowing Scots to have better medical care and many benefits that the English do not get.
I, like an increasing number of Scots, hope that Scotland leaves the union. I pretty sure the UK government will do all it can using dirty tricks in the divorce process.
it's called "draff" and is more commonly used as cattle feed. There is only about 1 tonne per mash process (usually 2 a day) for your average 2-still distillery so not quite enough to use for bio mass generation unless you are a pretty big distiller (glenlivit et al).
IAASALIS. (I am actually scots and live in scotland)
In the UK - "Hoover" became very concerned in the 70's that their vacuum cleaning products and those of other manufacturers were being called by their trademark - i.e. the term "hoover" had entered the english language - because, as soon as it does that - it cannot be trademarked anymore.
"To google" has done the same thing to the Google trademark in the UK.
(this could be a nuance of the UK trademark system)
I think the Wells/Chapman case is going to be the biggest problem for News of The World because it was phone evidence that was used by the police to eventually determine that they never left the vicinity of the school - the murderer didn't switch off the phones, instead leaving them to run out of battery. The police enquiry was quite confused at this time and I am now wondering whether, armed with the geoloc data from the phones cell phone signal (pinpointing them both together near the school) and the voice mail being read that the police thought they were still alive in the early stages of the investigation???
a pal of mine was a BBC reporter at the time had a TV interview setup on the pavement near the school. They had previously arranged with the police that two interviews would take place almost side by side. As Ian Huntly was being miked up ready for a live interview; the chief inspector was already on camera speaking of a major breakthrough. Ian Huntly was being counted down for the live interview at the time and totally panicked, took the mic off and walked away.
The second thing was that the schools heating system was on full blast during the summer holiday - they apparently had a sweltering press conference in the school hall.
in other news, the usually vocal Lulzsec twitter feed stopped at the same time as the arrest.
Michael McIntyre (comedian) sums it up in this live performance at the Apollo theatre.
And the harsh reality is that, since we started the "get tough on crime" attitude in the U.S. back in the early 80's, violent crime has seen a steady decline.
1. Citation needed.
discussed at great length in the easy-to-read pop-sci book "freakonomics"
"They cleaned it out. Can you imagine what's on Osama bin Laden's hard drive?"
it turns out that Osama Bin laden is ... Anonymous Coward.
hard drives are therefore useless and have been sold on ebay. There's the repayments on that helicopter you see.
I'd suspect that it was more about economics and the fact that the console import duty for the EU is at 0% now.
In the UK, even the PS2 had a disk included in the original box that allowed the owner to code in BASIC in an attempt to be classified as a computer (import duty 0%) and not a games console (import duty 2.2%). HOWEVER, the UK HMRC looked in detail when SONY tried to get £50m in tax rebates and decided (not surprisingly!) that it was a sham and charged them 2.2% import levy anyway). The same negotiation happened with the PS3 - SONY really thought they could avoid import duty.
in the EU, the import levy varied over the years from 0.6% to 2.2%. Of course, local VAT was compounded on top of those rates. Today, the import duty from Japan to the UK is 0% (i.e.no incentive for even trying with OtherOS)
next time you're out, lift the bonnet/hood of your car and look at the various belts that drive the water pump, alternator etc. I had a belt driven proflex mountain bike once that used the belt from an MGF sports car. It would way outlast a chain - but it does have it's problems. They are not so good in wet muddy conditions and need to be under quite a lot of tension (compared to chain) and that's why they haven't really taken off on bikes.
here in Scotland, where I live, on the winter solstice dawn will be at 0943hrs whereas Londoners see the sunrise a whole 40mins earlier. Twilight will last longer the farther north one is as well so it won't be fully light until around 1000Hrs.
If Scotland does vote not to adopt the new timezone - all computer systems will have to be changed to reflect the new TZ data. It still pisses me off that Fedora Linux does not recognise "Edinburgh" as a capital when selecting the TZ during installation but it does recognise USA state capitals.
Linux users who use the U220 etc from day to day (like I do) might find knemo has been updated to monitor ppp0 and warn on configurable data usage limits.
I currently pay 25GBP /month for a few of these sticks on an old web'nwalk plan (used as backup connections for draytek vigor routers etc) - so you should simply buy 4x Pay As You Go and use a different stick every week up to its limit and it's still cheaper than some of the contracts out there.
PS: since I started reading this slashdot article; my normally 'blue' tmobile service (i.e. for the last two years at this desk) has gone down to green... hmmm.
many people bought the Huawei U220 USB data modems a couple of years ago and use the T-Mobile service just for data. These were sold as "broadband replacement" services and cost GBP25/month on contract. There's no way I'm paying that much for 500Mb pcm. My data volumes usually are in the 1.5Gb per month for work and the odd yum -y update that sneaks by unnoticed.
I have one plugged into my Draytek Vigor home office router as a backup for when the broadband service goes down - it has a Solwise high gain antenna attached to it. I also have one plugged into my work Linux laptop ("it just works" with network manager).
TFA referenced in the TFA says: "Browsing means looking at websites and checking email, but not watching videos, downloading files or playing games."
WTF? I was sold "mobile broadband" - it's a data service, nothing is mentioned about browsing at all.